Week 1: MFA Class. Lecture by Richard Froude. (Crossworlds) Read:

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1 Week 1: MFA Class Lecture by Richard Froude (Crossworlds) Read: o Hip-Hop Culture Alexs Pate o The Event of the Border Bhanu Kapil o The Question is How To Interrogate the Remains Eleni Sikelianos (An Elemental Thing) Read: pgs Creative Writing Prompt: An Identity Exercise Part 1 Consider a walk you have taken many, many times. The walk from your apartment to work, for example, the short route from your desk job to the closest washroom, a hike you have taken over and over, anything you know back to front. Write this journey in painstaking detail. Constrain yourself to only the physical details - your surroundings on the walk in question, your body. This is important: only include details that are accessible through the senses, not reflective. And I mean excruciating detail. Write it. Part 2 Write why you chose this journey. Write a series of reasons. Begin each one with Because but never mention the journey itself in its physicality. Allow yourself to be reflective, figurative, transcendent. Surround the physicality of Part 1 with your own individual associations and identity. I imagine Part 1 and Part 2 to be both around words, but there is no set limit, no set form, or structure other than what is outlined above. The rest is up to you. Critical Writing Prompt: For every week that you are registered, you must compose a 6-page critical essay in response to the prompt provided for that week. The paper must include a thesis statement that speaks to what you have learned and should include MLA formatted citations. Outcome One: Your argument must be supported by quotations and paraphrases of material from at least four SWP events (panels, lectures, workshops, readings, etc.). Outcome Two: The essay should analyze and synthesize the week s theme/topic and address the diversity of values arising from guest speakers. It evaluates your own assumptions and the assumptions of the discourse community.

2 Essays must be 6-pages long (double-spaced, times new roman (or equivalent), 12pt font). All MFA/MA students are required to submit these 6-pages (per week) as part of their final manuscript. A rough draft of the full essay will be collected in person or via by your MFA instructor at the end of the each week. These essays will then be revised and submitted at the end of SWP as part of your final portfolio. Answer one of the two prompts below in your essay. What elders, time-periods, locales, texts, or poetic ethos has supported your practice as writers? What is exciting and radical in this transmission or permission? Has it come from within/without the academy? Do you feel part of your time in terms of lineage or school or identify with a particular community of writers? Who are the elders in your psyche and why? What creative forms feel endangered to you? Speak about how technology and the printed page language themselves, the commerce between artists, the venues and zones for creative possibility. Where do you gather? And what about the endangered reality animals, plants, environmental zones surrounding and embedded within your lives? What is the spiritual edge to all this?

3 Week 2: MFA Class Lecture by Sara Veglahn (Crossworlds) Read: o Hidden Female Shamanic Traditions, Barbara Tedlock, pp o What is the Light? Reflections on Other Worlds, Monica de la Torre, pp o Savoring Death in Mexico, Alberto Ruy-Sanchez, pp (An Elemental Thing) Read: pgs Creative Writing Prompt: How can uncertainty function as a narrative strategy? What happens when creating a text that offers the writer (and, in turn, the reader) the opportunity to experience the fertile realm of doubt, of the mystery to inhabit, for a time, a textual space that functions outside of what we might recognize as familiar, plunging us into the depths of the unknown? What can our texts learn from this perhaps uncomfortable mode of composition? Possibly the greatest uncertainty for all of us resides in the subjects of our own birth and death. Giving yourself over to the idea that through uncertainty and through the mystery of what we both do and do not understand within the realm of a subconscious or other conscious plane, a more accurate kind of certainty is possible, create a text that depicts your own birth or your own death (or some combination, perhaps). Although this exercise is ostensibly about you, it by necessity, becomes something very different something that you must create, imagine, and shape through the lens of doubt, the lens of mystery. Offer an aspect of the visionary, an expression of enchantment. Can you articulate a moment of unknowing? (3-5pgs) Critical Writing Prompt: For every week that you are registered, you must compose a 6-page critical essay in response to the prompt provided for that week. The paper must include a thesis statement that speaks to what you have learned and should include MLA formatted citations. Outcome One: Your argument must be supported by quotations and paraphrases of material from at least four SWP events (panels, lectures, workshops, readings, etc.). Outcome Two: The essay should analyze and synthesize the week s theme/topic and address the diversity of values arising from guest speakers. It evaluates your own assumptions and the assumptions of the discourse community.

4 Essays must be 6-pages long (double-spaced, times new roman (or equivalent), 12pt font). All MFA/MA students are required to submit these 6-pages (per week) as part of their final manuscript. A rough draft of the full essay will be collected in person or via by your MFA instructor at the end of the each week. These essays will then be revised and submitted at the end of SWP as part of your final portfolio. Answer one of the two prompts below in your essay. How does philosophy inform our lives, our discourse, our gnosis and what is its relationship to creative language practices and where does it originate? Greece? Europe? Asia? From Decartes to Agamben to Buddhism, to what stirs the pot. Eco is our House: ethos is how we live in it and in the world. How are we influenced by our exposure to cultures other than our own, abroad, local and otherwise? What do we know of histories, forms from aborigine epic, to surrealism to the texts we choose to translate? How has Moroccan culture influenced the Beat Writers, or French poetry the work of writers associated with the New York School and other contemporary practitioner? How do you cross worlds?

5 Week 3: MFA Class Lecture by Khadijah Queen (Crossworlds) Read: o Cultural Activism: Writing Under the New World Order (Panel w/ Akilah Oliver, Joanne Kyger, Anne Waldman, Eleni Sikelianos) (p. 173) o Po/Ethics (Panel w/ Anne Waldman, Daisy Zamora, Jack Collom, Harryette Mullen, David Henderson) (p. 332). (An Elemental Thing) Read: pgs Creative Writing Prompt: At the end of his book, Violence, Slavoj Žižek argues that all of the debate about what to do concerning things like climate change, race relations, exploitation, immigration, etc. is a kind of pseudo-activity that masks the fact that we aren t capable of making any difference. Instead, he advocates that passivism (rather than activism) might be a more profound response to the world s crises. What does this mean? Not sure. But if you can t even figure out what you re living for, how can you realistically advocate for the meanings that might define life for other beings? Figure it out: make a list of 50 things worth living for (or 2 3 pages) and see where this leaves you. 3-5pgs. Critical Writing Prompt: For every week that you are registered, you must compose a 6-page critical essay in response to the prompt provided for that week. The paper must include a thesis statement that speaks to what you have learned and should include MLA formatted citations. Outcome One: Your argument must be supported by quotations and paraphrases of material from at least four SWP events (panels, lectures, workshops, readings, etc.). Outcome Two: The essay should analyze and synthesize the week s theme/topic and address the diversity of values arising from guest speakers. It evaluates your own assumptions and the assumptions of the discourse community. Essays must be 6-pages long (double-spaced, times new roman (or equivalent), 12pt font). All MFA/MA students are required to submit these 6-pages (per week) as part of their final manuscript. A rough draft of the full essay will be collected in person or via by your MFA instructor at the end of the each week. These essays will then be revised and submitted at the end of SWP as part of your final portfolio.

6 Answer one of the two prompts below in your critical essay. What are we currently engaged with in cultural /political activist spheres? What protests and polemics? From civil rights to climate change activism to multi gender parity. How do these actions inform and magnetize our writing. What use is our writing in public and highly vocal dimensions? What are the texts we look to? Or does poetry make nothing happen? What are the creative and practical ways that writing communities might work to avert, dissemble, heal violence? How do we tithe our time and include others through our analysis of late capital, education, police brutality? What are useful safety nets? Do we work within political systems? What is effective? How does ritual and remembrance and protest and appeal to jurisprudence enhance outcomes?

7 Week 4: MFA Class Lecture by April Joseph (Crossworlds) Read: o (Crossworlds) Read: Lorenzo Thomas "Talking Back to Whitman" pp o Eileen Myles "Choralizing Cultures" pp (An Elemental Thing) Read: pgs Creative Writing Prompt: The form of the letter asks us to think about community in both intimate and expansive ways. Letters in literature often feel very direct and immediately accessible while also providing a space for nuanced thought and complex dialogue. Write a letter to an imaginary addressee. Your writing can embrace, explode, critique, or otherwise investigate the idea of intimate address. You can find some more examples for how some writers have handled the epistolary form here: In the these examples, the range of addressees include imagined ancestors, public figures, an owl, various abstractions and inanimate objects as well as the workings of language itself. 3-5 pages Critical Writing Prompt: For every week that you are registered, you must compose a 6-page critical essay in response to the prompt provided for that week. The paper must include a thesis statement that speaks to what you have learned and should include MLA formatted citations. Outcome One: Your argument must be supported by quotations and paraphrases of material from at least four SWP events (panels, lectures, workshops, readings, etc.). Outcome Two: The essay should analyze and synthesize the week s theme/topic and address the diversity of values arising from guest speakers. It evaluates your own assumptions and the assumptions of the discourse community. Essays must be 6-pages long (double-spaced, times new roman (or equivalent), 12pt font). All MFA/MA students are required to submit these 6-pages (per week) as part of their final manuscript. A rough draft of the full essay will be collected in person or via by your MFA instructor at the end of the each week. These essays will then be revised and submitted at the end of SWP as part of your final portfolio. Answer one of the two prompts below in your essay.

8 Who are you collaborating with and what examples inspire you from your historical and personal archive? What are communities (such as Sun Ra s Arkhestra or The Nuyorican Cafe) that have stayed together as performance collectives? What historic third mind has occurred already in the annals of wordwork past and current? How has music influenced your work; what are some examples from your own experience? What genres? What are the precedents? How does the word fit the sound? What do the hybrids sound and look like? Influence of jazz, Sprechstimme, folk, punk, rap, the individual lyrical matrix.