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Writing Poetry as Resistance
- Kim Magill
- Caribbean Room #75
- Saturday, June 24, 1:15 PM – 2:45 PM
Workshop description
I will begin with a short discussion about how found text and public landscapes can be used as a tool to approach writing the personal political. I will also discuss how the emergence of prose in contemporary female language poetry is a formal choice that resists the male traditional mode of lineation, closure, and linear narrative.
I plan to play 15 minutes of edited and recorded audio visuals that will include select commercials aired during soap operas, old Hollywood melodrama, and contemporary experimental video as a vehicle for free associative poetic exercises designed to release a subconscious response to pop culture and art. The audio visual will be viewed first muted and examined as a landscape to which the participants can write a script. Then it will be viewed with the sound and the text can be transcribed, rearranged, or rewritten. At the end of this exercise, I will show the participants copies of my own free associative notes to an audio visual landscape and then show them the finished product that was completed days after the exercise. I do not expect the participants to leave the workshop having composed a poem, but I do expect them to leave with new strategies to approach writing autobiography or a fictional personal antidote. The participants will be provided with pen or pencil and paper and a small packet of poems representative of resistant content and form that confronts the public with the private and vice versa.