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The introduction section to this workshop frames language as an infinite garden, or library, or family, or fog. Each of its possible trillions of points of contact are sites for new structures of relation, new stubborn-opened horizons.  

Participants will divide a sheet of any size vertically into 2 equal parts; fill the left half with verbs, the right half with prepositions; reproduce this sheet and distribute to all participants. To activate, fold or draw a line from the left edge of the sheet to the right; gather the first verb which that line passes through, combine it with the first preposition which the line passes through. 

Participants will reflect on this speculative allegiance (e.g. to “spit / about”, “run / through”, “spill / for”).  Make a list of possible things which might hold this relationship. Write a poem describing one of these relationships. Read, share, discuss. 

REFERENCE:  

“The Library of Babel”
by Jorge Luis Borges 

Roots and webs and nets and branches and bulletin boards and banners and newsletters and mutual-aid text threads and kin and caretakers and porches and poems of today and spaces of survival
https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/6914/
by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo 

This section is built around the negative subject, the missing part of the whole, the left-out punchline, the friend to whom you owe everything, your wishes or fears, the imperfect bridges that language might build between us and a subject which is unwilling or unable to respond. Perhaps a friend or a loved one is dying or dead. Mountains emerge. Speaking to mountains emerging or god or comrades. Speaking to you. 

Participants will gather dedications, in their many forms—apostrophic speeches, dying breaths, title cards, front pages, open letters, voice messages, obituaries and headstones. Read, share, discuss. 

Participants will write 2 dedications approaching different limits: one will be constrained to 15 words or less, prioritizing the economies of language and its capacities for grief, debt and love, longing, distance, and  animation; the other will be 200 words or more, a participation in the theatrical tradition of the apostrophic monologue, or the open letter, or the spittle-flecked rant, or the florid obituary. Read, share, discuss. 

REFERENCE:  

“Playing Telephone: An Interview with Amalia Pica”
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/ 
playing-telephone-an-interview-with-amalia-pica-56318/
by Courtney Fiske

The Missing Pieces
by Henri Lefebvre 

By the time this reaches you, when you pick it up out of the junk mail or off the bedside or kitchen table, I’ll have forgotten what I have said. Good friend, my love, a text too slow for an accelerating world, in your letter the act of writing becomes a tonsil stone, stubborn sediment material evidence of the collective out-there-in-here. This section may be conducted entirely over post, email, zoom. 

Correspondents will each write and circulate a poem with the group. Each correspondent will write a letter to another participant’s poem (or multiple participants’ poems). Participants will come back to meet again, read,  share, and discuss. 

REFERENCE: 

Reluctant Gravities
by Rosmarie Waldrop 

“EVERYBODY SLEEPS IN ROYAL BLUE SATIN SHEETS  
LIKE CUCUMBERS IN A BOX OF SNOW” from
What’s your idea of a good time?
by Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer 

We are trailing with us the massive and furled sails of the texts and conversations of those around us. To make work at all is to speak towards another source, or acknowledge the space and presence of existing work, to understand our labor as being of many. We have, on average, 4,000 weeks to live and fewer to read books. Morgan Bassichis describes receiving their first copy of Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots And Their Friends Between Revolutions from Bobby, with the inside cover inscribed “Come home soon.” 

In this section, participants will acknowledge and make work-as-part-of-many. Participants will select any previously-written work from the workshop and annotate it, to whatever end. These new texts, contingently co-authored will serve as the lens through which the original poems will be re-read, re-shared, re-discussed. 

REFERENCE: 

“The Feminist Shelf” from
The Feminist Bookstore Movement 
by Kristen Hogan 

Introduction
by Morgan Bassichis to Nightboat’s 2019 edition of  
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolution 
by Larry Mitchell 

WE, WRITING, BECOME A TONSIL STONE FOR
PUNCHLINE-HORIZONS. THE LIBRARY WILL BE
AN OPEN LETTER; SPEAKING, EMERGING
MOUNTAINS OR COMRADES

In its digestion and inflammation, the manifesto produces burred edges on the text’s surface, for the purpose of exciting publics. Through a change in pitch, volume, voice, height, poetics can become rows and rows of teeth. This section will see participants produce 3 manifesto poems, <25 words each, of collaged text gathered only from previous writings from this workshop.  

Participants will reconvene to collate the writings into a multi-line manifesto, after which a plan will be developed to release this work into the commons (be it through print, sound, image, performance).  

What makes itself clear? Where do poetic edges fail when speaking to power/publics/purpose? Where do they succeed? Where does opacity waver? What recedes into the music or party or crowd? Gather one more time to re-read, re-share, discuss the work in and out of the context of its release.  

REFERENCE: 

Foreword to
WE WANT IT ALL: An Anthology
of Radical Trans Poetics
ed. Kay Gabriel and Andrea Abi-Karam 

“Speech for Mark Lowe Fisher’s Funeral
Procession; November 2, 1992”
https://actupny.org/diva/polfunsyn.html#speech
by Jon Greenberg

This syllabus references Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, another Syllabus contributor.