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Hybrid Poetry Workshop with Chris Campanioni


EVERY LIFE IS THE DEFENSE OF A FORM
The social urgency of hybrid poetics

“Every life is the defense of a form,” wrote Susan Sontag in her notebook in March, 1979. “Form is the defense of every marginalized life,” I wrote in my notebook in February, 2017. Hybridity is the salve & salvo for those of us who have been marginalized, who exist in the margins, who exist in the middle & on the edges, halfway between two points, at the intersection of categories & labels, race & ethnicity & gender, an expression of the isolation & alienation of non-binary, non-normative, mixed race bodies. What better way to empower our neo-mestizo experience than to re-present it through the liminal frame of the hybrid, cross-genre text? When I re-trained my own eyes how to see myself from outside myself, I began the long work in re-teaching myself how to write.

May all our accountings be irregular. May all our lives be in defense of form: our own blood & breath, breath & flesh. May we always defend our form; may our form always defend us from the hierarchies of genre & all of its generic expectations. A great deal has to be given up if you are going to succeed in creating a generative work of art, unless what might be given up is taken away from you. Unless what is taken away from you is your voice. If reading your writing is a way out of exile, writing toward a new way of reading is a method to engender empathy, dismantle conventional narrative, undo silencing.

Objective: To straddle the line between poetry & prose, essay & narrative, list & analysis. I’d like to think of the hybrid form as a map, an itinerary, an index, a choreographed movement that allows one to move between text & context, past & present, meaning & making—& moreover, the moment of making. On the fly. In this one-day workshop, we’ll learn to embody the liminal hybrid form by embracing our own liminal, intertextual, fluid, often performative, identities. Let’s locate ourselves on this map & re-present our way of seeing; our way of being in the world.

In doing so, we’ll think about our own work in relation to the markers of lineation, prose poetry, the essay, & the list, not to form distinctions but to fulfill the synthesis of genre, the generic, & the generative. We’ll arrive in class ready to discuss ways in which we can integrate all of these markers in a piece, connect seemingly disparate moments & ideas, & leave with a great work-in-process.

This class is ideal for those of you who have taken Chris’s previous class on hybridity at HVWC but newcomers are welcome.

Tickets are $124 for this 4-hour intensive course. Please register at
https://www.writerscenter.org/calendar/hybridcc/

Chris Campanioni is a first-generation American, the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland, and the author of the Internet is for real (C&R Press). His “Billboards” poem was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was selected as Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece “This body’s long (& I’m still loading)” was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. He runs PANK and PANK Books, edits At Large Magazine and Tupelo Quarterly, and teaches Latino literature and creative writing at Pace University and Baruch College.

Event Location and Ticket Information

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Hudson Valley Writers’ Center
300 Riverside Drive
Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591
Handicap Accessible? Yes

Date: Saturday, June 1, 2019
Times: 12:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Ticket pricing:

Get tickets now
- $124

Presenter: Hudson Valley Writers Center
Presenter Phone: 9143325953