Biobibliography
Born and raised in the San Francisco bay area, Montreal based writer and visual artist Yedda Morrison�s books include: The Marriage of the Well Built Head (Double Lucy Press, 1998) Shed (A + Bend Press, 2000) and Crop (Kelsey Street Press, 2003). Recent work has been published in the Bay Poetics Anthology (Faux Press, 2006) and in Co (collaborations with poet Bruce Andrews, Roof Books, 2006). Her photographs have been exhibited at New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure, Artisans Gallery and Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery among others. From 1998-2003 she edited Tripwire: a Journal of Experimental Poetics and Visual Arts and served on the Board of Directors at Small Press Traffic for many years. She has taught poetry in numerous institutions including Central City Hospitality House (an art center for homeless adults and youth in San Francisco�s Tenderloin district), and in the California prison system. A multi-media project entitled Girl Scout Nation is forthcoming.
Workshop Description
Soft Spots, Overcoming Linguistic Complacency
In our shared occupation of the earth, lexicons and oxygen, language defines us and in so doing betrays. It is in this betrayal that I find energy, comfort� how otherwise to understand our own complicity, linguistic and otherwise. If language normalizes (makes sense), has its own set of fiercely guarded privileges, finds its use value in meaning, what then is the role of the writer, she who balks at being written, she who presumes to write.
Any serious mud wrestle with language does begin to open one to its slippage, the histories encoded/erased therein, its present and potential power as articulated by, through and for us. How one proceeds in this partnership with words is the intoxication of experimental writing. What new forms can innovation engender, what habits (of the mind, the state) can it disrupt? If, within the poem, we begin to question the measure of meaning itself, if we approach meaning making as (among other things) a necessary convention that has as its mandate the guarding of the status quo, then we might ask ourselves as workers with our hands in the base materials of cultural production, how do we proceed? What, in our historical moment, constitutes a relevant poetics? What conceptual frames might articulate our multiplying now?
In this workshop we will approach each other�s work with an eye to innovation and irreverence, to how these impulses relate to form, to desire, to efficacy. We will approach the poem as an intimacy compiled for use not passive consumption, a collaborative site of sociopolitical negotiation. We will challenge ourselves to use language, before, or even as, language uses us. To this end we will track linguistic transgressions, mine grammar for its subversive potential, encourage writing that attempts to transcends its own formal and aesthetic limits. We will support each other in un-writing our poems if necessary, and we will ask, what then is the responsibility that comes with this undoing� the harder, more humbling work� the reshaping, the re-imagining, the re-meaning of our tongues.
