24Pearlstreet Workshops

Nomi Stone Anthro-Poetics: Living, Seeing, and Wonder Poetry May 7 to May 11, 2018 Tuition: $500 Class Size: 12 Session: spring Level: 1 week asynchronous workshop

We will “sing the [world] electric” through experiments in anthro-poetics. Our goal: to expand both our seeing and writing practices, by estranging the familiar and deestranging the hitherto unknown. We will adventure together into wonder by bringing brief excerpts of philosophical texts in conversation with ethnographic explorations in the world. Together we will extend your anthropological imagination and find the right craft tools to enact moments of seeing the world new. Read about sound vibrating through the body, and then create a poem by generating a soundscape in a neighborhood you’ve never explored before. Read about the secret life of objects, then wander through an outdoor market: poem-trace your oranges back to the grove, while considering a syntax for their migratory arc. This intensive class brings together the tools of anthropology (both theoretical and ethnographic) and of poetry (in particular sonics and syntax) to create an explosion. You’ll read widely: Marx on commodities and Kant on the sublime; Jim Longenbach on the line and Ellen Voigt on syntax; and poems, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Yusuf Komunyakaa to Jorie Graham. At the end of the week, each student will meet with the instructor over Skype, to discuss their work and their potential directions for the future. This class is best suited to a more advanced student, with prior workshop experience.

Biography

Nomi Stone’s second collection of poems, Kill Class is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2019. She is also the author of the poetry collection Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton University. Poems appear recently or will soon in The New Republic, The New England Review, Bettering American Poetry 2017, The Best American Poetry 2016, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia, an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College, and Masters in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford, and she recently won the UC Press Atelier competition for her ethnographic manuscript in progress, Human Technologies and the Making of American War.