About the Workshop

I always begin at the beginning, so we’ll start with the tiniest scraps of language and even before and think about what a poem is made of, literally and we’ll read some great poems and swatches of prose all week because I advocate writing prose in a poet way. On the basis of that new understanding you’ll write four new poems and possibly one prose thing. We use poems and prose and we use film and we use a nude model one day and even get ourselves out of FAWC for a walk and or a dip and exploring the poetics of that. I’m not kidding. Poems are a political necessity today, we are the front of the band even if we are not standing there, we’re the soul of the chant and resistance to all forms of oppression. We say what’s inside and outside because we must and we are sometimes queer and trans and whatever body we write our poems in is good so we celebrate that. Bring your best pen and your notebook, I don’t object to computers. But don’t miss the pen and the hand. Maybe also bring a stuffed animal and a piece of artificial fruit or something likewise ridiculous and puzzling, that looks well in a studio. This is extremely a studio class.

About the Instructor

Eileen Myles (they/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Their newest books are Pathetic Literature and a “Working Life”, poems. Myles’s fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994) which just won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel, Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.