March 22, 3–6pm (1-day seminar) / In-person at the UDP studio

In her introduction to Prose Architectures, Renee Gladman writes: “But to progress in language (in sentences) is to move forward through a kind of syntax we’ve all agreed upon…However, this “making sense” wasn’t actually a representation of how what I wrote came to me or existed in me.” Later, in his afterword, which comes after many pages of drawings Gladman calls “some interiors, some energies of my prose,” Fred Moten describes her sentences as having “neither beginning nor end but [moving] in a kind of parabolic orbit, an irregularity of swerves and rises…” and finally asks, “Now, can we renew infection, insubordination, in the sentence?”

In this workshop, and through the work of writers, filmmakers and visual artists such as Norma Cole, Renee Gladman, Sade LaNay, Marosa Di Giorgio, Gordon Matta-Clark, Louise Bourgeois, Tove Ditlevsen, Jonas Mekas, Etel Adnan, Lara Mimosa Montes, Helen Frankenthaler, Stanley Whitney, and others, we’ll look at sentences that favor music, architecture, movement, “anarchic shifting of ground” over semantic climax and closure; we’ll look at how meaning is built from syntax and how syntax is pulled from structures in cities, color and grammars, how shifts between the hypo and paratactic modes can create thresholds, or stretched relationships between subjects and objects, how an ambiguous conjunction can create spaciousness in the sentence, and how sentences can be transposed across mediums, constantly posing new ways of imagining time and space. All are welcome. We’ll do some generative writing, and reading, and eventually workshop specific sentences from manuscripts in-progress.