this course of course

Since my writing group went and got itself defunct, I've had the pleasure to work with two on-line poetry projects...but I've still missed the tom-cat yowling of in-person discussion.

So I've signed myself up for the following MWG course...and I'd encourage any of youse who lives anywhere nearby to sign up.

Reclaiming the Poetic Landscape
with Di Brandt

Dates: November 25, 26, December 2, 3, 2006;
Weekends, Saturday and Sunday, 10:00am-4:00pm
2 weekends, 24 hrs. total

Course Outline

Part One (November 25 & 26):
Poetry was once the queen of discourses, performed on both daily and ritual and honorary occasions, in every culture around the globe. Nowadays, poetry gasps and struggles to stay alive; funding and accessibility and publishing opportunities are narrow; and the purposes of poetry, as practiced by writers and readers and performers, have also shrunk. What if traditional peoples were right, in thinking that poetry is the central language of our species? How can we enlarge the playing field of poetry in our time?

Part one of "Reclaiming the Poetic Landscape" is an exercise in kleptopoetics, trying to take back some of the territories we lost over the centuries, by playing with the language of other discourses and drawing it into the realm of the poetic. And hopefully finding out something about what poetry is, and enlarging our own poetic repertoires in the process.

Part Two (December 2 & 3):
Here we will discuss participants’ previously written poetry in progress, for the purposes of honing poetic skills, and developing provisional postpostmodern poetics.