Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity…(a)bsolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
—Simone Weil
Taking Simone Weil’s concept of attention as a starting point for discussing poetry in relation to dailiness, students will forge a civic (public) poetry grounded in close attention to their own being in the world. Through engagement with writers such as CAConrad, Anaïs Duplan, June Jordan, Evan Kennedy, Benjamin Krusling, Audre Lorde, Bernadette Mayer, Syd Staiti and Stacy Szymaszek, and by utilizing forms ranging from the epistolary to the diaristic, list poems to self-determined forms, our writing will ask what’s at stake in a poem if not “What will we eat? Where will we sleep and who are we sleeping with? How will we survive various precarities with dignity and intention? How can we find collective joy in making work?” By workshop’s end, students will have rigorously read, discussed and produced a varied, highly intimate, yet decidedly social body of work. Class sessions will meet at 144 Montague St, and assignments, poems and critiques will be shared via Wet Ink.
We strongly encourage all in-person workshop participants to wear masks. Workshop participants may be required to wear masks as an accessibility accommodation for other participants or the instructor.
Workshop Details
imogen xtian smith is a poet and performer living in Lenapehoking / Brooklyn, NY. Their work has appeared in Baest, b l u s h, Folder, the Rumpus, the Poetry Project Newsletter and Tagvverk among other places, as well as in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. imogen holds an MFA from NYU and was a 2021–22 Emerge–Surface–Be Fellow at the Poetry Project. Their debut collection, stemmy things, is out from Nightboat Books.