Ecopoetics
Workshop
Collaborative, critical, and creative work-group experiences.
Next in NYC
Saturday 28 October 2023
ecopoetics workshop NYC 2023
Call for Applications
Deadline: Thursday 5 October 2023
The organizing group of the Topological Poetics Research Institute (TPRI) calls for applicants to attend ecopoetics workshop NYC 2023, which will take place in New York City, New York on 28 October 2023 from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM.
ABOUT
ecopoetics workshop was initiated in 2018 as a two-week nomadic residency focusing on creative, critical, and collaborative approaches to the nexus of poetics and contemporary environmental issues. The first iteration was held in association with the Nature, Art, and Habitat Residency (NAHR) in the summer of 2019. After a hiatus due to COVID, the workshop restarted in its residential format in July 2023.
Rather than providing time to write nature poetry, ecopoetics workshop is intent on gathering poets, multimedia and movement artists, theorists, philosophers, and researchers and artists of all kinds committed to advancing the way humans conceive of and enact their relationship with nature. The organizing group conceives of ecopoetics as an expanded, open-ended research program and aesthetic practice. While some members consider themselves poets, they are also filmmakers, theorists, visual and movement artists, designers, and musicians investigating and producing novel modes of poetic engagement.
The workshop is open to many different approaches, but is most dedicated to engagement with complexity, aesthetic and practical innovation, and what can be achieved through empathetic collaboration.
ecopoetics workshop is affiliated with the Topological Poetics Research Institute (TPRI), a platform for experimental poetics. TPRI is a heterological research institution devoted to alternate forms of poetic engagement, an ongoing fidelity to the event of poetry.
SCHEDULE
The intent of the NYC event is to create a miniature version of our summer residency program. It will involve structured writing/creation sessions, collaborative research, talks from experts, and informed discussion. Participants will walk away with new ideas, the seeds of new creative work, new collaborators, and a new perspective on the nexus of art and the environment.
The workshop will take place over the course of one day (28 October 2023). While plans are subject to change, the current schedule is to meet at 9:00 AM at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge where we will coordinate a speaker and creative exercise.
At around 11:00 AM, we will take a subway ride to Central Park, spending the transit time working on a creative project. At 1:30 PM, after a break for lunch, we will engage with another speaker and collaborate on another creative exercise and writing session.
We will then make our way to the Brooklyn Navy Yard where we will reflect, present, and conclude.
In the evening, participants are invited to attend a reading of ecopoetry at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, which will include a public presentation of ecopoetics workshop 2023: Italy, which took place in July, the launch of our Italy workshop pamphlet, and a discussion about speculative futures of the workshop for 2024.
TO APPLY
Please fill out our application form here: https://forms.gle/ArDa7T3QVqQJupSM8
The form will ask for the below items, which you might like to prepare in advance:
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A personal biography detailing relevant past artistic, academic, and professional experience. (200 words max).
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Please provide a “statement of intent,” in lieu of a “project proposal,” detailing what concepts, modes, materials, or discourses you are looking to engage with during this day-long workshop. You might discuss a project you would like to work on, keeping in mind the two places we will visit and the fact that we will be writing in transit. (500 words max).
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Links to any online portfolios or other evidence of relevant previous work published or exhibited.
GUIDELINE FOR APPLICANTS
We ask all people interested in attending ecopoetics workshop 2023: NYC to complete this application form.
16 applicants will be invited to join the organizing group of Brooke Bastie, Courtlin Byrd, Brent Cox, and Simon Eales.
Preference will go to applicants whose statement of intent (submitted in the form below) is most closely engaged with the concerns of Ecopoetics Workshop and the Topological Poetics Research Institute. A shorthand gauge for measuring such a closeness is: creativity (is the intended work innovative?), criticality (is the intended work rigorous and relevant?), and collaborative (would the intended work both contribute to and benefit from being developed in a group context?).
For a sense of what we do, please visit our websites (ecopo.art & poeticsinstitute.com) and view our summer residency trailer (https://youtu.be/SeqDfMfJcCE).
COST
The cost for attending ecopoetics workshop 2023: NYC is $50.00.
This amount covers facilitation and speaker fees, administrative fees, and some catering.
We endeavour to make our events as accessible as possible, while acknowledging the economic demands placed upon us and those we seek to collaborate with. In line with this, we are offering one fully subsidized place and two half-subsidized places in this workshop. Please indicate below if the cost of this workshop would prohibit you from attending and we will automatically consider you for one of these spots.
DEADLINE
We ask that all applications are submitted via the application form portal linked above (and repeated here: https://forms.gle/ArDa7T3QVqQJupSM8) by Thursday 5 October 2023.
CONTACT
Info Video about EcoPo Workshop
Here you can view an information call we held in early 2023. It is pitched to potential applicants to the workshop (applications are closed for 2023), but would be interesting for those who want to learn more about the workshop and those who run it.
In it, the organizers introduce themselves and talk about the history of Ecopoetics Workshop and its relationship with NAHR, the location, the theme for this year, the schedule, and then field some questions.
Ecopoetry Workshop Organizers
Brooke Bastie, Courtlin Byrd, Brent Cox, and Simon Eales.
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Simon is originally from Melbourne, Australia and now lives in Lisbon, Portugal. He is studying towards a PhD in SUNY Buffalo's Poetics Program, where he has taught courses in writing, poetry, and literature since 2016. He was a NAHR Fellow in 2017, is a performance artist, and has published writing in The Music, Rabbit, Cordite, Don't Do It, and independently.
Brent also studies and teaches in SUNY Buffalo's Poetics Program. He has a MFA from University of Washington, Bothell, in Creative Writing and Poetics. His critical work focuses on experimental and innovative poetics of the 20th and 21st century, aesthetic theory, and transtemporal, transpatial, and transdisciplinary art. He is also a video-artist and poet exploring the creative-critical cross-section of poetry, time-based art, and sound. He runs MonoD Press and TPRI.
Courtlin lives in New York City, and is from Tennessee and California. She attended Vanderbilt University for Creative Writing and the USC School of Cinematic Arts for Film Production, and now makes associative poetic videos, writes verbose visual art, and teaches media studies. Her work can be found at https://theoppositeofshadows.wordpress.com/.
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Brooke is a PhD candidate and instructor in English at the University of Buffalo. Her academic work focuses on contemporary American and Indigenous poetry through the lens of spatiality. For her dissertation, she is writing on what she terms coterminous territories—a contested or extra-legal spatial formation that generates multiple, often incompatible experiences of lived socio-political identity within the same space. To understand this phenomenon, she uses the work of poets such as José Felipe Alvergue, Anthony Cody, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Craig Santos Perez, amongst others.
Contact
If you have any questions at all, please do email us via the form below. We will get back to you as soon as we can, and will aim to be as helpful as possible.