SloPo mini-courses for winter/spring 2025
To participate in SloPo mini-courses for winter/spring 2025, please sign up using this form: LINK TO FORM
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Here is the schedule:
Session 1: Jan 20-30 Irene Torra Mohedano on Paloma Chen
Session 2: Feb 16-25 Jake Marmer on Jerome Rothenberg
Session 3: March 3-10 Kate Colby on Fanny Howe
Session 4: April 21-29: Gabi Ojeda-Sagué on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
2025 DESCRIPTIONS:
Session 1: Jan 20-30 Irene Torra Mohedano on Paloma Chen
Paloma Chen: where are you from and where are you going and where are you from
Paloma Chen (Alicante, Spain, 1997) is a poet and journalist who explores identity and migration with a focus on the Chinese community in Spain. In between two cultures and two languages herself, her poetic work relies on various media as well as performances to create an engaged narrative that succeeds in the interpellation of multiple and diverse readers. In this mini-course we will discuss a selection of her poems, and we will reflect on the relationship between language, identity and power. In addition to discussion in the ModPo forums, this SloPo group will have two Zoom sessions (dates TBD) with Paloma joining us for one of them.
Session 2: Feb 16-25 Jake Marmer on Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg in Memoriam
In this SloPo session, we’ll celebrate the memory of the ground-breaking poet, translator, anthologist, and anthropologist Jerome Rothenberg (1931-2024). We’ll explore the intersection of the ancient and avant-garde, comic and tragic, oral and written, which he inhabited, innovated, and celebrated.
Session 3: March 3-10 Kate Colby on Fanny Howe
A Glance at the Light: Reading Fanny Howe
In a 2013 BOMB interview, American poet Fanny Howe was asked what she hopes her readers will understand from her poetry. She replied, “A glance at the light and its crackling delivery. Contradiction. A longing for paradox. Someone’s brain on alert on the streets…How it felt to be here with Big God and little gods and to stare at them.” In this mini course we will read poems from Howe’s long career in light of her linguistic experimentation, metaphysical rigor, and defiance of coterie and categorization. This SloPo group will meet March 3-10, with one optional Zoom (date and time TBD).
Session 4: April 21-29: Gabi Ojeda-Sagué on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Between Landscape and PhenomenologyIn this mini-course we will dive deeper into the work of the Chinese-American experimental poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, reading across pieces from her lengthy career with particular attention to her landscape representations and her phenomenological poetics. Influenced by the vistas of her New Mexico home and writing with a sharp yet abstract attention to the process of experience, Berssenbrugge’s work details the environments we are situated in and how we observe and understand our own situatedness. We will discuss a curated selection of poems from across Berssenbrugge’s career on discussion boards and in an optional Zoom meeting.
