Stop Making Sense!

STOP MAKING SENSE!
You don't need to write about something to write a poem. As the French poet Stèphane Mallarmé once said, poems are written with words, not ideas. This workshop uses Mallarmé's insight as its guiding principle, so participants can embark on a productive literary voyage distinct from that of prose. This workshop emphasizes lyricism and the spirit of play and an openness to technique distinct from narrative (think jazz). Participants will, for example, explore the sound of a word or phrase, and what this might suggest, without regard to meaning. Meaning will be arrived at rather than be predetermined. We will create nonsense that actually makes sense!

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Manila-born Luis H. Francia is a poet, nonfiction writer, and playwright. His latest volume of poetry is Tattered Boat, released in 2014. Previous collections include The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems, Museum of Absences, and The Beauty of Ghosts. His poems have been translated into several languages. He has read at numerous literary festivals and most recently at the XI International Festival of Poetry (2015) held annually in Granada, Nicaragua. A collection of his most recent nonfiction, RE: Recollections, Reviews, Reflections, was released the summer of 2015. In 2002, he won both the PEN Open Book and the Asian American Writers literary awards. He is in the Library of America’s Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. His full-length play, The Strange Case of Citizen de la Cruz, had its world premiere in San Francisco in 2012. He teaches at New York University and Hunter College. He has also taught at the City University of Hong Kong and has conducted workshops at, among other places, the St. Marks Poetry Project, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Curare in Mexico City, and St. Louis University in Baguio City.