Siting, Placement, and Flow: Poetry & Art in the Lynden Sculpture Garden with writers-in-residence Lytle Shaw and Ed Friedman

June 2, 2013 - June 7, 2013

Presented in collaboration with Woodland Pattern Book Center.
Fee: $300/$275 for members of Lynden or Woodland Pattern (one discount only)

Lynden Sculpture Garden and the Woodland Pattern Book Center offer a weeklong-residency at Lynden with poets and writers-in-residence Lytle Shaw and Ed Friedman. In addition to the workshop, the writers will offer a reading at Woodland Pattern on June 2 at 7 pm. The workshop will culminate in a reading and reception at Lynden on Friday, June 7 at 7 pm.

Siting, Placement, and Flow is a writing workshop that will utilize the Lynden Sculpture Garden, as experienced from two vantages.

One
Most outdoor modern sculpture like that at Lynden at once casts attention to its siting, its placement in and interaction with a specific environment, and also displaces viewers from that environment through the associations evoked by its materials: specialized welding, architectural structures, the worlds of heavy industry and construction. This dual address, however, is not unique to sculpture: poetry, too, might be characterized as a constant oscillation between its gestures of pointing at specific things, and its inescapable processes of abstraction—its evocation of cultural, historical, linguistic associations that cannot be neatly contained in a single space.

Though only 40 or so years old, the language of mid-century abstract sculpture can feel as remote to us today as that of Egyptian hieroglyphics. This workshop will seek to convert our distance from sculptural modernism into an asset, inviting writers to reinvent its uses in the present as the point of departure for generating serial poetry.

What does such sculpture want? What might we want from it? How might we go about exacting it?

Two
In a sculpture garden, there are high-priority—usually high-density—forms set into and creating a wider ambience of thought and potential experience. Such elements as landscape, lighting, weather, and human occupancy suggest both open opportunities and constraints. In this workshop we’ll be writing works in poetry and prose that exist in the context of other works. We’ll be working in forms, some of which are established in advance of writing and others that evolve conceptually as we go. We’ll experiment with some very short, minimal forms and how they can be combined into larger works. We’ll collaborate and pool our resources. We’ll evolve complexities.

What is visuality in writing? How do we attain materiality in language? How do we release our sense of authority and then reappear in the work more surprisingly ourselves?

Lytle Shaw’s books include Cable Factory 20, The Lobe, and Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. A contributing editor for Cabinet, he has recently published catalog essays on Robert Smithson and Zoe Leonard for DIA Center, on Gerard Byrne for Koenig Books, and on The Royal Art Lodge for the Drawing Center. Shaw is currently working on two books: one about the politics of time in depicted landscapes and another about the status of poetry in recent theoretical debates.

Ed Friedman is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including The Telephone Book; Humans Work; Mao & Matisse; and Drive Through the Blue Cylinders. He has collaborated frequently with visual artists Robert Kushner (The New York Hat Line and Away) and Kim MacConnel (La Frontera and Lingomats). Friedman has given readings and performances in venues such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, and The Public Theater. For 16 years (1987-2003) he was the artistic director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in NYC. He lives with his wife and 13-year-old son.

Dates at Lynden: June 3-June 7

Monday, June 3 2-7:30 pm
Tuesday, June 4 2-5 pm
Wednesday, June 5 2-5 pm
Thursday, June 6 2-5 pm
Friday, June 7 2-5 pm (reading to follow)

Related events:

Sunday, June 2
7 pm
$5-$8
Opening Reading: Lytle Shaw & Ed Friedman
This event takes place at Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust St., Milwaukee, WI 53212

Friday, June 7
7 pm
Workshop Reading & Celebration
Free
This event takes place at the Lynden Sculpture Garden.
Participants in the workshop offer a reading of work produced during the week followed by a reception.


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