WordSpoke Festival: Radical Poetics, NYC, 19 Apr, 2012
WordSpoke Poetry Festival
Reading & Writing New Jewish Poetry Workshop
Sunday, Apr 29 at 11:00 AM
Workshop led by Adeena Karasick & Jake Marmer
The Sixth Street Community Synagogue
325 E. Sixth Street
New York, NY 10003
Tel: 212.473.3665
This summer, KlezKanada festival will be piloting the world's first Jewish poetry retreat, co-hosted by Adeena Karasick and Jake Marmer. Join them for the preview of the upcoming attractions, a sample workshop session.
A few words about methodology and the upcoming retreat:
Poetry’s greatest moments have often been measured by its proximity to music. And so, this year, KlezKanada – legendary festival of Jewish music and culture – is inviting poets world-wide to join the festivities at a week-long writing retreat. Two daily workshop sessions will explore the poetic tradition and anti-tradition across the three millennia of Jewish discourse, with a special focus on the avant-garde and otherwise contemporary work. We’ll look at the ecstatic tradition of poetry-prophecy; Talmud and its dialectic-semiotic heritage; practice of Darshening; Uncreative Writing; Kabbalistic language experiments; Concrete Poetry; Jazz/Klezmer Poetry; Yiddish voices; Modernists – and much more. There will be one-on-one time with the faculty and encounters with internationally celebrated poets, musicians, artists, and academics. Poets will be encouraged to draw inspiration from the numerous concerts, and to collaborate with musicians, dancers, painters and other participating artists, to attend lectures, Yiddish classes, sing, dance, celebrate. Held in the beautiful mountain settings in the heart of the Canadian Laurentians
About the poets:
Adeena Karasick is an internationally acclaimed and award winning poet, media-artist and author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory, most recently, Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks 2009) and The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004 as well as 4 videopoems regularly showcased at Film Festivals world wide. All her work is marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges linguistic habits and normative modes of meaning production. Engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, it is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries. Her writing has been described as "electricity in language" (Nicole Brossard), "plural, cascading, exuberant in its cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory" (Charles Bernstein) "a tour de force of linguistic doublespeak" (Globe and Mail) and "opens up the possibilities of reading" (Vancouver Courier). She is Professor of Global Literature at St. John’s University in New York. This Poem is forthcoming Fall 2012.
Jake Marmer is a poet, performer, and literary critic. His first collection of poems, "Jazz Talmud" was published by the Sheep Meadow Press. It was endorsed by Jerome Rothenberg as "triumph of the Fancy in full flight, comic & serious by turns." He's written for the Forward and Tablet magazines, and performed widely in New York and Jerusalem. Performance videos, latest updates and the schedule of upcoming gigs can be found at http://jakemarmer.wordpress.com.
Cover: $5
More info: sixthstreetsynagogue.org/special-events