Événement

STOP MAKING SENSE! with Luis H. Francia, New York Writers Workshop

Saturday, December 8, 2018
2:00-5:00 pm
$55.00

You dont need to write about something in order to write a poem. As the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé once said, poems are written with words, not ideas.

Taking its title from a Talking Heads song, my workshop uses Mallarmés insight as its guiding principle, so the participant can embark on a productive literary voyage distinct from that of prose. Here we emphasize lyricism and the spirit of play, and an openness to technique distinct from narrative. (Think jazz.) Workshoppers 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 non-sense that actually makes sense!

BIO:
Included in numerous anthologies, Luis H. Francia has had five poetry books published, including Tattered Boat (2014), The Beauty of Ghosts (2010), and Museum of Absences (2005). He is a Palanca Prize winner in poetry, the prestigious literary awards body in Manila. In 2002, he won both New Yorks PEN Open Book and the Asian American Writers literary awards for his memoir, Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago. In 2016, his RE: Reviews, Recollections, Reflections (2015), was awarded Manilas National Book Award for Best Essays in English. He is included in the Library of Americas Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. He has taught at the City University of Hong Kong, Ateneo de Manila University, Yale, and the Iowa Writers Summer Workshop. A member of the New York Writers Workshop, he is on faculty at New York University and at Hunter College. He and his wife, the art historian Midori Yamamura, live in Queens, New York.