Remote 3-Hour Workshop: Jenny Xie: Stranger Things: Language Against Assimilation

Stranger Things: Language Against Assimilation

Poems hold vitalizing power through estranging language, rendering us strange in our speaking.  The late C.D. Wright, who infused her lines with her own “idiom Ozarkia,” believed “poetry should repulse assimilation.” “Each poet’s task is to fight their own language’s assimilation,” she wrote. Ilya Kaminsky, writing on Paul Celan, reminds us that “we are asleep in language until language wakes us with its strangeness.”  In this generative and revision-oriented workshop, we’ll repulse assimilation in our poems by experimenting with strategies to galvanize and defamiliarize the way we speak and write. Together, we’ll read, listen to, and think and feel our way around poems by Lyuba Yakimchuk, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Paul Celan, and Sahar Muradi, and engage in exercises meant to de-domesticate and de-discipline our language and upend the usual assumptions about what it can, and should, do. Participants should come prepared with poems, or segments of poems, that they would like to revise, invigorate, and make strange.

3 hours on Sunday  |  April 30th  |  1-4pm Eastern  |  $120 ($96 for Members)

All are welcome, space is limited. A limited number of need-based scholarships are available. Please email support@poetshouse.org with any questions.

About the educator:

Jenny Xie was born in Anhui, China. She is the author of Eye Level and The Rupture Tense, both of which were shortlisted for the National Book Award. Her honors include recognition from the Academy of American Poets, the Vilcek Foundation, New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. She is assistant professor of Written Arts at Bard College and resides in New York City. Photo credit Marco Giugliarelli.

While our physical space is closed for construction, workshops will be held over Zoom. While you can use Zoom from your phone or browser, we recommend downloading the desktop client.