Weaving and poetry with Jill Magi

This workshop begins with a forty-five minute work session where we will make small cardboard looms, take bits of thread and fabric, and make page-sized weavings. No textile arts experience is necessary. Without theorizing, we’ll then move right into a writing session where we will transfer this sense of play and “in-expertise” to the blank page. Of course the connection between “to write” and “to weave” is present in the word “text,” so we will be building on that ancient association. But this workshop is really about playfulness and sensing language in the same way we make decisions about pattern and color: often without thinking too much, especially when we are beginners. We’ll take a look at the poems of Marjorie Welish where weave structures inform her compositions, and we’ll use our experience weaving to read poets like Kazim Ali and Etel Adnan in perhaps new ways that can inspire our own poems.

Jill Magi is an artist, critic, and educator whose research and teaching interests include poetry and poetics, experimental literature, handmade books, alternatives to mainstream publishing, and textile arts. Her books include LABOR, SLOT, Cadastral Map, Torchwood, Threads, and the monograph Pageviews/Innervisions, a textimage theory and curriculum for literary studies. She teaches writing through the study of textiles, as well as electives in poetry, literature, and art, at New York University Abu Dhabi.

LIMTED SPACE AVAILABLE: Contact Program Coordinator Lauren Clark at lauren@poetshouse.org.