Workshop 6: Chen and Rachel

We took excerpts from "I Remember", a text by Joe Brainard that were basically memories by Brainard, each sentence starting with "I Remember." We discussed how the prose was like a poem, the syntax, visual associations that were akin to collage (Brainard also worked in the visual art collage format). The women liked writing their own "I remembers"... a lot of them cut right to the chase, such vivid memories, small and sincere and amazing. One woman wrote about her grandmother...

I often forget that not everyone sees things the way I do, or interpret them, and it's a great pleasure to be surprised by someone else's point of view that opens a window into things... There was one Brainard memory that went like this:

"I remember regretting things I didn’t do."

I interpreted it as a memory of regret, so perhaps Brainard no longer regretted. One of the women said it might be that he was regretting again. So interesting...

It was a little hard to discuss Brainard's stuff because people were eager to write their own memories-- and his are so specific to the 70s that perhaps it was a little hard to connect with... they were also pretty simplistic. But it was a good jumping off point. Workshop ended early then and Rachel asked them to write from the point of view of an object in the room. Someone wrote a really great "surveillance" poem from the POV of a fly. Pretty rad.

Teaching, especially workshop style, is such a matter of exchange. I'm pretty grateful for everything people have shared with me and opened up about, and I realize an inherent inequality about this give and take procedure. We sort of started this conversation last Saturday, but some of it was about balancing what we are able to offer vs. what the women are interested in, their background. I still need to crystallize my thoughts on this, so look for a later post.