January 6, 2025 Fall 2024
Birdsong, Bartleby the Scrivener, Funko Pops, Marxism, and hypertext: these are some of the phenomena our workshop Spectacle, Presence and Poetry encountered during its five-week run this fall. Lead teacher Gabrielle Octavia Rucker created a wide-ranging syllabus exploring how poetry can return us to ourselves and the world around us, and I had the honor of assisting with classes and soaking up knowledge from Gabrielle, our participants, and the texts we investigated together.
Week 1: Beginnings and self-audits on presence
We spent the bulk of our first session getting to know each other and exploring Gabrielle’s vision for the class. From the outset, we encouraged everyone to keep a handwritten journal, which we hoped would root us in day-to-day thoughts and sensations, as well as instilling a regular writing habit. We also set aside time to examine our existing relationships to reading, writing, and the attentive presence requisite for both of these.
Assigned readings discussed the ruling class’s incentive to prevent us from becoming close, critical readers; the future of literacy and distinctiveness of text compared to other artistic media; and poetry’s role in celebrating embodied experience and opening an avenue for revolutionary practice.
A screenshot from our class’s shared Figma board, where we took lots of collaborative notes together. There are a variety of images and diagrams, including a poem, screenshots of the dictionary definitions and etymologies of “attention” and “grieve,” a page filled with asemic writing, and more.Week 2: Spectacular lyric
In the second week of class, we landed on another noun from the course title, “spectacle.” Our longest assigned reading was Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, an influential text from the 20th-century Situationist movement that remains eerily insightful today. Debord investigates the stories capitalism manufactures to encourage our consumption, tracking their totalizing nature and propagation around the world. Language forms an integral component of this “spectacle,” so we spent our remaining class time considering two poetic examples of “anti-spectacular” writing: Taylor Johnson’s “Similes,” which critiques the co-optation of the prison system into metaphor, and Layli Long Soldier’s “38,” which argues that acts of resistance by the Dakota people should be seen as poems in their own right. I’m thankful for the rich discussion we enjoyed thanks to these three writers.
A snippet of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle we read together.Week 3: Letters and liberation
Leftist poetry has a long tradition of political letter-writing; this became the focus of our third week. We read letters from Sean Bonney, Diane DiPrima, and George Jackson, each writer transforming the epistolary form beyond a rote vessel for correspondence into a sharp political and literary tool. Our discussion dwelled particularly on Bonney’s contention that as writers and organizers, we should remember our political opponents can access our literature as much as we can theirs: what does it mean to write while circumventing the enemy’s intellectual habits, to make up a language all our own?
In one of the many etymological turns we took throughout the workshop, one section also grew interested in Bonney’s assertion that poetry is “feeble,” an adjective derived from the Latin word for lament or grief. What possibilities open up to us if we establish poetry as a terrain to explore and nurture sorrow? What if we define poetry, and even language itself, as worthy of grieving?
Week 4: Guest speaker!
Katherine Duckworth, author of Slow Violence. Photo courtesy of Katherine Duckworth. The photo shows a white woman holding a bouquet of yellow flowers, surrounded by a background of trees.For our fourth week of classes, we had the honor of welcoming Katherine Duckworth, author of our assigned text Slow Violence, for a live reading and discussion of her work. Slow Violence considers various subjects but focuses especially on birds, trees, and the 1984 Detroit World Series riots. We talked with Katherine about her inspirations, including classical epic poetry and high school football plays, and her sources, which ranged from the NYC Parks Department’s Tree Map to employee reviews posted on Glassdoor. Everyone came away pondering the questions we posed together: how can poetry draw on and expand archival work? How should a poet inhabit or contribute to today’s suffering world?
In a Zoom meeting, a poem is displayed via screen-sharing, and a group of people listen as Katherine reads Slow Violence aloud.Week 5: Final project sharing
All too soon, we found ourselves in the last week of the workshop, but happily, there were final projects to share. Participants created a variety of offerings spanning many artistic media, from an outline for a video game to an interactive website, a series of poems to a short film, all inspired by our time together in some way.
I was so sad to see this class end, but so grateful to have shared space with everyone present. In some ways, I left with more questions than when I started about how to be a poet and a person in an unjust world, but maybe that’s where we begin: gathering, listening, sensing, grieving, making, and exhaling.
Sunday section spreading love during our final class!