Writing in the Subjunctive Mood: Poetry

Poetry and Writing in the Black Archive is a practicum in poetics, and a reading and writing workshop inviting us to turn our attention to the construction of memory into literary art that speaks to contemporary Black life. Despite myriad and ongoing attempts of erasure, Black life and creativity can be discerned through the archival record, physical artefacts and images, and even our bodies’ gestures and sustenance.

We will consider poetic methods for reconstituting the paths that led us to our current situations, predicaments and imaginaries. In the practicum, we will read diverse archival material—scrutinizing, sifting and transforming the worlds we recognize, the worlds we believe are silenced, and evidence of worlds that need our words to begin to take shape.

We will write work that considers a new poetics of the “archive,” studying methods for making literary texts pay productive attention to the partially recorded incident, emotion, image and music.

Our reading and writing will focus discussion on using literary and aesthetic techniques as a means to listen or “interview” the gaps in the archival record and to write against the aporia and expand the footnote and passing reference. One of the several consequences of our writing experiments, based on “what if” and “as if,” is to teach us to re-see, and look critically at received knowledge.