Documentary Poetics: Archive and Counter-Lyric with Kimberly Alidio will meet over Zoom on Wednesday evenings from July 7th–August 25th at 6:30 PM–9:00 PM ET. This 8-week poetry workshop will splice together the poetic techniques of recording everyday life and engage political-historical documents to ask how poets subvert a self that is subject to the state, neoliberal capitalism, and the cultural diversity machine.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.

This workshop is open to all writers of color. Registration is now open, and space is limited. There is one scholarship spot available. The deadline to apply for the scholarship is Wednesday, June 16th. See the class page for more information.

To see all of our spring classes, visit kundiman.org/online-classes.