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.
A Verse Record: Poet’s Journals/Journal Poems — Master Class with Stacy Szymaszek
Stacy Szymaszek
Stacy Szymaszek is a poet, and arts administrator/organizer, and teacher. She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where in 1999 she started working for Woodland Pattern Book Center. She founded and edited seven issues of GAM, a free magazine featuring the work of poets living in the upper midwest. In 2005, she moved to NYC to work for The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where she served as Executive Director from 2007-2018. Szymaszek is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (2005), Hyperglossia (2009), hart island (2015), Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017, and A Year From Today (2018 ). She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in poetry. She is a regular teacher for Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, and mentor for Queer Art Mentorship.
Szymaszek is the 2018-19 Hugo Visiting Writer at the University of Montana and was a Poet-in-Resident at Brown University in fall 2018.