Jake Marmer

We’re doing it again – North’s America’s first Jewish poetry retreat – a week-long poetry gathering as part of the KlezKanada Festival, Aug 19-25. I’m honored to be collaborating with fabulous Adeena Karasick on this – and KlezKanada is one of hippest music/culture festivals out there, now in its 18th year!

There’re some scholarships available for folks under 35 (or under 35 in spirit) – deadline May 1st.

Here’s all the info –

KlezKanada’s Poetry Retreat (Three Millennia of Poetic subversion)

August 19-25, 2013

Seminars and Master Classes will be led by Minister of Semiotic Turbulence, Canadian poet and professor Adeena Karasick, and Chief of the Discordant Talmudic Crisis, poet and performer Jake Marmer. Sessions will include a combination of lectures, discussions, one-on-one faculty time, and solo writing time. A portion of each morning will focus on creating a polyvocal performance that will be showcased at the end of the week.

Workshops with Adeena and Jake:

Tuesday: Can Poems Be Jewish? Identity, Rituals, Rebellions and Vernaculars
This session will focus on what formal qualities or processes play a part in Jewish writing –Is it using overt Jewish themes? Its lexicon? Or is it about the way its written, its structure, form; its humor? The disruptions? The questions? Dialectics? Its obsessions? Over-thinking? The Music? This session will not so much as provide answers but open up the field of relations between writing and culture. Participants will be urged to write through the sonic environment of KlezKanada; and compose in immediate reaction to the music, viscerally experiencing the direct relationship of music and writing.

Wednesday: Found poetry: Poetics of Klezmer – Remixing your World
Focusing on how Conceptual Writing is a practice not so much of creation but re-formation, formed not ex-nihilo (out of nothing), but yesh m’yesh (“something from something”), we will traverse the campground – and our own minds – collecting scraps of conversations, rhythms, sounds as the landscape of new, circuitous meaning, graphically layered and intralingual text as a means of ever-expansive literary expression. We will practice spontaneous poetics and Jack Kerouac’s technique of “sketching”.

Thursday: Dialog & Rants: Talmudic and Hermeneutic Techniques
Focusing on both form and content, we will look at some of the ways we can use such texts as the Talmud for poetic inspiration. You want arguments? You want multiple people speaking from within a single poem? Laws referring to ethereal matters that have never existed, and loopholes created out of them? It’s all there for you. Secondarily, this session will show how cultural ancestry manifests through contemporary semiotic practice. With Darshening, we will focus on the necessity for continued active interpretation; the glee of compulsive thinking; highlighting that to be a good writer is to be a wild reader; and will encourage a continued dialogue with various texts in order to appreciate the infinite possibilities available with every letter, phrase, textured inscription.

Friday: Transcendence and Transience: Poetry as Spiritual Experience
Many poets – religiously observant or profoundly skeptical or self-proclaimed heretical – will tell you that writing is their chief access to what can loosely be termed as “spiritual experience”. Something about writing, the process itself that engenders the experience; a feeling of trance comes on; words that get unearthed feel as if not belonging to us, but something larger, unnamable. We will explore this experience, and capitalize on it, from various angles, focusing, among other things on various means of prophetic divination through letters, Kabbalistic meditations or Gematriatic methodologies, shamanistic technologies of the sacred, ecstatic writing, automatic writing, Oulippean techniques of seeking new structures and patterns — the profound way texts can become a source of visionary inspiration and cause us to see the world in a new way. Using both ancestral techniques of transposition, recombination, cut-ups and mash-ups intersection and juxtaposition, this session is dedicated to getting ourselves out of our own rutted ways of thinking and re-creating the world through language.

Throughout the week, participants will have the opportunity to engage in both a solo and multi-vocal performance, which we will prepare for during the Festival. Time in each session will be devoted to oral-based performance techniques. Additionally, workshop participants will be able to make their own chapbook from the work created over the week. Supplies will be provided.