A Verse Record: Poet's Journals/Journal Poems - Master Class with Stacy Szymaszek

What does time show in our lives? How does poet-logic (sequencing) run amok with temporal order and reveal multidimensionality? What is a momentous event? We’ll consider writing that takes time (years to hours and minutes of the day) as a basis of composition, starting with some examples from the Japanese poetic diary tradition (Ki no Tsurayuki’s The Tosa Diary and Masaoka Shiki’s The Verse Record of My Peonies) as well as work by David Antin, Kamau Brathwaite, Beverly Dahlen, Robert Grenier, Joanne Kyger, Harryette Mullen, Bernadette Mayer, and others. In class writing? Yes.

Stacy Szymaszek is a poet, editor and arts administrator. She is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (2005), Hyperglossia (2009), hart island (2015), and Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books. Her book A Year From Today is forthcoming in 2017 with Nightboat Books. She’s the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She is a regular teacher for Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, and mentor for Queer Art Mentorship. Szymaszek has been the Director of the Project since 2007. Before that, she served as the Project’s Program Coordinator (now called Managing Director) from 2005-2007 and curated the Monday Night Reading Series.