"What is Community?" questionnaire and Nico Vassilakis' response

I generated the following questionnaire for facilitating a writing workshop last spring at SVA, for my course about "intense autobiography." Afterwards we discussed Bruce Boone's Century of Clouds. This past weekend I gave the questionnaire as a hand out at the Poetics of Healing mini-symposium. Nico Vassilakis responded and his response is also posted below:

What is Community? (a Questionnaire)

1. To what communities do you belong? Name them. What are the defining features of these communities?

2. What distinguishes these communities from other communities? What limits and unites their members?

3. How would you characterize the politics of these communities? Illustrate with an anecdote or series of images. How would you describe your relationship to the

politics of these communities?

4. How do you enact your political beliefs through a daily practice? Provide a soundtrack or series of sounds rather than description to express this enaction of belief.

5. How do you enact your beliefs through an art practice?

6. Describe a time when you rebelled or provided a challenge against your community? How did this make you feel? How would/do you make art based on this experience—to channel or mediate it?

7. To what communities do you belong in your dreams?

Exercise: Read over your responses and select language that is interesting to you.

Use this language to compose a poem.

If you wish to share, mail your responses to wildhorsesoffire [at] gmail [dot] com

A visual one

Looking at seeing

Using alphabet to make objects

Using alphabet visually as language for seeing

The eyes and the eyes

Open

The ego of the eyes

I like what the eye likes

Share this

There is no power structure

We all see what needs seeing

We create so as to replicate and enhance the fascination visual alphabet holds for us

U, U, double U, double, double, double U

By getting it and getting it right

It continues by honing your intentional mark

We chose work

Chosen for its lack of repetition

To toss it far enough that nothing relates at such a distance

A community of happenstance

A confederacy of surprise

Healing / Community / Public / Space (event)

Healing / Community / Public / Space 

Talks & Poetics*

Melissa Buzzeo

Thom Donovan

Pavlos Stavropoulos

Eleni Stecopoulos

david wolach

Saturday, October 12, 2013

4:00 - 6:30 PM

Unnameable Books

600 Vanderbilt Ave.

Brooklyn

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PLUS 2 MORE NYC EVENTS BY PARTICIPANTS:

Eleni Stecopoulos, david wolach, and Thom Donovan

The Multifarious Array Reading Series

Friday, October 11, 2013

7 PM

Pete's Candy Store

709 Lorimer

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

http://multifariousarray.blogspot.com/

Discussion: Austerity, Fascism and their Popular and Libertarian Responses in Greece

with Pavlos Stavropoulos

Sunday, October 13, 2013

7 PM

Bluestockings 

172 Allen St.

NY, NY

http://bluestockings.com/events/

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* Healing / Community / Public / Space continues the Poetics of Healing project in New York City.

For more information: 

http://subterraneanarthouse.org/past-events/vital-forms-healing-arts-crisis-friday-april-19th-saturday-april-20th/

http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/eventCalendar.html#HEALING

~

Melissa Buzzeo is the author of For Want and Sound (Les Figues, 2013), Face (BookThug, 2009), and What Began Us (Leon Works, 2007). Her poetic work has been greatly charged by a long engagement with hypnosis, palm reading and a desire for an altered consciousness tied to the body but radiating outward, which is to say healing. Or writing.  She graduated from Cornell University and The University of Iowa's Writing Workshop, and currently teaches both Creative Writing and Architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. This year she is the 2013 Poet in Residence at Opus Projects Gallery in Chelsea.      

        

Thom Donovan is an exemplary Post-Fordist laborer. He works as a poet, critic, scholar, archivist, professor, editor, and curator. His book The Hole can be purchased at SPD and  he is currently working on his second book of poetry and first book of critical essays. He is the author of"Somatic Poetics," an essay regarding contemporary somatic practices and aesthetic discourse, and is a founding participant of the Nonsite Collective. For more information visit his blog Wild Horses Of Fire, now in its eight year.

Pavlos Stavropoulos is a longtime activist and organizer involved in numerous local, national and international liberatory and anarchist struggles, including anti-fascist and anti-austerity resistance in his native Greece, where he is associated with the journal Ευτοπία (Eutopia). He is a founder of Woodbine Ecology Center, which focuses on sustainable communities and indigenous perspectives, a certified permaculture designer and instructor, a water and sustainability educator, a street medic and a father.

Eleni Stecopoulos is a poet and teacher who lives in the Bay Area. She is the author of Armies of Compassion (Palm Press) and a recent chapbook, Daphnephoria (Compline). "The Poetics of Healing" series, her collaboration with The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, was supported by a Creative Work Fund grant  and featured participants from diverse fields, including philosopher Alphonso Lingis, poet Raúl Zurita, anthropologists Barbara Tedlock and Dennis Tedlock, physician-poet David Watts, and many others. She is currently finishing a book based on the project. 

A longtime union organizer, writer on performance and experimental sound composition, and former body artist out of Detroit, david wolach is founding editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press. wolach’s first full-length collection of poems is Occultations (Black Radish Books, 2011, 2012). The full-length Hospitalogy was published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in May of 2013. wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and cultural theory at The Evergreen State College, and visiting faculty in Bard College’s Language & Thinking program.