Reading & Writing Poetry: Experiments in Multimedia
Course Description
Summary
“When I combine imagery and text, I'm really just trying to surprise myself,” writes poet Diane Khoi Nguyen. In fact, there are many pathways to surprise when we start to experiment with multimedia. Certainly the result must have been surprising when the late John Giorno, in 1968, developed the phone-based, poetry performance project, Dial-a-Poem. And perhaps Lillian Yvonne Bertram was surprised by the results of her computational experimentation in Travesty Generator, a collection emanating from the legacy of digital poetry, a vast world in its own right incorporating coding, sound, textscapes, hyperlinks, and of course, poetry generators.
While there are some who feel that poetry has suffered in an age of multimedia, I propose that lyric––and the written word more generally––is invigorated by its interactions with other fields of exploration. In this workshop, students will be encouraged to explore far beyond poetry on the page and to delve into performance, computation, visual media, and group interaction.
Learning Outcomes
- Developing the skills of giving and receiving peer feedback
- Comfort with new modalities of poetry writing
- Familiarity with contemporary multimedia poetry
Prerequisites
Interested students should send a 5-10 pages of ideally multimedia poetry. If the work sample doesn't contain multimedia, then include a brief paragraph outlining your desire to take the workshop.
Please contact the faculty member : anduplan@bennington.edu
Corequisites
4000-level literature students are expected to attend Literature Evenings.