F****** Theory with Sara Jane Stoner

“Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing to this end….the possession of a term does not bring a process or practice into being.” – bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

“—Say it, no ideas but in things—” writes William Carlos Williams, but perhaps there are things for us in ideas, things we might need in this urgent present to take responsibility, engage, and recognize the relationship between power, politics, aesthetics, and identities (both individual and collective) in poetry and beyond. In this workshop we will read and discuss work by contemporary poets alongside brief, contextualized excerpts from a variety of “theoretical” texts. Our goals: to write ourselves into a study of how ideas or theories shape the way we perceive the world and render it in our writing; to fall in love/hate with a sentence and find the magic in reading and writing when we linger with something difficult; to discover the different ways that poems and theory expand, limit, reframe or complicate our sense of subjects; to respond to these ideas with our bodies and the lived knowledge they possess. We will practice generating assignments for each other out of these texts, their ideas, unanswered questions, gaps, and problems. And thinking through our alignments and resistances to locate useful tensions, we will write and workshop poems that bring our imaginations and lived experience to transform and speak back to the ideas we discuss. Authors may include: Sarah Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Roland Barthes, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Brian Massumi, Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Sianne Ngai, Paul B. Preciado, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick.

Born and raised in Colorado, Sara Jane Stoner is a writer and teacher living in Brooklyn who holds an MFA from Indiana University and is pursuing a PhD in English at CUNY Graduate Center with a focus on critical pedagogies and queer theory, particularly in the context of contemporary experimental writing. She has taught writing, queer theory, and literature at Brooklyn and Baruch Colleges, as well as The Cooper Union, where she worked in the Writing Center for almost a decade. Presently, she serves as the Reviews Editor for The Poetry Project Newsletter. Experience in the Medium of Destruction (2015) is her first book.

Click here to register