What’s Inside is Just a Lie: The Agony & Ecstasy of Influence with r erica doyle

In Stew’s brilliant rock musical Passing Strange, the main character, inspired by ex-pat James Baldwin, embarks on a journey where he encounters Mr. Venus, a Berlin performance artist, who declares “What’s inside is just a lie! Culture is cosmetic…” The Young Man realizes that “What’s inside of each and every one of us … what we mistakenly call our thoughts, our feelings, and our dreams, have actually been put there by a system, therefore our minds have been invaded, conquered, and occupied.”

In an interview in Mother Jones, Wangechi Mutu shares how her preoccupations influence her “mysterious, beautiful and terrifying” visual art: “the sciences and biology and physics and evolution…Paleontology… I’m interested in the way these fields have helped us understand how we are human and why we are human. I’m also from the area that is considered to be the cradle of mankind.”

In this poetry workshop, we will explore both the agonizing invasions of conquering influences a la Stew and the ecstasies of our intellectual, emotional, spiritual and physical influences a la Mutu, and how they inform our work and those of other artists. We will practice working with and against our predilections and habits, design exercises outside of our comfort zones, and give ourselves permission to obsess and worry poems down the rabbit holes of compulsion and assumption. Whether it’s the Internet, popular culture, the Black Arts Movement, the Romantics, physics, Baltimore, New York City or your mother, be prepared to explore, interrogate and expand what influences your thoughts, feelings, dreams, and ultimately, poems.

r. erica doyle’s first collection of poetry, proxy (2013), was selected by poet Maggie Nelson for a Norma Farber First Book Award and named a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and an Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice Lesbian Writers Fund Award in Poetry. Doyle lives and teaches in Brooklyn.

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