Thalia Comedy
Turn to Thalia Comedy, the poem/story entitled “Memory” (pg 149) of the anonymous woman watching film. Now write, describe a memory of watching a film in a theatre, on your lap top, phone, or television. Describe this memory in the style of Cha without punctuation in the third person (you, she, he).

Record
Record an excerpt from Thalia Comedy (30 sections) and an excerpt of your piece about memory of watching a film (30 seconds to 1 minute)

Video
Take 10 – 15 seconds of video of an
1) object
2) body part – movement
3) nature
Feel free to go outside, in the halls, the classroom.

Poetry
Consider Cha’s writing of women figures in her book. Chose one to meditate on. Read it over, and read aloud and record. (30 seconds to 1 minute)

Now, call on a woman figure in your life. Write a part of her story as a letter to her, describe her speaking. In the style of Cha, no punctuation and third person, utilizing the you. (page 80) What does she say, how does she say it? Describe. Experiment.

If you have time, and feel comfortable. Read aloud and record.

Photography
Take a photo that aligns with this poetry of this woman in your life.

Unconference Activity

Prompt:
Choose two themes/questions/insights you have on Sky Hopinka’s workin relation to the course discussion. Create organic group.

Creative Gesture

Prompt:
Discuss the questions you’ve raised. Now, working with your partner, create a creative writing prompt in response to Sky Hopinka’s films and/or writing. Consider the themes, dimensions, feelings, and textures brought up in class. Type the prompt and send or type on google doc. Discussion: Why did you chose to create this prompt? Please provide rational.

Result: Asma and Chen

Choose one example of a “secondary text (images, footnotes, concrete poems, video links, etc.)” from the book and create a creative writing piece that speaks to how “main text” and “secondary text” are defined and the interaction between them.

You could consider:

1. Translate the chosen “text” into another form of expression (e.g. from footnote to concrete poem, from video links to video transcript) that fits with Sky Hopinka’s writing and films
2. Rewrite a section of your choice into the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha/Claudia Rankine’s style and consider where (if anywhere) (part of) of it belongs in Cha/Rankine’s works.

How does the creative writing process inform your understanding of the main/secondary texts and the form of a book in general?

Result: Mary and Kelsey

Anti-Objects, Or Space Without Path Or Boundary by Sky Hopinka is a rumination on the prevalence of the language Chinuk wawa as descriptors of geography and to think of these images of signs and maps beyond their objecthood–as anti-objects. Think of a photograph or image that calcifies something important to your identity and describe it.

Result: Milo and Jess

Write about a location that makes you feel closer to a part of your identity from which you sometimes feel alienated. You might take inspiration from Dislocation Blues or other films by Sky Hopinka.

We were pleased to have poet Nick Montfort visit us from MIT to Harvard for our unit on electronic literature. We covered his work–such as The Truest, The Future, and Exploratory Programming for the Arts & Humanities–which spans across multiple genres and platforms, and ended with a poetic lab led by Mindy Seu on chatbots, and the in person visit by Nick. Thank you to Nick for an inspiring visit, and to metaLab at Harvard for their support on this gathering!

Throughout the semester we engaged with questions on contemporary poetry through the excellent collection the poem is you by poet and scholar Stephanie Burt, and her article “Nearly Baroque.”  We were honored and delighted with a special guest visit by Stephanie as a poetic lab after we read “Nearly Baroque”, and discussed Nearly Baroque poetry, writing poetry, and trans politics among other topics. We also enjoyed Nearly Baroque cupcakes made for the occasion.

A Tale of Love (1995)

Portraying the Vietnamese immigrant experience through Kieu, A TALE OF LOVE follows the quest of a woman in love with ‘Love’. The film is loosely inspired by THE TALE OF KIEU, the Vietnamese national poem of love which Vietnamese people see as a mythical biography of their ‘motherland,’ marked by internal turbulence and foreign domination. A free-lance writer, Kieu also works as a model for a photographer who idealizes the headless female body and who captures Kieu sheathed by transparent veils. Voyeurism runs through the history of love narratives and voyeurism is here one of the threads that structures the ‘narrative’ of the film. Exposing the fiction of love in love stories and the process of consumption, A TALE OF LOVE marginalizes traditional narrative conventions and opens up a denaturalized space of acting where performed reality, memory and dream constantly pass into one another. Sublimely beautiful to watch, A TALE OF LOVE eloquently evokes an understanding of the allusive and powerful connections between love, sensuality, voyeurism and identity.

Definition & Boundaries of Poetry/Cinema:

Sound – sound components, what we hear. Music, voiceover, effects

Editing – Is the sequencing of the shots in the film? Editors decide on the order and the duration of shots, the visual transitions from scene to scene, and visual effects

Mise En Scene – Acting, Costumes, Set Design
Draw from Kittler, Gunning, and Minh-ha

Script Reading – What is the literary design of the film? Story ideas and the script. Is there narrative/poetry?

Jess Erion

“Such an unlikely site of death. But every winter, that’s what it is. All white, gray, brown, coming up out of the pavement. I wonder about the suffering of the students. We never get to hear them, crying. Where do they go to cry? The tears come in public, on trains, while walking. When you cry in the open, it’s as if it didn’t happen at all. There are no averted eyes, because they didn’t see you in the first place. Closed hearts, sullen mouths bleed contempt. Blood on the snow. Or is that blood? No matter. One day the snow will melt.”

Milo Davidson

The identity of the place is closely tied with the color of its buildings. I see a lot of burgundy, I often get lost in Harvard Yard. Sometimes, I wish strangers would hold hands. What if we lived in a world where everything could only be opened using three hands. Three is the number of red, of luck, much like the red-brick of this place. We are indistinguishable from our histories and the steps that trod before us. I passed the strangers! A stranger wearing red, as red as the three hounds. Why does this color dog me? Because I cannot distinguish it from green.

Chen Xiaocheng

I, Pensive—an innateness
of endless thought,
difficult to suppress.
Air bubbles up, life bubbles up,
from under the lazy water
the static of the television
when I held my hand to the
glass. I almost felt something.
Combination1 feels like static on the
screen,
an endless fizzing desperation.
this must be what numbness feels like.
But numbness was never really a problem, was it?
Change the Channel.
I listened, and did nothing.

Mary Neguse

there is kinship in shared city cadences
but city belongs to the king
the king. Yes, the king, who has died
leaving the city without a monarch.
We will be our own stately presence in the throne room.
I want to live with a crown and medieval fantasies. I want to read.
I turn off the screen and the fantasy disappears.
there is no king, no crown – just a city
with aching empty cadences.
I want to live inside its emptiness.

For Citizen, we completed two special poetic labs. One on tangible media and “animating” Citizen by LED lights, as well as discussion. In addition to the workshop, we spoke via Skype with scholar and feminist Alex Juhasz and poet Chet’la Sabree who conducted a workshop at Claudia’s home in New Haven for a special workshop on video, poetry, and race with filmmaker John Lucas, in conversation with Alex’s project “10 Tries, 100 Poems blog.”