“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 reading and discussing the work of leftist and proletariat poets who were writing in the United States during the Great Depression. As a framework for the discussion, I'll provide excerpts from Mark Nowak’s critical work on how lineage construction obscured certain “social poets” of that era. We will devote the other half of our time to reading contemporary poets whose work is developing a field of anti-racial capitalist (anti-neoliberal, anti-colonial...) poetry in the US. The workshop will focus on group reading (PDFs provided) and 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 to be included in a pamphlet that will be printed by Woodland Pattern.

Writers we will read include Kenneth Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Lorine Niedecker (New Goose), John Wheelwright, George Oppen (Discrete Series), Laura Riding Jackson, Minnie Bruce Pratt (Inside the Money Machine), Chrystos (Not Vanishing), June Jordan, Amiri Baraka, 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.