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.