Led by Carmen Giménez and Forrest Gander
Death is the subject of many of the greatest (most moving, innovative, funny, haunting, political, oneiric) Latin American poems of the 20th century, from José Gorostiza’s Death without End to Gabriela Mistral’s “Death Sonnets,” from Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death to María Rivera’s “The Dead.
What can we learn from that body of poetry that might be generative for our own thinking, feeling, writing? Many philosophers tell us that there is a signal connection between death and “the meaning of life.” What particularities of culture, gender, sexuality, age, faith or experience might account for the visionary clarity of death as constant companion or permeable border, etc. in Latin American poetry? Why are death poems so common in those cultures? Is it connected to traumatic resonances from the conquest? Does it go back to Maya, Aztec, or Incan cultural traditions? With what kinds of syntax, sound, image, structure, and vocabulary is death treated? How different are the cultural contexts from country to country? And why did we once think that only men seem to write them?
Dates & Times: Online Sundays from March 30 to May 4, 2025. Main sessions run from 4 pm-6 pm (Pacific) with optional discussion groups to follow.
- Sunday, March 30, 2025
- Sunday, April 6, 2025
- Sunday, April 13, 2025
- Sunday, April 20, 2025
- Sunday, April 27, 2025
- Sunday, May 4, 2025
Note: For those who are interested, intimate Zoom discussion groups (Virtual Houses) will meet after each session and on subsequent Saturdays at 10 AM.
Course Texts
Participants who don’t own the text are asked to purchase at least the required text, if possible, before March 30. Additional optional texts are included below.
Required Texts:
- Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America edited by Forrest Gander and Raul Zurita
- Hormone of Darkness by Tilsa Otta translated by Farid Matuk
Optional Texts:
- Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik translated by Yvette Siegert
- The Night by Jaime Saenz translated by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson
Handouts for each session will be posted online. Additional reading materials, including essays and poems will be added.
Bios
Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the NBCC Award in Poetry and Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship Prize in 2020. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she served as the publisher of Noemi Press for twenty years. She now serves as publisher and director for Graywolf Press.
Forrest Gander, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, lives in California. His most recent book is Mojave Ghost: a Novel Poem. Among his translations are: It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho; Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems; Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura, winner of the Best Translated Book Award; and the forthcoming Even Time Bleeds: Poems by Jeannette Lozano Clariond.
What to Expect:
- Six, two-hour weekly sessions online with assigned reading. The group can be large, depending on the course.
- In the first 60 or 70 minutes, Gander and Giménez will explore and supply background on the previously assigned readings.
- In the second part, Gander and Giménez will address questions and widen the discussion. Participant questions and comments will be submitted in the chat.
- Optional small (8-10 person) discussion groups will be available to those with the energy and interest after the formal session is over. Discussion guides will be provided.
- These sessions will be recorded, and will be available for later viewing by registered participants for 30 days following the final session
Tuition:
- Early Bird Tuition is $324 (deadline: midnight on Tuesday, March 25)
- Standard Tuition is $360.
- Limited financial aid available. Please contact us if needed.
Register Now
The Writers Annex
Online, and year-round, The Writers’ Annex is composed of short courses, seminars, workshops, and more. Our vision is to bring the creative insight and experience of our staff poets and prose writers to our community in all seasons, not just in the summertime, and not just here in our Valley. Our online offerings will address such topics as eco-poetics, translation, and generative sessions. Some will be one or two days, some will be weekend intensives, and some will meet weekly for a month or two. In addition, we hope these offerings will help offset the tremendous expenses we face as an organization for our traditional in-person events in Olympic Valley.