The Freedomways Workshop

Catalog description

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was founded by Wilbur Schramm in 1936. Schramm went on to a many-faceted career, which included cowriting a postwar manual for the army called The Nature of Psychological Warfare. He saw the writing workshop as a way to train “the kind of young persons who can become the kind of writers we need” in a future framed by the dominance of the United States. This course will look for the traces of this project of domination and will ask what might happen for writers when the domination is seen from the point of view of the dominated and the “free” from the point of view of the prison. Why are censorship and incarceration such central facts of what it means to be a poet elsewhere? Why has that not been true in the United States? How does Archibald MacLeish’s “a poem should not mean but be” or T. S. Eliot’s “like a patient etherized upon a table” sound beside Adam Wazyk’s “how many times must one wake you up before you recognize your epoch?” or Suzanne Césaire’s use of surrealism as a tool to recover stolen power “purified of colonial stupidities”? What is real freedom? What are its ways? How is the poetry that comes from it? Our class text will be an anthology and workbook handed out on our first day, The Most Beautiful Sea: Poems & Pathways Toward Poems, including the work of Nas, Elizabeth Bishop, Refaat Alareer, Nâzım Hikmet, Marie Howe, Joshua Bennett, Lucille Clifton, Nipsey Hussle, Mahmoud Darwish, Dionne Brand, and the greatest of all poets: Anonymous. Students will be asked to complete in-class writing exercises, write letters with a partner, bring drafts to conference, and make a chapbook. In the words of Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet, we will look together for “the most beautiful sea” that “hasn’t been crossed yet," also known as “the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you / I haven’t said yet.” Poetry Workshop: Kitchen Sink Poetics