Field-Poetry with Juliana Spahr
Poetry has a long relationship with the natural world. In this Fieldwork Session, poet Juliana Spahr will elucidate these corollaries by guiding participants in writing next to and out of various data sets about the Marin Headlands: lists of native and invasive plants, lists of weather patterns, histories of the area, etc. Collaboratively, the group will work to shape these writings into something literary through additional prompts and exercises, direct observation, and a short hike. Spahr has called this field-poetry, but what gets written can be any genre, and will resemble a dialogue between all participants, and the environmental and atmospheric surroundings. No prior experience as a writer is required.
About Juliana Spahr
Juliana Spahr is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring. Both Spahr’s critical and scholarly studies, i.e., Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001), and her poetry have shown Spahr’s commitment to fostering a “value of reading” as a communal, democratic, open process. In addition to teaching and writing poetry, Spahr is also an active editor. Spahr received the National Poetry Series Award for her first collection of poetry, Response (1996).