Poet In Residence Claire Donato at Germantown High School

Claire Donato with Germantown English teacher Stacy Dore

Students writing!!!

Rapt attention

Above are just a few photos from the day spent accompanying the truly amazing poet Claire Donato in her role as visiting poet at the Germantown High School. We at the Millay Colony began this program last year in an effort to extend our gifts to the larger community. If we are able to support all these incredible artists, why shouldn't the surrounding areas benefit from this?

So, with some generous funding from the Hudson River Bank and Trust Foundation, we were able to bring Claire back up to Millay for a mini-retreat and a few days in school. What followed was the best kind of poetic mayhem! Students were engaged, lively, and making their own versions of Shakespeare's sonnets with pens, markers, and white-out.

Students will be making books of the work created in class, and there will be a culminating presentation in May. More photos to follow as well as a report from Claire and examples of student work in our Spring Newsletter.

Hi there lovely readers,

Here are some photos of our first workshop of the year, From the Office of Recuperative Strategies...with Rachel Levitsky & Christian Hawkey...it was amazing...

We met at the offices of Trisha Brown Dance Company, who beyond generously let us use their gorgeous, airy loft space for our Weekend Workshops (thanks to one and all for this lovely sharing of resources!!). The workshop began with an exercise: we partnered off and alternated staring at our partner while they shut their eyes and being stared at by them while we shut ours. From this place of self-consciousness and heightened noticing, we began our two-day conversation, writing workshop and think tank...

At all times, Rachel & Christian guided us, but also let our individual worlds and personhoods and thoughts and questions and projects and feedback flourish and form the class. Each discussion was deeply nourishing and felt like the tip of a large mountain to be scaled...it was extraordinary.

We did several writing exercises, shared work and talked through angles for projects we are working on, thinking about, stuck in (c'est moi!) or just imagining...

I'll share one part of one hand-out that Rachel & Christian gave us, from C.A. Conrad's "The Right to Manifest Manifesto":

"The aim of (Soma)tic poetry and poetics is the realization of two basic ideas: (1) everything around us has a creative viability with the potential to spur new modes of thought and imaginative output. (2) The most vital ingredient to bringing sustainable, humane changes to out world is creativity. This can be enacted on a daily basis. "

Onward!

Our next workshop will be Frances Richard "Critical Writing as Creative Process" and if you don't already know it, Frances is brilliant and the class will open doors onto ways to write in around and on topics one may be nervous to approach with language...fear no more...

xox

April is here....

and so is the first batch of 2012 residents!

Winter Shakers season was wonderful and, as always, particular to the unique individuals and groups who join us for varying lengths of time. Also, it is when the juries gather, upkeep is kept up, and we are able to host some unusual programs.

One highlight worth particular mention is our Poet in the Schools Program. The first year we worked with Teachers & Writers Collaborative to bring Adam Wiedewitsch up to the area for a week stay at the Colony and an in-school unit at Germantown High School. This year we brought up Millay alum Claire Donato who led an inspiring and seriously cool unit on collage, erasure, and handmade poems.

Claire will be back to the Germantown High School in May for a culminating presentation with everyone who participated. Meantime, teachers, administrators and students alike are busy making books of the inventive work created during Claire's visit.

More details and photos to follow!

Weekend Workshop in NYC with Rachel Levitsky and Christian Hawkey

A Workshop from the Office of Recuperative Strategies with Rachel Levitsky and Christian Hawkey

April 14 & 15 AND performance/documentation on April 28

In this workshop, Christian Hawkey and Rachel Levitsky, co-founders of the Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS) will share their research into strategies that intervene and repurpose the brutality of technocapitalism's obsession with speed, newness, able-bodiedness, originality, and innovation. Our focus as a class will be to encourage a memory-based politics that draws on poetic thought to invent new fields of vitality, desire, and dwelling. A wide range of recuperative strategies and media will be supported in this workshop (bring all ideas and projects in process!), including such practice-based interventions as archive investigation, field-research and recording, digital sampling, and the realignment of author/reader, subject/object positions. Writers of all genres are welcome. Participants will be sent an advance list of links to existing recuperative strategies and supportive texts. The workshop will document research and creative production and will conclude with a performance!

+The Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS) is a mobile organization that explores ways to affirm and promote the cultural reuse, perversification, reanimation, revivication and reparation of extinct, endangered, correctable cultural phenomena.

Christian Hawkey has written two full-length poetry collections (The Book of Funnels and Citizen Of, both from Wave Books), four chapbooks, and the cross-genre book Ventrakl (2010, Ugly Duckling Presse). In 2006 he received a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award. In 2008 he was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow. He translates contemporary German poetry, and with the German poet Uljana Wolf he translates the Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger. His own work has been translated into over a dozen languages.

Rachel Levitsky is the author of Neighbor (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Under the Sun (Futurepoem Books, 2002), and DEARLY (A+Bend Press, 1999). Her book The Story of My Accident Is Ours is forthcoming from Future Poem Books. In 1999, Rachel started Belladonna* as a reading series at the Bluestockings Women's Bookstore. She is now a founding member of the Belladonna* Collaborative.

This is a Millay Colony for the Arts Weekend Workshop at the Trisha Brown Studios in Manhattan. These two-day/eight-hour workshops offer intensive sessions with some of the most exciting teaching artists around.

Weekend Workshop Schedule: We will begin each four-hour class at 11:30 AM with coffee, tea and a lot of ideas about a lively, focused, smart writing and art practice. Total workhop time is eight hours or sixteen hours for a double class. Lunch is served at each class and the day ends at 3:00 PM.

Weekend Fees: $350 for the full three dates.

To Apply: Send a letter of introduction including a brief bio with a $50 deposit. Also include a work sample (10 pages of writing or links to online work). Applicants will be accepted on a first-come first-serve basis.

Send to: The Millay Colony for the Arts, 454 East Hill Road, Austerlitz, NY. Attention: Workshops. Make checks payable to The Millay Colony for the Arts. For more information contact Caroline Crumpacker at 518-392-4144 or director@millaycolony.org. http://www.millaycolony.org/workshops

Workshop Location: Trisha Brown Dance Studios, 465 Greenwich St., New York, NY 10013

Millay Alumni Good News & Updates

We will be posting here more regularly the news and notes from alumni. What better way to start than with a huge congrats to Julia Dault (July, 2011) for her work being pictured in the NY Times today! She is part of the New Museum's second Triennial exhibit "The Ungovernables" opening this Wednesday.

Click here for the image. Here for The Week Ahead in NY Times.
And here for the New Musuem.

The photo above is of one of the many unique table decorations designed by Julia and fellow resident Heidi Jensen for the Colony's Summer Party last July. All the words were Edna's!

Millay Colony at AWP - Join Us!

AWP. Chicago. A cluster of tables and lit mags and poets writers performers jamming the joint. Yep. We'll be there....

Come visit us at table R5. If alumnae want to join us for a spell, please do! We'll have good cheer to share.

UPDATES for 2012 Workshop Schedule

At the Colony:

The Beauty of the Image with Carole Maso
May 30 to June 2

In this class, we will discuss how to access and use resonant emblems from one's life and transform them into fictive shapes of meaning, urgency and beauty. We will work on making our own forms, exploring various literary, musical, philosophical and visual modes in order to get close to our subjects.

Generating Sound in Poetry with Tracie Morris
August 30 to September 2

In this course we will explore the relationship between body, page and voice. At the end of the course students can present page-based or space-based work to the community.

We'll be doing physical exercises and writing. The workshop is not restricted to any one medium and a cross-disciplinary approach is welcomed.


At Trisha Brown Studios in Soho:

Recuperative Poetics Workshop with
Rachel Levitsky and Christian Hawkey
April 14 & 15 AND April 28 & 29

Critical Writing as Creative Practice with
Frances Richard
May 5 & 6

New Writing: Poetry Workshop with
Patricia Spears Jones
June 16 & 17

www.millaycolony.org/workshops