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The Textum: A Poetry Workshop with Cynthia Cruz (via Zoom)
February 4 @ 12:30 pm - 4:30 pm
$124.00
In Walter Benjamin’s essay “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” he describes a type of writing, an amalgamation, resulting from voluntary and involuntary memory: facts and data from remembered, or conscious, memory and the haze of memory lost, or the unconscious. This web or textum, the result of writing that weaves these two types of memory, also drags the poet’s community as well as their community’s history with them, as Benjamin writes: “Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It is less a product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data.” Taking Benjamin’s concept of the textum as our starting point, we will spend the opening of workshop reading examples of poetry that engage in this poetics. Then we will spend the majority of the class engaging in generate writing exercises and sharing our writing.
This class will be held on Zoom. The link will be sent at the time of registration and again the day before class. Please write to [email protected] with questions. Scholarship information for this class will be available on Nov 15 and will be due by Dec 15 2022. See the scholarship section of our website for details.
Cynthia Cruz is the author of seven collection of poems. Hotel Oblivion, her seventh collection, was published in the spring of 2022 by Four way Books. Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays exploring the concept of silence as a form of resistance, was published by Book*hug in 2019 and The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, an examination of Freudian melancholia and the working class, was published by Repeater Books in 2021. Forthcoming in 2023, are a novella, Steady Diet of Nothing, a collection of poems, Back to the Woods, and book on the working class and negative freedom. Cruz is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at the European Graduate School.
Photo credit: Aman Askarizad