Poetry Workshop with Litmus Press
Join us for a special poetry workshop featuring the Litmus Press Teaching Guide on Aja Couchois Duncan, in partnership with the Poulin Project of Art Resources Transfer (A.R.T.). Centered around Duncan’s powerful works Vestigial and Restless Continent, this generative writing workshop will explore feminist poetic experimentation, through offering rich discussion, creative writing activities, and insights into Duncan's body of work.
Participants will be led through their own experiments in writing and discussing poetry. Open to everyone, including writers, readers, educators, and any aspiring poets alike, this event will spark new critical conversations and inspire fresh approaches to experimental poetry. The workshop will feature a brief personal pre-recorded video message from featured poet Aja Couchois Duncan.
The first 13 attendees will receive free giveaway copies of Restless Continent and Vestigial.
Lush with elemental imagery, Aja Couchois Duncan’s Restless Continent communes with a North America that speaks elegiac, celebratory, and melancholic histories human and geological. In this collection, the body of that land and those histories fuses with the body of Duncan’s language, the body of memory, and the physical body. Intertwining English with Ojibwe, this debut collection of poems ominously hails and holds us in its ethereal sound, bearing sharp witness to the ruptures perpetuated by the violences of humanity—bodies and lands colonizing and colonized, naming and othering, stamping life into disappearance—while inviting us to forge with Duncan the mythologies that suffuse her poems with crystalline grace and gratitude.
Vestigial (from the Latin vestigium, meaning “footprint”) tracks a poetic narrative across multiple chronologies and scales—from the personal to the geologic. Following her debut collection Restless Continent (Litmus Press, 2016), Aja Couchois Duncan continues to investigate ecology and heritage as a story of entangled becoming, synchronizing movements of deep time with the transient substance of touch.
PARTICIPANTS
a.Monti is a cross-disciplinary poet. Their projects span translation, radio, publishing, collaboration, performance, research and pedagogy. Monti edits the biannual pamphlet Womanwood (Cutt Press) and is an Associate Editor at Litmus Press. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Pratt Institute and have facilitated seminars and workshops on experimental sound, contemporary poetry, and writing for/from performance. Their work has been presented across the U.S., U.K., and Europe, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art London, and the Austrian Cultural Forum. They are working in New York City and Berlin but were born in an elevator in Rome, going up to the third floor. https://amonti.net
E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Hell Figures (Nightboat Books, 2016), portrait of a lesser subject (Elis Press, 2015), Helen: A Fugue (Belladonna Elder Series #1, 2008), Some Clear Souvenir (O Books, 2006), and music or forgetting (O Books, 2001). With Isabelle Garron, she is the translator of way by Leslie Scalapino into French (Éditions Corti 2020). Her poetry, essays and visual art have also appeared in a wide range of collections and publications, including BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing, edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris (Wesleyan). Grinnell’s poetry has been translated into French, Serbian, Polish, and Portuguese. She has taught creative writing at Pratt Institute, Brown University, and in the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and is the Founding Editor and Executive & Artistic Director of Litmus Press.
VIRTUAL
Aja Couchois Duncan is a social justice coach and capacity builder of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent who lives on the ancestral and stolen land of the Coastal Miwok people. Her debut collection, Restless Continent (Litmus Press, 2016) was selected by Entropy Magazine as one of the best poetry collections of 2016 and awarded the California Book Award for Poetry in 2017. In 2020, she co-wrote the libretto for Sweet Land—a collaborative opera project produced in the Los Angeles State Historic Park to critical acclaim. When not writing or working, Aja can be found running the west Marin hills with her Australian Cattle Dog Dublin, training with horses, or weaving small pine needle baskets. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and a variety of other degrees and credentials to certify her as human. Great Spirit knew it all along.
The Poulin Project distributes the work of hundreds of contemporary writers and poets published by independent presses to public schools, libraries, prisons, and alternative education centers throughout New York State, free of charge. We offer a box set of approximately 100 titles distributed to 100 public institutions each year.
Art Resources Transfer (A.R.T.) is a nonprofit organization committed to documenting and disseminating artists' voices and work to the broadest possible publics. Through A.R.T. Press, our Library Program, and Reading Resources, we activate the key components of the printed book—publication, distribution, education, and spaces of reading—to create more egalitarian access to the arts and literacy.
Join us for a special poetry workshop featuring the Litmus Press Teaching Guide on Aja Couchois Duncan, in partnership with the Poulin Project of Art Resources Transfer (A.R.T.). Centered around Duncan’s powerful works Vestigial and Restless Continent, this generative writing workshop will explore feminist poetic experimentation, through offering rich discussion, creative writing activities, and insights into Duncan's body of work.
Participants will be led through their own experiments in writing and discussing poetry. Open to everyone, including writers, readers, educators, and any aspiring poets alike, this event will spark new critical conversations and inspire fresh approaches to experimental poetry. The workshop will feature a brief personal pre-recorded video message from featured poet Aja Couchois Duncan.
The first 13 attendees will receive free giveaway copies of Restless Continent and Vestigial.
Lush with elemental imagery, Aja Couchois Duncan’s Restless Continent communes with a North America that speaks elegiac, celebratory, and melancholic histories human and geological. In this collection, the body of that land and those histories fuses with the body of Duncan’s language, the body of memory, and the physical body. Intertwining English with Ojibwe, this debut collection of poems ominously hails and holds us in its ethereal sound, bearing sharp witness to the ruptures perpetuated by the violences of humanity—bodies and lands colonizing and colonized, naming and othering, stamping life into disappearance—while inviting us to forge with Duncan the mythologies that suffuse her poems with crystalline grace and gratitude.
Vestigial (from the Latin vestigium, meaning “footprint”) tracks a poetic narrative across multiple chronologies and scales—from the personal to the geologic. Following her debut collection Restless Continent (Litmus Press, 2016), Aja Couchois Duncan continues to investigate ecology and heritage as a story of entangled becoming, synchronizing movements of deep time with the transient substance of touch.
PARTICIPANTS
a.Monti is a cross-disciplinary poet. Their projects span translation, radio, publishing, collaboration, performance, research and pedagogy. Monti edits the biannual pamphlet Womanwood (Cutt Press) and is an Associate Editor at Litmus Press. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Pratt Institute and have facilitated seminars and workshops on experimental sound, contemporary poetry, and writing for/from performance. Their work has been presented across the U.S., U.K., and Europe, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art London, and the Austrian Cultural Forum. They are working in New York City and Berlin but were born in an elevator in Rome, going up to the third floor. https://amonti.net
E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Hell Figures (Nightboat Books, 2016), portrait of a lesser subject (Elis Press, 2015), Helen: A Fugue (Belladonna Elder Series #1, 2008), Some Clear Souvenir (O Books, 2006), and music or forgetting (O Books, 2001). With Isabelle Garron, she is the translator of way by Leslie Scalapino into French (Éditions Corti 2020). Her poetry, essays and visual art have also appeared in a wide range of collections and publications, including BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing, edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris (Wesleyan). Grinnell’s poetry has been translated into French, Serbian, Polish, and Portuguese. She has taught creative writing at Pratt Institute, Brown University, and in the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and is the Founding Editor and Executive & Artistic Director of Litmus Press.
VIRTUAL
Aja Couchois Duncan is a social justice coach and capacity builder of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent who lives on the ancestral and stolen land of the Coastal Miwok people. Her debut collection, Restless Continent (Litmus Press, 2016) was selected by Entropy Magazine as one of the best poetry collections of 2016 and awarded the California Book Award for Poetry in 2017. In 2020, she co-wrote the libretto for Sweet Land—a collaborative opera project produced in the Los Angeles State Historic Park to critical acclaim. When not writing or working, Aja can be found running the west Marin hills with her Australian Cattle Dog Dublin, training with horses, or weaving small pine needle baskets. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and a variety of other degrees and credentials to certify her as human. Great Spirit knew it all along.