Upcoming Kundiman Events:

Katabasis: on Descent
with Rohan Chhetri

May 2nd–June 20th
Sundays, 4:00 PM–6:30 PM ET

“Stanley Kunitz says this thing about the original rhythm of the poem that not only belongs to the ‘subject matter’ of the poem, but to your ‘interior world.’ Accessing that rhythm, he says, leads to a ‘quantum leap of energy,’ a rhythm you can ride on and rely on to ‘carry you somewhere strange.’”
––Rohan Chhetri, New England Review: “Behind the Byline” 

“Katabasis” from the Ancient Greek means a descent of some kind, a trip to the underworld in search of understanding. A living person descends to the land of the dead so that they may come back with knowledge that informs and instructs how to conduct life among the living. Using that metaphor, the primary focus of this workshop will be to read and survey katabatic narratives from ancient epics and contemporary poetry to generate original poems involving some kind of descent into the underworld as a way of imagining an encounter with the dead. A way of staging a reckoning with the ancestors and communing with the dead toward building a future in the “overworld” with the knowledges that can be activated within us through that encounter. It is also a way of accessing past events and re-calibrating the lens through linguistic and formal interrogations, vexations and quarrels, to allow for a radical re-visioning of the past to induce the possibility of a future. The lens of this quest is trained toward the Utopian, the thematic tone toward the miraculous, incantation, prayer, horror, ritual. The final project will consist of a group of poems/prose pieces written out of this symbolic “descent” and will in some form mirror this “katabasis” and a successful return (anabasis) to the overworld with/without a resolution, documented as poems. Through these narratives ancient and modern we'll draw on a range of cultural katabatic traditions to access our own modern descents in hopes of uncovering our hidden lineages.

TEXTS:

Each of the eight sessions will start with readings & discussions of small excerpts from ancient epics such as the Akkadian poem “Descent of Ishtar,” Aeneas’s descent in Aeneid, Odysseus’s descent to consult Tiresias, and the treatment of this theme in Pound’s Cantos, and more importantly to instances in East and South Asian epics such Yudhistira’s descent in Mahabharata, the descent of the Sons of Sagara in the Ramayana to rescue the sacrificial horse, King Gesar’s descent in the Tibetan “Epic of King Gesar” among others. Each of these will be paired with modern examples and variations on the theme by Transtromer, Louise Gluck, Li-Young Lee among others.

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 April 15th.

Registration for this class is now closed.