Fall 2009 courses: for Documentary Poetry / the Documentary Poem click here for Performative Genres: Post-beat Language Arts click here  "The Poet in the Library" Workshop at The Poetry Project, spring 2008 Is there a role for research in imaginative or creative writing projects? Sure! In this workshop we´ll combine prior knowledge with curiosity, creating opportunities to stumble upon interesting language and images. We´ll develop research questions to accompany our intuitive and imaginative writings; search for materials in books, historical documents, articles, newspapers; take field trips to public archives, libraries, and historical sites; experiment with using found text; explore ways to structure a long poem, including the possibility of creating a hybrid text, and a text that includes visuals. All along, we´ll take a look at works by Susan Howe, Gale Jackson, Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, and others, and the visual/text work of Mary Kelly, Lorna Simpson, The Atlas Group, and others. | I have been teaching creative writing, literature, cultural studies, and literary publishing in college programs in New York City for more than ten years. I got my start in teaching and writing at a community-based literacy program in Brooklyn where we, as teachers, believed that “to teach it you have to do it.” My interest in writing came from my involvement in that community of teachers and learners intent on writing down their stories. I encourage myself and learners to access alternative
sense-making spaces within language—spaces outside of traditional
logic, explanation, and linearity. This idea of language probably comes
from one of my first language memories of listening to my loved ones
carry on in their home language, Estonian, and though nothing was
translated for me, I loved hearing their sounds and being a witness to
that intimate encounter created by language itself. So I delight in
those workshop and classroom moments when we encounter a combination of
words that puzzles all of us, but also makes more sense than we could
have ever imagined. My approach to facilitating writing is to encourage
experimentation and to fashion a space that is both challenging and
supportive. About 17 years ago I first read Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and knew that I wanted to teach. Freire reminds us that we read both the world and the word and to do this with others is an energizing experience that might lead to transformations. I respect and cherish the community that is created when learners gather—it’s invigorating and inspires me continually. Read my teaching philosophy here. Download my CV and sample syllabi below. |
Teaching |
 "As the great poet Keorapetse Kgositsile put it, 'When the clouds clear / We shall know the colour of the sky.' When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets--no matter the medium--who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling." -from Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D. G. Kelley |