wo chan

Sonnet is the Gown

A little room, a little sound; a breathing pattern, a gem in the crown; an argument, a love song, a tradition, and a playground—few forms in poetry are as celebrated and subverted as the courtly sonnet. In this workshop we will read sonnets by queers and we will read sonnets queerly. We will look at fulfillments and subversions of the sonnet as queer(ed), embodied performances—tonal postures, silhouettes on the left margin—or mega-poems center page. How are these poems as received forms imbued—structurally, sonically—with queer intention? How has the form been altered—hemmed, cropped, loosened, or doffed entirely— to fit us? Tradition: do we flout it? Or do we comply…maliciously? And lastly: how does a volta make us twirl?

In our brief time, we will read, discuss, alter, and finally prance by generating our own daily sonnet. No prior experience necessary, but: must love sound, must love play.

Jayson P. Smith

(in)articulations, or, what we mean when we say "craft"

This workshop offers writers an opportunity to reconsider the idea of craft as a somatic interrogation. Together we will ask: what memories / experiences / habits guide the choices you make on the page? How can we use them to redefine how you understand yourself as a poet?

Emji Saint Spero

Slip into something more uncomfortable

Tilt towards precarity. Deviate, abandon the page. Luxuriate in illegibility, in incoherence. Cling to discomfort. Incorporate this tension. Allow it to crack your practice. Lick the outline of its extremities. 

In Troubling the Line, Ely Shipley writes, “how might one begin to write a body that has been historically illegible?” For queer and trans writers, wielding illegibility, incoherence, can be a strategy for reclaiming agency. How might incoherence be seen as a form of resistance? In this workshop we will engage embodied  poetic strategies that resist, refuse, and deconstruct, as a way to imagine other possibilities, to encounter unexpected intimacies.

Ching-In Chen

Spells for Safety

Using the anthology Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power, we will create and dream poem-rituals and spells together as freedom maps for ourselves and our communities.

Bianca Rae Messinger

Love in Excess

This workshop centers around the power of love (in writing) to transcend bodily limitations. We will look at a couple brief excerpts (Robert Glück, Samuel R. Delaney, Leslie Scalapino, Marquis de Sade, Teresa de Avila) while focusing on exercises which allow writing from the body-mind. Part of this involves triangulation, writing through others, conjuring others, hallucinatory translation. The other involves an acknowledgement of fetish (or an investment in the response of the “self”) as a fundamental theoretical and aesthetic mode. How does an ecstatic relationship to love permit us to expand the limits of our perception and desire?