“A Dollar's Worth of Blood, Please”: Anti-Capitalist Poets—A Multi-Session Workshop with Stacy Szymaszek

In this workshop we will devote half of our time talking about the work of leftist and proletariat poets who were writing in the United States during the Great Depression and further into the 1930s. We’ll also read some of Mark Nowak’s critical work on how lineage construction obscured certain “social poets.” We will devote the other half to reading contemporary poets whose work is developing a field of anti-racial capitalist (anti-neoliberal, anti-colonial . . .) poetry in the US and read some of Chris Nealon’s critical work on poetry in late-late capitalism. The workshop will be reading-heavy (individually outside of class) from a PDF I will provide, with gathering time spent on discussion. I will give writing prompts related to the reading but there will be no critique of work. At the end of the workshop everyone will be invited to submit a poem for a pamphlet that will be printed and shared.

Writers we will read include Kenneth Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Charles Reznikoff, Lorine Niedecker, John Wheelwright, Ernesto Cardenal, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka, Claudia Rankine, Wendy Rose, Mark Nowak, Chris Nealon, Kevin Davies, Ted Rees, Jasmine Gibson, and D.S. Marriott. 

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of the books A Year From Today (Nightboat Books, 2018); Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017; hart island (Nightboat Books, 2015); Hyperglossia (Litmus Press, 2009); and Emptied of All Ships (Litmus Press, 2005). Her sixth book, Famous Hermits, will be published in 2021. She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry. She was the Hugo Visiting Writer at the University of Montana–Missoula in 2018–19, Poet-in-Resident at Brown University, and Visiting Poet for the Fire Island Artist Residency. Szymaszek was the director of The Poetry Project from 2007–18, and now lives in Tucson, AZ, where she does freelance work for the field of poetry. Learn more at stacyszymaszek.org.