Ennoblement & Purpose

Dates: Six spring meetings: 3/16, 3/22, 3/23, 3/29, 3/30, 4/4
Format: Videoconference (Zoom)
Cost: $225
Entrance: Submission only (see below); 9 participants maximum.

the class:

A rigorous first course in the habits of Neo-Gnostic writing.

After inclination, gifting, and a few claps on the back, how exactly is an artist made, and how does she proceed? What begins as a chance undertaking is followed by the small reckonings that will determine whether the guts of our poems are made of slow-dying corpuscles or nesty hale materia. Mutative and hale.

We begin from this supposition: that audience can be nullified, all inheritance buffeted, language dehisced as the first—and the poem remain implacably, utterly vital, a sterling virulent.

Serious inquiries will be made against private symbologies and what Spece calls fulfillment-adjacency. Other early provisos: Yes to iconoclasm, strange merit, meaning, density, investment, lit yards, world-making in wars and cortèges, ever-interregnums; No to history-as-arbiter, obscurantism(?), book-as-telos, the cult of normalcy, ‘relevant solidarity.’

Readings likely include Hagiwara, Rimbaud, Woolf, Hopkins, Lawrence, Riding, Moxley, Olson, Reik, Vince, Baraka, and others.

GENRES

Poetry.

WHAT YOU’LL PRODUCE

Poems and poetics; two or more new or seriously revised pieces

WHAT YOU’LL RECEIVE

High community; earnest critique and investment in your writing.

WORKSHOP LOGISTICS

Sessions generally run 2-3 hours in the evening, beginning at 7 PM EST. Optional (recommended) reading groups in place, too.

HOW DO I SIGN UP?

First, submit 3-5 pages of your best work to our Submittable. Next, wait for review and reply; if you’re selected, we’ll send along preliminary readings, links, and payment options.

THE TEACHING ARTIST:

Joseph Spece read English and philosophy at Boston College, and took his MFA from Columbia University. His books are BAD ZOO (FATHOM 2018) and Roads (Cherry Grove 2013); periodical credits include Poetry, DIAGRAM, Volt, AGNI, datableedzine, 3:AM, TriQuarterly, Fond, Salamander, Berfrois, and Best American Experimental Writing, with cross-genre editorial and reader credits at Narrative, Noble/Gas Quarterly, and The Paris Review. His public honors in writing include a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, artist fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Corrente Prize in Poetry from Columbia University. He is founding editor at FATHOMBOOKS, and splits time between Wellesley and Provincetown, MA.