Zoe Imani Sharpe & Claire Freeman-Fawcett
April 18
“.... especially then, in that moment of rampant killing, cynical bluster, distortion and propaganda, it was somehow important to be a student, observer and transmuter of this mercurial ‘thing’...”
November 22
Horror at the fact that “words are attached to some thing” (Gail Scott)
Power, Baby! is series of letters between writers, and an attempt to explore the vexed sites of poetry and language in the aftermaths/midst of collective violence.
We are interested in discursive interrogations of the power of language/the language of power, and in relay as electrical and relational current.
A Digital Anthology, 2023
Zoe Imani Sharpe & Fan Wu
BOUT THAT LIFE was a four-week workshop that explored “life writing:” the textures of a life lived; the ethics of how a life might ought to be lived; and what the aesthetic supplement of “writing” (broadly construed) casts back upon that life. Each week, we read and discussed a variety of texts, then composed ourselves through practices of watching, listening, moving, sensing.
We imagined the structure of this series as an hourglass, a (curved, bodily) channel in which the totality of “life material” flows from its widest opening to its most narrow, emptying again at its generous base. It was through this shape that we tracked the movement of vitality from the universal and cosmic down to the singular and subtle.
Some questions we explored together:
Do we dare turn away from that which exhausts our vitality when it promises so much reward under a capitalist aegis? What can we learn from following an ethics of life in Daoist terms (particularly in the writings of Zhuangzi¹), over Western ideals of happiness or knowledge-seeking? What about the role of chance,² divination,³ materiality,⁴ place,⁵ family,⁶ nourishment⁷ and immanence?⁸ How does the body “extend into space well beyond the skin?” ⁹ What kinds of compositional processes attend to, in Akilah Oliver’s words, “my memory of my body as a life”?¹⁰
This digital anthology, featuring some of the work composed during these four weeks, offers answers—— and new refinements to those questions.
———
¹ Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings (trans. Brook Ziporyn)
² On Nietzsche (trans. Bruce Boone), Georges Bataille
³ The Choice, Denise Ferreira da Silva & Valentina Desideri
⁴ or, on being the other woman, Simone White
⁵ In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, Etel Adnan
⁶ Maigre Dog, Donna James
⁷ Vital Nourishment, François Jullien
⁸ Hello, The Roses, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
⁹ No Archive Will Restore You, Julietta Singh
¹⁰ The Putterer’s Notebook, Akilah Oliver
Workshop, 2021
Zoe Imani Sharpe, Cason Sharpe & Yaniya Lee
Citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create out dwellings. —— Sara Ahmed
When approached as praxis, the act of referencing becomes kaledescopic. How do we find, pull and build our references? How do we know where to look? Zoe Imani Sharpe, Cason Sharpe and Yaniya Lee are writers who are also siblings. Sparring, joking and caring for one another as kin, they know citation as an intimate endeavour, where the act of bringing together disparate materials is abundant and wayward. In this workshop, they share the development of their own collective canon and engage participants in collaborative writing that explores the resonances and contradictions of our personal reference banks.
Pre-recorded conversations/Milanote board available upon request.
Workshop, 2020
Zoe Imani Sharpe & Fan Wu
POETRY, RACE, FORM was an eight-week workshop where poetic form (sound, rhythm, rhyme, line, idiom, time, syntax, semantics, spirit) became a channel for thinking about race and ethnicity —and vice versa. For two hours every week, a group of over 25 artists closely read and discussed a small selection of poems; wrote for a half-hour inspired by our studies; then came back together to share our writing.
Here are some of the questions we explored:
In our time of urgent mass action against anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence, of major scrutiny of how our institutions (dys)function, what does poetry—a subtle, slower, and often covert energy—have to say? Can poetry act as a supplement to political action by imagining other futures and other psychic structures that might ground different systems of power?
How can we attune to how “race” is constituted linguistically, historically, ancestrally, existentially, and cosmologically? What presses on poetic form, now, and can these pressures reveal what we know, what we must do?
Reading List here.