Event

Textasy! 5-week poetry workshop w/ Adeena Karasick

DATES: This workshop will meet the following Sundays: March 25, April 1, April 8, April 15, April 22
TIME/LOCATION: 12 PM 2 PM at Bowery Poetry located at 308 Bowery
INSTRUCTOR: Adeena Karasick

Taking as its jumping off point the relationship between text and ecstasy (from the gk ex-stasis), this workshop will investigate the pleasure and play within all aspects of language construction. From sound poetry, concrete poetry, renegade, neo-formalist pataphysical, language-based visual art, it will track through the relationship between language, eros, meaning and being, exploring ways artists, philosophers, poets have subverting colonialist structures of language towards an ever widening scope of potential meaning. To this end, we will try on a range of poetic forms which highlight aspects of translation and subversion -- such as 13th C. Kabbalistic alphabetic incantatory techniques, homophonic translations, emojilations, oulippean improvisation, erasure and vispo, exploring ways poems can be both a site of transgression and revolution. And, foregrounding the poem as an intermediatic, textatic space, celebrating languages inherent viscerality, at the end of the 5 weeks, we will create chapbooks, highlighting how form is always-already an extension of content and how the book itself, a site of desire.

Adeena Karasick is a New York based poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of seven books of poetry and poetics. Most recent is Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), and The Medium is the Muse: Channeling Marshall McLuhan (NeoPoiesis Press, 2014). She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is co-founding Artistic Director of the KlezKanada Poetry Festival and Retreat, 2016 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking. The Adeena Karasick Archive has just been established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.