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Quiet as Creative Force: dismantling the language of writer's block and the materiality of composition
a lecture & writing workshop w/Ocean Vuong

Saturday, February 21, 2015
6-8 p.m.
Cost: $25
Registration is closed

This lecture and workshop aims to examine the notion of “writer’s block” as a construct stemming from capitalistic anxieties with production—and how arbitrary expectations “to produce” can cause shame, guilt, and self-deficiencies that stunt and shuns the creative mind. We will seek and investigate new and more forgiving modes of composition found in the rich and potent power of elongated listening and meditation on language. Ultimately, we will redefine for ourselves a more idiosyncratic definition of “work” that resists quantification and materiality, a bridge where creativity and daily living become mutually nourishing forces. Books and authors discussed will include Homer, Dante, Whitman, Dickinson, Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop, Ruth Stone, Li-Young Lee, as well as eastern philosophies and aesthetics from Basho, Li Bai, Du Fu, Lao Tzu, the I Ching, and the Tao Te Ching.

Teacher Bio:

Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2016. A 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, he has received honors from Kundiman, Poets House, The Civitella Ranieri Foundation (Italy), The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and a 2014 Pushcart Prize. His poems appear in or are forthcoming in Poetry, The Nation, Boston Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Guernica, TriQuarterly The New Yorker, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. He lives in Queens, NY. (www.oceanvuong.com)

 

Ocean Vuong will be reading his work for the Edge Reading Series at Casa Libre on February 18
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