Jake Adam York

Workshop: Leopard Without Spots, or, Postformalist Poetry

2012-04-29T12:41:44Z

This course is all about taking a traditional whole-poem form---like the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina---and using the idea of the form, or an abstraction of it, to generate a poem that works beyond the form. If you'd rather write sonnet-ish than write sonnets or write villanellean rather than write villanelles, this is the place for you. Some brief discussions of traditional whole-poem forms followed by some exercises and plenty of time to talk about possibilities in poems you're writing.

Complete details here.

Workshop: Duets: Writing Poems With Music

2012-04-29T12:40:15Z

This workshop explores a number of ways to ease the drafting of a poem by leaning on, harmonizing with, borrowing from, and playing off a second voice. Participants will be asked to identify a favorite piece of (popular) music, something from the last half-century that includes lyrics, and to bring a CD copy of the song as well as its lyrics to class. We will discuss a number of strategies, based on contemporary poems, before discussing the participants' songs and moving on to a workshop in which we begin to draft and discuss the techniques that will help us raise our finest voices.

Complete information here.

Workshop: Say What You Don't Mean

2012-04-29T12:38:37Z

This class is a workshop-centered attempt to try out some strategies of negation--saying what you mean by saying what you don't mean--and obliquity, including errata poems, that old-time favorite occultatio, enthymemes (poor logic), and some straight-up Opposite Day shenanigans.

Complete information here.

Workshop: The Sonnet and Its Discontents

2012-04-29T12:36:40Z

We've all read and probably memorized a sonnet or two from Shakespeare, and we may even have been asked to write a few. But how to we get in to the sonnet and learn to make more of it than rhymes and love? This workshop begins with a brief exploration of different sonnet forms---Petrarchan, Shakespearean, caudated (20 lines), curtal (9.25 lines [a 3/4 sonnet]), and some 20th century distortions (unrhymed, 13-line, &c)---before turning to work on our own poems that use the sonnet's form to get to the spirit, if not the textbook letter, of "the sonnet."

Complete information here.

Workshop: Poetry Chapbooks and Manuscripts (Two Weekend Intensive) at Lighthouse Writers Workshop

2012-04-29T12:33:48Z

In this workshop, we’ll learn how to germinate new poems from the seeds of our own best work. In the first meeting, we’ll discuss how short collections can be organized, using a few recent chapbooks as examples; then, as a group, we’ll place poems from each participant in one or more organizational schema and quickly brainstorm concepts and frameworks for 6-10 new poems. Between the meetings, each participant will draft two of these new poems, and in the second meeting, the group will workshop participants’ new poems and their chapbook concepts. At the end of the second week, each participant will have two new poems, concepts for a half-dozen more, and a framework for a short manuscript that will supply the impetus for new and self-improving work for months to come.

This two-weekend intensive meets four times: Saturday and Sunday, June 2-3 & June 9-10, from 9:00 AM to Noon.

Complete information here.

Kennesaw State University

2012-03-05T11:58:10Z

I'll be reading and signing books on Thursday, April 19th, at 7pm, at Kennesaw State University, in Social Sciences Building Room 1019. More details as they become available.

Colorado School of Mines

2012-02-02T14:54:14Z

Thursday & Friday: April 5th & 6th, 2012 --- ArtiST (Art in Science and Technology) Competition and Conference

Campus Wide Poetry Reading (Thursday, April 5th)
SC Ballroom E 4.00 - 5.30 PM
In Collaboration with High Grade

Coastal Carolina University, with Natasha Trethewey

2012-02-02T14:40:18Z

On Thursday, March 29th, I'll read with Natasha Trethewey at 4pm at Coastal Carolina University. Details here.

Split This Rock: Panel: White Poets Writing About Race: An Invitation to Conversation

2012-02-02T14:39:39Z

White Poets Writing About Race: An Invitation to Conversation
In his 2007 essay “A Mystifying Silence,” Major Jackson asks why there should be a “dearth of poems written by white poets that address racial issues.” Six white poets who have written about race will make very brief presentations that address not only this problem, but also questions of why and how white poets can and should deal with racial issues, and what aesthetic and ethical complexities they may encounter in doing so. By limiting our presentations to five minutes each, we will save most of the session for group discussion.

Goucher College

2012-02-02T14:30:00Z

Friday, March 23 at 4:30am to 12:00am Batza Room of the Athenaeum 1021 Dulaney Valley Rd, Towson, MD 21286, USA

Poet Jake Adam York will give a reading and talk, entitled, "Re/mix : Blue-Shifting Writing Race; or: An Improvisation on Relation; or: Improvised Relations; or: Relative Improvisations." Along with a sampling of his newest poems, he will share and contextualize them with some remarks and riffs on Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation. York is the author of three books of poems, including his most recent, Persons Unknown, an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2010);as well as a work of literary history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry. A fifth-generation Alabamian, York was raised in and around Gadsden, Alabama, the son of a steel-worker and a history teacher. An associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, he has this year been a Visiting Faculty Fellow at Emory University's James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, working on a book about images and ideas of the Civil Rights Movement in contemporary art, music, and literature, from which this talk is excerpted.

LINK

Blacksmith House Reading with Paul Hostovsky

2012-02-02T14:17:07Z

Monday, March 12th, at 8pm. 56 Brattle St, Cambridge MA. Jake Adam York author of Persons Unknown, reads with Paul Hostovsky, author of the poetry collection Dear Truth.

AWP Panel: In White: White Poets and Race

2012-02-02T14:15:18Z

Saturday, March 3rd, 10:30AM

S128. In White: White Poets and Race

(Tess Taylor, Michelle Boisseau, Martha Collins, Kate Daniels, Jake Adam York)

Continental C, Hilton Chicago, Lobby Level

In his 2007 essay “A Mystifying Silence,” Major Jackson asks why there should be a “dearth of poems written by white poets that address racial issues.” The panelists, white poets who have written about race, will address but move beyond the why question, discussing their own attempts to examine racial issues, as well as aesthetic and ethical complexities they have encountered in doing so. We are aware that the panel may invite controversy and invite questions and comments from the audience.

AWP Panel: A Face to Meet the Faces

2012-02-02T14:13:04Z

Thursday, March 1, 12:NOON

A Face to Meet the Faces: Five Poets on Persona, Empathy, and Race

(Stacey Lynn Brown, Eduardo C. Corral, Cornelius Eady, Patricia Smith, Jake Adam York)

Waldorf, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor

Persona, the act of writing beyond one’s own immediate perspective or experience, is arguably one of the strongest mechanisms for empathy—and understanding—that exists for a poet. Join the co-editor and four contributing poets from A Face to Meet the Faces, the first anthology of contemporary persona poetry, for a roundtable discussion on the freedoms, limitations, and possibilities inherent in using persona as a tool to excavate the complexities and constructs of race.

Lovett School Writer in Residence

2012-02-02T14:12:13Z

University of West Georgia

2011-10-31T21:12:38Z

I'll be reading on Tuesday, November 8th, at the University of West Georgia. 7:30pm in the Ingram Library. Full details are here.