School of SJ

Present

Fall 2026

Critical Service Thursdays, 7-9pm ET (online)

In this small critical writing workshop, each of us will choose a work of poetry we want to review, and through a guided process involving review readings, micro-review writing (experimenting with different critical moves that could become a part of our individual process) and the introduction of a few theoretical frames, we will each write a review. Parallel to this generative process we will develop individual and potentially collective positions of some or all of the following questions:

What are the prevailing directions of poetry reviews/criticism now?
What kinds of reviews/poetry criticism do we need?
What do we need reviews to do?
What problems/questions/possibilities emerge through the general expansion of the category of poetry to include everything?
How does the status of language, reading, writing, communication, publication, or reception need to be addressed in the process of reviewing, or taken up as motivation for reviewing? (e.g. the evaporation of paid opportunities for criticism at large; censorious corporate control of venues for critical writing; the attenuation and dispersion of readerly attention; the various forms of inflation that operate as part of "literary" markets; the fact that reviews often seem to function in two modes: evisceration or advertisement)

We will also develop a thread of group research into sources and venues for the reviews we are writing, along with the possibility of publishing our own collection of reviews or micro-reviews. Participation in the workshop includes one 1-on-1 editorial meeting with SJ.

More information and application HERE

Fall 2026

“Compass” the “Chasm”: Adjunct Teachers Circles Mondays 7:30-9pm ET (online)

No single person has the answers or solutions to the all the questions and problems of adjunct teaching right now, particularly as the conditions for us as teachers rapidly change (if not fully devolve). We love teaching and/or we need teaching to live, but the schools where we teach exploit both our love and our lives. We care about our students, but their needs often exceed our capacities as precarious, contingent workers (or the institution itself systematically redistributes the value of these needs to justify another pointless digital managerial platform). What we are doing as teachers is always much bigger than ourselves, and despite adjunct work being alienating and isolating, we are most often not actually alone in our experiences.

We need each other. In the Adjunct Teaching Circle, we will meet weekly in order to:

share and discuss our experiences as adjunct teachers
support each other with practical and political ideas
pursue and clarify the personal and pedagogical questions that drive our work
take care of ourselves with writing and listening
share resources and awareness of current institutional trends
make and affirm connections across fields, institutions, and other forms of social and intellectual division, and
generate critical writing projects arising from our experiences as adjuncts

More information and application HERE

Fall 2026

Architecture for Poets Tuesdays 7:30-9pm ET (online)

In this rolling, generative workshop, we will take up some of the terms, practices, and questions of architectural study, with the explicit intent of identifying and wielding them as part of our poetic practices (within and beyond poetry).

Why this workshop now? One answer emerges from the question of the value of the function of syntax, structure, and space in poetry in our current moment, in which the reality and nightmare/fantasy of ecological and structural collapse materially and discursively iterate at pace, and the fleshly sensing of syntax's matter and meaning is increasingly absorbed and flattened by the metastasizing proliferation of LLMs. Another motivation for this workshop comes from my desire to convey beyond the institution my understanding of the important ways that both poetry and architecture require a meaningful oscillation between the abstract and the real, the conscious and the unconscious, the verbal and the visual.

Each week will focus on a specific concept or phenomenon, staged and unfolded in relation to linked concepts, images, and precedents. Possibilities include: the relationship between point, line, and plane; tectonics; thresholds; structure/ground relationship; site; plan and section; operations; formal/spatial binaries; micro, meso, and macro perspectives; systems thinking; sequence; movement; precedent; parti; and program. We will find grounding for this phenomenon in the poetics of a text, which will lead us to actively write and share this writing in smaller groups within the meeting’s time. Poetry, like architecture—architecture, like poetry—can touch or emerge from anything. Therefore, one aim of our meetings will be to elicit and track the emergence of spontaneous connections, perversions or subversions, the eruption (or irruption) of difference, as our individual trajectories show their force and direction.
More information and sign up HERE

Past

Summer 2025

Critical Poesis: Confrontation

Summer 2024

Critical Poesis: Empire

Summer 2024

Givingheed / To / Heedsgiving, Poetry Project

Summer 2022

Critical Community Poetics Practice Tuesdays

Summer 2020 -
Winter 2021

Being to Teach

Summer 2020 -
Winter 2021

Critical Poesis: Long Form

Summer 2020

Writing in the Manifold
an 11-week generative workshop, co-led with
a different poet each week

Winter 2019

Critical Poesis, The Poetry Project

Summer 2017

All Inseparable Now, Wendy’s Subway

Summer 2016

F***ing Theory, Poet’s House

A note on what Critical Poesis has meant over the years: what a poem is matters less than what it does; writing at the weird nexus of the critical and the poetic; attending to criteria for meaning; experimentation with critical postures and formal feelings; pursuing the body in the voice of the writing; writing through individually and communally proposed tactics; developing subject-object archives; querying our assumptions about audience and authority; investigating our forms of address and their relationship to ethics, chance, and loss.

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Note: All Summer 2020 workshops were supported by the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, under the title “For the Time Being: Writing in the Pause,” which partially funded my teaching as well as scholarships for each class.

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