CalArts MFA Creative Writing Program Symposium Zoom Panel
You are invited to attend the first in a series of Zoom events for the socially distanced version of Discrepant Engagement: A Symposium of Interdisciplinary Writing. The symposium's title is in homage to Nathaniel Mackey's seminal, critical text on African Diasporic cross-cultural practice, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing, and centers on student-driven discourse inspired by the MFA Creative Writing Program's four concentrations: Image + Text, Writing+Performativity, Documentary Strategies, and Writing + Its Publics. We invite you to think alongside these brilliant, interdisciplinary text-artists!
Please join us this Friday, May 1, 6pm PST, for Resonance/Instability/Witness, featuring MFA CWP students Steph Smith, Christine Imperial, Simone Zapata, Sarah Yanni and Shirley Kim-Ryu!
We'll be talking about the "I", in all its permutations: Through the subjectivity of an immigrant daughter, Sarah Sophia Yanni will explore how poetry can be a pathway to sense-making within forms of chaos. Writing within/through the hyphenated identity of a Filipino-American, Christine Imperial will investigate both the promise and grief of ambivalence for the post-colonial poet. In its correspondence between objects, relationships, and time, Simone Zapata will discuss the colon and its shift away from equivalence and towards resemblance. Steph Smith will present a nascent theory of the fourth person which explores the strategic destabilization of the subject position within the text. SJ Kim-Ryu will address post-colonial queerness as the final process of liberation for all.
Join us on Zoom!
Meeting ID: 962-2186-3362
And stay tuned for
DanceNotes: A collaborative exchange of movement, interpretation, notational writing between dancers and writers, featuring CalArts Creative Writing Program alumnx Patricia Sazani, Sam Creeley and Yuxin Zhao, whose DanceNotes publication project informs the work. The process: A dancer will film a 2-3 minute improvised solo, and send the footage to a notater. The notater will watch the footage and notate (describe in any of a number of various modes) the dancer's movements, recording their notation as an audio file. The notater will send the audio file to another dancer, who will take the notater's audio as a set of instructions and respond live with movement. They will send a recording of this response to the next notater...and so on.The inter- and transdisciplinary promise manifests and emerges through each iteration, physical distance bridged by psychic reach and interpretation, generating new vocabularies for both textual, sensual and embodied experience, in the form of video, audio, a reading by Yuxin Zhao from her DanceNotes chapbook, and poetic process texts and theoretical framings from Sam Creeley and Patricia Sazani.
Occult Poetics: This sound, documentation and performance study by Jen D'Mello and Shirly Ryu-Kim contributes to a larger conversation around occult poetics, (soma)tic poetics, queer studies, music-fiction and “writing as symphony.” This project is born out of an interest in the Derridian notion of ‘brissure’/the hinge: the space between words that both differentiates them from one another, and, when read together, allows for new openings and meaning making. Following non-linear/unpredictable neurological paths in everyday lives, such as those of the migratory patterns of blue whales, can encourage us to conjure sensual, skeptical and imaginative experiences that enable us to think and feel our way into wildness. For this particular piece, D'Mello and Ryu-Kim incite wildness by way of listening to whale songs and conjuring our abilities to sense sounds called “ultrasonics”—sounds that are inaudible to the human ear, referring to both higher and lower frequencies, such as seismic sounds generated by earthquakes. In an attempt to improvise with ultrasonics sung by whales, they will use an analog touch plate feedback synthesizer in various ways, such as triggering the processing tones by breathing on the plates (i.e. using the moisture content of breath to partially sculpt sounds). This will also serve as a bridge with which to generate a membranous syntax that will inform our writing processes and enable us to invoke a socio-ecological language.
The Archive on African Time
A podcast dialogue between Maryam Kazeem (MFA 2020) and Zina Saro-Wiwa. Maryam and Zina will have a conversation about 'African time' as an alternative temporality that not only creates but demands new ways of negotiating with archives. Zina Saro-Wiwa is an artist working primarily with video but also photography, sculpture, sound, and food. She lives and works in Los Angeles as well as running a practise in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria where she founded the contemporary art gallery Boys’ Quarters Project Space for which she regularly curates. Saro-Wiwa is one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Global Thinkers of 2016 recognized for her work in the Niger Delta. She was Artist-in-Residence at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn 2016-2017 and in April 2017 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Art.