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Documentary Poetry: a writing workshop
w/Brandon Shimoda

Mondays
April 23, April 30, May 7, and May 14
6-8 p.m.
Cost: 4 weeks / $75

A DOCUMENTARY POETRY: an abridged study of contemporary documentary poetry towards challenging and expanding the possibilities of narrative truth and lyric consciousness in the documentary form.

This conversation will explore the making and the consciousness of the documentary poem, emphasizing modes of research, composition and of engendering ecstatic truth—supplemented by exemplary and challenging works of the form and our own investigations and in-progress works.

Students will be encouraged to conceive a subject/subjects or isolate an issue/concern prior to class. The class will then function as both seminar and workshop, engaging: documentary poetry as address, imagination and recovery; speculative investigation and research; the maintenance of lyric and narrative imagination; the incorporation of the processual; the role of the poet in relation to material; methods of composition and the use of source documents, testimony, questionnaires.

Including texts by Etel Adnan, James Agee, Roland Barthes, Matsuo Basho, Werner Herzog, Susan Howe, Bhanu Kapil, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Paul Metcalf, Maggie Nelson, Michael Ondaatje, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, William Carlos Williams

And short films by Stan Brakhage, Lindsay Foster, Werner Herzog, Pável Kogan, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda

Teacher Bio

Brandon Shimoda is a poet, whose books include O Bon (Litmus Press, 2011), The Girl Without Arms (Black Ocean, 2011) and The Alps (2008), as well as numerous solo and collaborative chapbooks. He is currently researching/writing his first book of non-fiction and co-editing the selected writings of Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan (Nightboat Books, 2013). He has taught poetry and writing at Kaohsiung American School (Taiwan), the Missoula Art Museum, and the University of Montana. He has lived this past year in Missouri, Maine and Taiwan, though currently lives here in Tucson, AZ.