Upcoming Kundiman Events:
Documentary Poetics:
Archive and Counter-Lyric
with Kimberly Alidio
July 7th–August 25th
Wednesdays, 6:30 PM–9:00 PM ET
“Poets can care about and for the language used to pose questions. We can make multi-dimensional macro-micro inquiries into the language used to pose answers. As much as we are typically tasked with imagining, we can attend to what is present and to what is already arriving.”
–– Kimberly Alidio, Rob Mclennan’s Blog: “12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kimberly Alidio”
This 8-weeklong workshop splices together the poetic techniques of recording everyday life and engaging political-historical documents to ask how poets subvert a self that is subject to the state, neoliberal capitalism, and the cultural diversity machine. We will write poems of our working day, the domestic, and the minutiae of living to ask, What is extraordinary and full of possibility in the act of documentation? At the same time, we will engage both the vitality and the violence of archival documents of your choice to ask, How does an official document record the living, vulnerable phenomenological “nowness” of the official documenter, in addition to surveilling the subject being documented? By enacting the poetics of returning and revisiting the past (the day, history), we will write from the crossroads where the past, present, and future are already in conversation. We will write from a practice of listening and an ethic of refusing to re-enact the surveillance strategies of the archive.
Over the course of eight weeks, we will read Eduardo Corral, Joshua Escobar, Jasmine Gibson, Edgar Garcia, Renee Gladman, Saidiya Hartman, Juliana Huxtable, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Benjamin Krusling, Pamela Lu, Myung Mi Kim, M. NourbeSe Philip, Akilah Oliver, Legacy Russell, Jake Skeets, Edwin Torres, Sara Uribe, Divya Victor, Asiya Wadud, Jackie Wang, and Nikki Wallschlaeger.
eligibility:
This workshop is open to all writers of color, and students must be able to attend all 8 sessions of the workshop. The non-refundable tuition fee is $495. This workshop will be limited to 12 participants and will be held over Zoom. There is one scholarship spot available, and the application is open through Wednesday, June 16th.
Registration for this class is now closed.
FACULTY:
Kimberly Alidio is the author of why letter ellipses (selva oscura 2020), : once teeth bones coral : , a Lambda Literary Award Finalist (Belladonna* 2020), and after projects the resound (Black Radish 2016). Her forthcoming project, Ambient Mom, is a work of translingual poetry, concrete poetry, essay, digital archive, and sound poetry recordings. Excerpts were chosen as a finalist for the BOMB Poetry Contest, and won The University of Arizona’s Bill Waller Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her poetry has been supported by The Center for Art and Thought, Kundiman, Philippine American Writers and Artists, and VONA/ Voices. Alidio was Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Texas, Zora Neale Hurston Scholar at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School, and Asian American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan and a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. With her partner, the poet Stacy Szymaszek, she lives in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people, who, due to forced removal, reside in Northeast Wisconsin as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. Her website is: kimberlyalidio.com.