Poets & Writers

Metaphors from music pervade our language about writing: voice, rhythm, tone. Story and song emerged together, and this generative craft seminar explores this enduring intimacy across genres. Together, we will read influential theories of the voice (Federico García Lorca, Roland Barthes, Nathaniel Mackey) alongside experimental criticism that absorbs and improvises upon the music it takes as its subject (Elizabeth Hardwick, Greg Tate, Simone White, Jenny Erpenbeck, Harmony Holiday). As writers, we will move through a series of short exercises that explore different relations to music: imitating tonal qualities of favorite vocalists, brief memoirs of songs in the context of daily life, and micro-reviews of recent releases. In the racket of the world, we will follow Ralph Ellison's directive: “In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.”