Working On Gallery Vol. 7 - No.5
Guest Poet: Marci Vogel
Curator: Naoko Fujimoto
Guest Poet: Marci Vogel
Curator: Naoko Fujimoto
WEAVE is a theme for the Working On Gallery Vol.7.
For this volume, I am focusing on writers and artists who weave elements into their creative community. Those elements could be family relationships, neighborhood activities, or academic interpretations. Either way, one thread tightens and makes us stronger like a universal cloth.
For this volume, I am focusing on writers and artists who weave elements into their creative community. Those elements could be family relationships, neighborhood activities, or academic interpretations. Either way, one thread tightens and makes us stronger like a universal cloth.
Marci Vogel
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Marci Vogel holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from USC, where she currently serves as an Instructor in the Department of English. She is the author of Death and Other Holidays, winner of the inaugurual Miami Book Fair Prize for the Novella, and At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody, winner of the inaugural Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize. Her poetry, translations, essays, and fiction appear in Jacket2, Air/Light, and The Los Angeles Times, and her hybrid work critical and creative poetics, XENO » GLOSSIA: An Illuminated Study of Christine de Pizan, will be published in 2025 as part of Parlor Press’ Illuminations Series in American Poetics.
Vogel is the recipient of a Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, a Hillary Gravendyk Memorial Scholarship from the Community of Writers, and a fellowship from the Camargo Foundation.
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Right - Marci Vogel with GLYPH and 09/09
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I met Marci Vogel at a poetry reading event hosted by Genevieve Kaplan and Lisa C. Krueger near Los Angeles at the gorgeous garden of the Kruegers' house. It was a celebration of my translation chapbook, 09/09, by Toad Press.
She came up to me with GLYPH. It was a delightful moment to connect with my audience and a wonderful realization that someone enjoyed reading my book. Marci Vogel currently teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California, and she shares one of her writing exercises using picture cards by Bryan Nash Gill, who created woodblock prints of tree rings.
It has become more popular to use prompts to write poems. Tupelo Press recently released oracle cards to meditate on writing and editing. Vogel's "Tree Rings of Knowledge" has a similar approach. There are some student examples after the article. The result is a phenomenon. It was some students' first time writing and expressing their creative pieces.
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Tree Rings of Knowledge
Writing Exercise by Marci Vogel
I found that things were as |
The Poetry of Translation is one of several courses I've designed for students of all majors, primarily first-year undergraduates, at the University of Southern California. In addition to the brilliant diversity of my home city's local student body, students come from all over the world to pursue their education in Los Angeles, and I wanted to provide a way to foster cross-cultural sensitivity, nuanced interpretive skill, and increased understanding around our common experience of language. |
"At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody" by Marci Vogel
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I also wanted a restoration of sorts: for my students to know poetry as a friend, rather than as a corpus to be dissected—a site of transformative power, not of autopsy. In the case of knowledge, however, it's one thing to convey; another to conjure. As Lyn Hejinian writes in The Language of Inquiry, "To know that things are is not to know what they are, and to know that without what is to know otherness (i.e., the unknown and perhaps unknowable)."
How to encourage my students—already (understandably) apprehensive about unfamiliar material—to venture even further into unknown (and perhaps unknowable) waters?
In other words: If translation is what gets carried across, how might poetry bridge the gap between shores?
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By its very nature, translation involves change. As for the poetry, I looked to the trees.
Woodcut Memory Game - Bryan Nash Gill
Woodcut Memory Game - Bryan Nash Gill
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Bryan Nash Gill was a visual artist who created prints from cross sections of fallen and damaged logs foraged near the Connecticut studio where he worked before his death in 2013. One day early in the spring semester, I brought Gill's Woodcut Memory Game to class. As my students settled into desks, I offered each a card and asked that they write in response to what they saw. For the time being, I did not explain the images they were looking at, only provided guidance for how they might approach the instruction. |
Woodcut Memory Game - Bryan Nash Gill
To write in response:
- You might write a straightforward description, a lyrical meditation, or a narrative account.
- Your writing might take the shape of a brief paragraph, a lineated poem, words, phrases, a numbered list.
- You might include a remembrance, a riddle, a sequence of observations, ideas previously unknown (and perhaps unknowable).
- You might write in languages other than English.
- You might alternate modes, shapes, alphabets.
- You might stumble, stutter, or repeat yourself. You might wander off topic.
- The one constant is to write further than you think you can go (should you feel lost, look again to the map printed on your card—).
I set a timer for three minutes, then set it again. After the second (or maybe third) round, I asked my students to stop writing, for now.
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I asked them to search out the classmate whose card matched their own, to venture for a short while in new seats so they might more easily confer about what they'd seen. They were invited to share whatever writing they felt comfortable sharing.
As I circled the room, it became clear that each student had their own way of interpreting the crosscuts in their hands; indeed, each had their own orientation of holding.
As voices quieted, I provided information about how the prints were made and who had made them. I wrote the word translitic on the board (from trans, meaning across and litic, meaning to cut or loosen) and explained the term as an experimental form of translation, whereby the translator-poet draws upon work in an unknown language as a means for creating work in a known one.
I next invited my students (by now, comfortably seated in new perspectives) to forage through their writings and lift out words, phrases, &/or sentences that struck a chord. These, they were to offer to a new work in collaboration with the translator-poet in the next seat (only moments ago a fellow undergraduate, such is the magic of conjuring new knowledge!), maybe (by now) a new friend, at once rooted and free. ∞
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Student Example 1.
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Student Example 2.
Student Example 3.
Student Example 4.
