Jake Marmer

KlezKanada is in less than a month! As I’ve written here, I’m co-hosting North America’s first Jewish Poetry retreat, which will be part of the festival.

Here’s the curriculum for the program!

August 20-26, 2012

Morning sessions facilitated by Adeena Karasick & Jake Marmer will include a combination of lectures, discussions, one-on-one faculty time, and solo writing time.

In the afternoon, poets are invited to attend any of the other courses offered – music, dance and more. Please pay special attention to: Jenny Romaine’s Theater Workshop; Poetry & Music class led by Dan Kahn, Marcelo Moguilevsky & Jake Marmer; Kolya Bordulin’s “Bagegnish mit Yiddisher poezye”, numerous lectures and Yiddish language classes.

Workshops with Adeena and Jake:

Tuesday: What IS a “Jewish Poem”?
This session will focus on what formal qualities or processes play a part in Jewish writing – is it about nomadicism and exile? Is it using overt Jewish thematics? Lexicon? Or is it about the way its written, its structure, form, the way it’s inscribed in nomadicism, exile, perhaps. Is it the humor? The disruptions? The questions? Dialectic? This session will not so much as provide answers but open up the field of the relation of writing to culture.

Wednesday: Poetry of the Talmud / Practice of Darshening
This session will explore various ways that the Talmud is poetry; the intersections between Talmud discourse and poetry, focusing on both form and content and the ways we can use such texts as the Talmud for poetic inspiration. Secondarily, this session will show how cultural ancestry manifests through contemporary semiotic practice.

With Darshening, we will foreground the necessity for continued active interpretation, dwelling on how to be a good writer is to be a good reader and will encourage a continued dialogue with various texts in order to appreciate the infinite possibilities available with every letter, phrase, inscription.

Thursday: Poetry as Prophecy
Through this session, will will focus on various means of prophetic divination through letters. Whether it be looking at Kabbalistic meditations or Gematriatic methodologies, ecstatic writing, automatic writing, or just the profound way texts can become a source of visionary inspiration and cause us to see the world in a new way, through a new lens.

Friday: Defining G-d / Concrete Poetry / Uncreative Writing
This session will look at ways various poets have come to express the Divine; say the unsayable, contain the uncontainable. Thus, through a process of veiling and unveiling, this session will show how a definition is not inscribed in deafening finality, closure but an infinite spiraling of possible expression.
We will also discuss the physicality and materiality of the page. We will explore different forms of expression and investigate ways in which the actual space and material makeup of the letters and other infusions such as collage, graphics, layered or mutated texts not only interrupt but as a means of ever-expansive literary expression.

Finally, we’ll be focus 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”); from that which always already existed.