IDEOLOGY
**A Trans* Poetry Workshop Series**

Hosted by Millay Arts

Join us this Pride month (and in celebration of our 50th Anniversary) for IDEOLOGY, a series of virtual poetry workshops that transgress to impress. Featuring creative prompts and performances by five of Millay Arts’ brilliant trans* and nonbinary alums: wo chan, Ching-in Chen, Bianca Rae Messinger, Jayson P. Smith, and Emji Saint Spero.

Dream ritual. Hallucinatory translation. Cruel nothings. This is gender confirmation poetry at its finest. Expansive, ecstatic, and deliciously complicit, these workshops are designed to be interactive and exploratory. Open to all / no previous experience necessary.

All proceeds will go toward supporting The Vincent Prize, Millay Arts' fully-funded residency for trans* and gender nonconforming artists.

$60-120 per workshop
Sliding scale; no one will be turned away for lack of funds

Please specify which workshop/s you are registering for!

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Schedule

Wed June 14 | 7-9pm EST
Sonnet is the Gown w/ wo chan

A little room, a little sound; a breathing pattern, a gem in the crown; an argument, a love song, a tradition, and a playground—few forms in poetry are as celebrated and subverted as the courtly sonnet. In this workshop we will read sonnets by queers and we will read sonnets queerly. We will look at fulfillments and subversions of the sonnet as queer(ed), embodied performances—tonal postures, silhouettes on the left margin—or mega-poems center page. How are these poems as received forms imbued—structurally, sonically—with queer intention? How has the form been altered—hemmed, cropped, loosened, or doffed entirely— to fit us? Tradition: do we flout it? Or do we comply…maliciously? And lastly: how does a volta make us twirl?

In our brief time, we will read, discuss, alter, and finally prance by generating our own daily sonnet. No prior experience necessary, but: must love sound, must love play.

Thurs June 15 | 6-8pm EST
(in)articulations, or, what we mean when we say "craft" w/ Jayson P. Smith

This workshop offers writers an opportunity to reconsider the idea of craft as a somatic interrogation. Together we will ask: what memories/experiences/habits guide the choices you make on the page? How can we use them to redefine how you understand yourself as a poet?

Sat June 17 | 4-6pm EST
Slip into something more uncomfortable w/ Emji Saint Spero

Tilt towards precarity. Deviate, abandon the page. Luxuriate in illegibility, in incoherence. Cling to discomfort. Incorporate this tension. Allow it to crack your practice. Lick the outline of its extremities.

In Troubling the Line, Ely Shipley writes, “how might one begin to write a body that has been historically illegible?” For queer and trans writers, wielding illegibility, incoherence, can be a strategy for reclaiming agency. How might incoherence be seen as a form of resistance? In this workshop we will engage embodied poetic strategies that resist, refuse, and deconstruct, as a way to imagine other possibilities, to encounter unexpected intimacies.

Tues June 20 | 7-9pm EST
Spells for Safety w/ Ching-In Chen

Using the anthology Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power, we will create and dream poem-rituals and spells together as freedom maps for ourselves and our communities.

Thurs June 22 | 6-8pm EST
Love in Excess w/ Bianca Rae Messinger

This workshop centers around the power of love (in writing) to transcend bodily limitations. We will look at a couple brief excerpts (Robert Glück, Samuel R. Delaney, Leslie Scalapino, Marquis de Sade, Teresa de Avila) while focusing on exercises which allow writing from the body-mind. Part of this involves triangulation, writing through others, conjuring others, hallucinatory translation. The other involves an acknowledgement of fetish (or an investment in the response of the “self”) as a fundamental theoretical and aesthetic mode. How does an ecstatic relationship to love permit us to expand the limits of our perception and desire?

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Registration

$60-120 per workshop
Fees are sliding scale, and no one will be turned away for lack of funds

Please specify which workshop/s you are registering for!

Discount Packages

• $100 for two workshops
• $225 for all five workshops

How to register:
Slide with us to the Donation page, tap the OTHER option. Fill in the amount that fits you, $10 and up.

*For more info, email monika@millayarts.org

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