Cistulli, Carson

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Project 1: Games, Chance and Writing
This course is aimed at exploring the role of chance and game-playing in writing. We will use many exercises invented and improved by poetry's most playful writers, including early examples from the Dadaist and Surrealist groups, and, more recently, poets in teh Flarf movement--as well as individual poets like Kenneth Koch and Matthew Rohrer. Exercises will include: Playing Surrealist games such as Exquisite Corpse and Question-and-Answer; the use of "cut-up" techniques; the creation and completion of students' own Mad Libs; and, finally, the students' invention of their own games.
This week will help to introduce and explore several concepts for students, including the possibility for collective, as opposed to individual, authorship.

Project 2: Poetry Ideas
This course takes as its lead Kenneth Koch's book Wishes, Lies and Dreams, in which he  talks about using "Poetry Ideas" as entrance points into students' writing. Koch, in working with students at PS 61 in New York, took those things which might be most relevant to the students' own lives (wishes they had; lies they told or might tell) and invited them to write poems that dealt with such topics--that is, to actually write poems that begin I wish and I told and I dreamed and so on. As such, students engage with poems on a very honest level, without much of the artifice that certain poetry textbooks might in encourage in students of the same age.

This workshop will help students see poetry as something potentially very relevant and immediate to their lives, and are invited to get beyond merely writing about certain topics and instead to use certain ideas as starting points for more expansive work.

Carson Cistulli is the author of the poetry collection Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated, and two chapbook-sized works--Assorted Fictions, and, as editor, The Prostituesdays Anthology, a collection of writing by students at Four Rivers Charter Public School in Greenfield, Massachusetts. He earned his MFA at the UMass-Amherst MFA Program, and has taught many semesters of Experimental Writing and College Writing at UMass and Imaginative Writing at Four Rivers Charter Public School.