In the first paper, “Harlem’s Workshops,” Professor Matthew Kilbane asks listeners to envision a history of literary Harlem narrated from the vantage point not of its published authors, but of its community-workshop participants, its hobbyists, its night-school writers, and its student poets. Drawn from a larger investigation of the community-based workshop as a twentieth-century literary institution, this paper will highlight two such workshops: the Harlem Writers’ Workshop of the 1940s, which convened at the storied Harlem YMCA, and June Jordan’s late 1960s workshops at the Harlem Community Resource Center. In rooms such as these, “amateur” or insurgent writers across the twentieth century have gathered to devise and pursue transformative ends for U.S. poetry—ends that may seem worlds apart from the priorities of those university workshops taking credentialed shape at the same time. In Harlem in particular, poets began at midcentury to press the workshop model into the service of anti-racist community organizing. The endeavor to assess these workshops for their literary-historical significance necessitates a shift in literary-critical method; given their exceeding ephemerality, and given the fact, too, that in many cases the goal of workshop writing was something besides, or something importantly in addition to, a poem’s publication, these workshops’ archives may appear strictly ‘unreadable.’ To grasp the social meanings borne by the practice of writing poetry in these workshops, we must first learn how to read not only written things, but the processual techniques of poetic writing itself. Making recourse to the archives of these two Harlem workshops, Kilbane argues that scholarly oversight of community-based writing workshops and other sites of “amateur” verse-making is enforced by an inattention to the act of writing itself—to poems as social acts, or ways of negotiating attachment and articulating struggle, and to literary-critical methods that would teach us how to read those embodied acts and lifesaving ways.
In recent years, moreover, the community-based poetry workshop has received overdue critical attention in part because of the publication of Mark Nowak’s Social Poetics (2020), which assembles a “people’s history” of the poetry workshop. In her paper, "Contemporary Labor's Cultural Front," Claire Farley considers the role creative writing workshops have played in the labor movements of the past century by turning to Nowak’s Worker Writers School (WWS), a project through which he facilitates poetry workshops in collaboration with labor organizations that support low-wage, migrant, undocumented, and precarious workers. The WWS’s collaboration with Worker Centers recalls the writing workshops run through John Reed Clubs in the 1930s, illustrating how creative writing workshops were once a crucial node in the infrastructure of the labor movement. Farley therefore positions the WWS as a challenge less to literary institutions like the MFA program and more to labor institutions that undervalue the importance of cultural programming to their organizing efforts.
The panel’s third presenter, Professor Hoa Nguyen, approaches the session’s theme from a praxis perspective. Nguyen’s paper, "Onward!: On Twenty Years of Reading-Centric, Generative, Community-based Poetry Workshops," will document, examine, and share by excursion pedagogical practices derived in writing workshops that engaged community members through durational and saturational readings of experimental twentieth-century poets. The pedagogy that developed over twenty years in community settings focused on relational social contexts, generative writing, and other forms of creative practice. "A creative event does not grasp," wrote filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha in No Master Territories. "It does not take possession, it is an excursion." In this presentation, Nguyen will distill pedagogy as a process in an expression of subjective reflection, creative growth, and cultural encounter as she devised her teaching practice and its development over two decades leading writing workshops in community settings in the US, Canada, and Cyberspace.
Each paper presentation will be between fifteen and twenty minutes, with the remaining fifteen to twenty minutes set aside for discussion among panelists and attendees.