Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics DocumentInitiative publishes the work of poets from our recent past who saw their work as poets and educators as equally significant parts of their intellectual, social, and political lives. In this lineage, we ask: what happens when we introduce poetry to emerging social, political, educational, and—in this case—virological phenomenon? Poetry brings intimacy to distance learning, as classrooms around the world aggregate in digital space.Sara Jane Stonerwill lead three courses—Writing in the Pause—and Lost & Found is proud to support her efforts to bring poets together to create and teach poetry by offering six scholarships to interested CUNY-affiliated poets to attend.
About Writing in the Pause Courses:
In this summer of our differently embodied co-existence, with/out and between institutions, Sara Jane Stoner will be offering three classes online:
- Writing in the Manifold, a series of workshops co-led with writers Stoner admires, to sustain and experiment with a rhythm of reading, writing, and spontaneous sharing;
- Being to Teach, an experimental forum on embodied text-based teaching;
- Critical Poesis: Long Form, an extension of a workshop taught for the Poetry Project that seeks to merge critical and poetic impulses and tactics.
These classes will aim for hospitability on the internet—with kindness to each other being guests to each other’s homes and strangers to this time—to create chances to feel our language and desires as threads to feel the tensions and connections of our lives
ongoing, to call upon and make community in the continuity and change we find across our past and future writing, reading, and teaching actions. Participants will have the opportunity to publish writing on poetry and pedagogy arising from the summer’s work on the Lost & Found website.
WRITING IN THE MANIFOLD
Dates: June 3rd — August 12th (11 Weeks)
Times: Wednesdays, 7-10pm EST
Throughout the summer, in this co-led, once-weekly generative workshop, I will be joined by NYC-based writers I wildly admire to practice the following rhythm: an hour of reading and discussion, an hour of writing together, and an hour of reading from the writing we’ve made. For the time being in digital community, I’m excited for the chance to collaborate with these writers, and you, to play through and toward the kinds of energy and experiment that will come from this interaction of impulses and references in reading and writing.
6/3: Kendra Sullivan
6/10: Ariel Goldberg
6/17: Phoebe Glick
6/24: Alexis Almeida
7/1: Maryam Parhizkar
7/8: Rijard Bergeron
7/15: Benjamin Krusling
7/22: Daisy Atterbury
7/29: Jenny Hsiao
8/5: Andriniki Mattis
8/12: Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves
BEING TO TEACH
Dates: June 14 — July 26 (7 meetings)
Times: Sundays, 4-7pm EST
Out of a fullness of a desire to talk about embodied, in-person teaching that transcends the current predicament, this seven-week forum (more threshold than marketplace, more doorway-to-assembly than defined container) will offer writing teachers readings, conversation, and pedagogical experiments on the following subjects: views on close-reading; calls to and modes of attention; one-on-one teaching; radical description; the “success” of “failure”; the possibility of parataxis vs. syntaxis in student essays; the phenomenology of learning; improvisation in discussion. Throughout, we will draw in as inextricable context the politics of our settings (institutions, forms of governance, the costs of tuition and accreditation, contractual teaching and learning, adjunctification) in the long present (straddling the recent past and reaching toward the near future), and we will dance with the paradox of loving and missing in-person teaching while desiring to make online learning better as long as it’s necessary.
CRITICAL POESIS: LONG FORM
Dates: June 16 — July 28 (7 meetings)
Times: Tuesdays, 5-8pm EST
This seven week workshop is an extension of the Critical Poesis workshop I led at the Poetry Project last winter. This will be a writing-focused workshop: communal readings will be brief or excerpted, and will occasionally draw on individual readings lists. In this time, in long form, we will practice in the weird nexus of the critical and the poetic, map our criteria, experiment with critical postures and formal feelings, pursue the body in the voice of the writing, write through individually and communally proposed tactics, develop subject-object archives, query our assumptions about audience and authority, investigate our forms of address and their relationship to ethics and loss, and play with chance and tactics as we write long (or longer) single or serial texts over the course of the whole workshop.
Eligibility:
CUNY students/alumni, faculty/adjuncts, & staff are eligible to apply.
How to Apply:
Please fill out this short google application form to apply. *Applicants can only apply to 1 class.
Click here to apply for Writing in the Manifold
Click hereto apply for Being to Teach
Click hereto apply for Critical Poesis: Long Form
Selection Process:
Because we are not in a position to judge “need” when need is so universal right now, selection of qualified scholarship recipients will be randomized.
Application Deadline:
Monday, June 1st by 11:59 PM.
Co-sponsored byLost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Special thanks to our friends and collaborators Engaging the Senses Foundation for their generous support.
These workshops are funded in part by Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
