Mind Can Change: Chance Encounters with Writing and Art - with Lynden Sculpture Garden Writer-in-Residence Rod Smith

Presented in collaboration with Woodland Pattern Book Center.

Photo: Steve McLaughlin

Taking a line from John Cage, "Mind Can Change," as our starting point, this workshop will explore a number of writing strategies of the historical and contemporary avant-garde. Following on writers and visual artists such as Cage, Joe Brainard, Dada, the Surrealists, and others, we will make use of the Lynden Sculpture Garden facilities to explore collaboration, non-narration, field poetics, disjunction, appropriation, and other artistic approaches to escape the codifications of daily language use. The avant-garde in our terms will not only signify a stance against the over-simplified and unimaginative, but for and toward the creation of art as new, synchronistic, immediate, and unprecedented experience. At the end of the week we will celebrate the work we have produced together with a public reading and reception.

Rod Smith is the author of Deed (University of Iowa Press, 2007) amd nine other books of poems, including Music or Honesty, Poèmes de l’Araignées, and In Memory of My Theories. He has taught creative writing at George Mason University, and was a visiting writer at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the Spring of 2010. He edits the journal Aerial, publishes Edge Books, and manages the independent Bridge Street Books in Washington, D.C. Smith is also editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley.

Dates at Lynden: June 4-June 8
Monday, June 4 2-7:30 pm
Tuesday, June 5 2-5 pm
Wednesday, June 6 2-5 pm
Thursday, June 7 2-5 pm
Friday, June 8 2-5 pm (reading to follow)
Fee $275/$250 for members of Lynden or Woodland Pattern (one discount only).
To register contact Chuck Stebelton at Woodland Pattern: (414) 263-5001 or woodlandpattern@sbcglobal.net.

Lynden Sculpture Garden and the Woodland Pattern Book Center offer a weeklong-residency at Lynden with poet and writer-in-residence Rod Smith. In addition to the workshop, Smith will offer a reading at Woodland Pattern on June 3. The workshop will culminate in a reading and reception at Lynden on Friday, June 8 at 7 pm.

Related events:
Sunday, June 3
2 pm
$8/$7/$6
Reading: Rod Smith
This event takes place at Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust St., Milwaukee, WI 53212

Friday, June 8
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.