Open Call:
Poetics of Refusal
 

Within the framework of  WE WHO ARE NOT THE SAME, a research project which looks at and challenges decolonial intersectional feminist practices and politics, we are honoured to welcome Simone White for the second set of exercises – a writing workshop on the Poetics of Refusal (applications closed) and a talk titled Erotic Power / Erotic Punishment:

Poetics of Refusal (1): 'The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives' [1]

What if Audre Lorde has already offered us a basis for thinking the answer to the question, If there were such a things as a feminist poem, today, where would it come from? What human site evaluates impression protected from the structured/structuring processes of subjectivity? Whether such a site exists or not, What forms might writing take when the writer concerns herself with scrutiny of her experience – the conditions of her life and work – to insist upon vital, unbound womanhood? How does and might the writer prepare her language for the demands of such scrutiny, so that the feminist poem might emerge as other than being as one is?

Together, we consider how to find/know examples (citational relations and practices as preparation), the examples (reading for light, pulse, vibration in writers such as Audre Lorde, Juliana Spahr, Khadijah Queen, Leslie Scalapino), exercises and strategies for organizing a personal field of language.

Simone White is the author of Dear Angel of Death (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem Books, 2016), Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), House Envy of All the World (Factory School/Heretical Texts, 2010) and the collaborative poem/painting chapbook Dolly, with Kim Thomas (Q Avenue Press, 2008). Simone is a Cave Canem fellow and was selected as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America in 2013. In 2017, she received the Whiting Award in poetry. She has been Program Director at The Poetry Project and on the faculties The New School, Eugene Lang College and the Writers’ Workshop at The University of Iowa. As of July 2018, she is Assistant Professor of English in poetics at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in New York.

The project  We Who Are Not The Same is funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds. 

1

Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury, 1985.