Matt Trease
is a poet, artist, teacher, and astrologer. He serves on the board of the Cascadia Poetics Lab, co-curates the Margin Shift reading series, and serves as the poetry editor for the CAELi Review. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is the author of The Outside (forthcoming Carbonation Press, 2024) and the chapbooks Later Heaven (busylittle1way designs) and rcvrdtxt (rlysrslit). He lives in the Salish Sea region of Cascadia on the homeland of the Duwamish people with his partner Xan, his son Harvey, and their dog, Hoopla. Find out more @ https://bio.site/mjtrease.
Poet as Radio: Writing from Intuition
A 5-week online poetry workshop designed for folks with a wide variety of experience with poetry and with a keen interest in spirituality and the occult. This course is more than a workshop—it’s a journey into the unknown, where you’ll discover hidden messages and ideas both from within yourself and the outside world. Through chance, divination, games, and ritual, you’ll learn to trust your intuition and let your spontaneity guide your writing.
Participants will engage in surrealist games to encourage spontaneity, explore the poet as a receiver of intuitive messages, and incorporate techniques like cut-up methods, tarot readings, and rituals into their writing practice. Readings will include works by Jack Spicer, Hoa Nguyen, and CA Conrad among others. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to deepen your poetic practice, this workshop will provide you with the tools and inspiration to transform your writing. Join us to tune into the frequencies of your creativity and uncover hidden messages within and emanating from the world outside!
Sundays 3-5:00 PM Pacific Time
November 10 – December 8, 2024
November 10, 17, 24
December 1, 8
Course Materials Week One
(Sunday, November 10, 2024, 3-5 pm PDT)
We’ll start by looking at how simple games can break open the writing process to allow for the unexpected. The Parisian Surrealists in the 1920s were fascinated by parlor games and how arbitrary rules allowed children to collaborate and create surprise and joy outside of conventional logic. They experimented with using variations on these games to pre-occupy the ego and access the imaginative part of the mind repressed by social pressures and education. Take a look at the opening section of The Book of Surrealist Games (complied by Alaistair Brotchie in 1995) and a short article on one of those games, The Exquisite Corpse, and see what rings some bells for you. Maybe even give one a try if you have time. We’ll discuss what these ideas have opened up for us, even if that happens to be a can of worms, and (time permitting) even try our best to play a round of Exquisite Corpse adapted for cyberspace.
Course Materials Week Two
(Sunday, November 17, 2024, 3-5 pm PDT)
Read: Week 2 Notes
For this week:
While I find most audio books to be a tortuous experience (probably because prose in our culture is far too utilitarian to be anything but monotone or cartoonish), I do love listening to talks and poetry readings, and PennSound is a great repository of those types of recordings. They probably have recordings of many of your favorite poets from mid-20th-century to the present. The PennSound page for Jack Spicer has recordings of his Vancouver lectures. As an exercise, listen to as much as you can from Lecture 1 (parts 1 and 2) and (unless you’re driving) spontaneously jot down words and phrases that come alive for you as you listen. These don’t have to be what Jack actually says; the goal is to listen for whatever arises in the moment. If you can do the listening and note taking in the dark, that would be ideal but go with what is most accessible for you. Later on come back to those notes, and see if you can make a poem from them.
Here’s print versions:
Internet Archive version of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer, Textbook of Poetry
Other reading for when you have time:
Jason Morris, “Crystal Gazing”—an essay on Clark Coolidge’s The Crystal Text, which is a 10-month daily journal in which the poet attempted to listen to a rose quartz crystal he was given as a gift. The book had long been out of print but has recently been reissued by City Lights.
Also, you might want to check out the work of Hannah Weiner, who in the 1970s began keeping a poetic journal in which she attempted to capture words she would often see appear on her forehead and on the forehead of others. Her book, Clairvoyant Journal 1974,gives a visual sense of the experience. But there’s also footage of her from Public Access Television in New York reading (with some of her peers) that conveys the auditory aspect of the experience.
And here’s a couple of albums I like to put on repeat to write with:
Son Volt, Trace
Adrienne Lenker, Bright Future
Course Materials Week Three
(Sunday, November 24, 2024, 3-5 pm PDT)
Read: Week 3 Notes
For this week:
Read Hoa Nguyen’s short essay “Divinatory Poetics” adapted from a panel talk at AWP in Kansas City earlier this year (if you have time, here’s a recording of an online version of that same panel from Sept of 2023),a 3-way conversation on Poetry and Tarot with Hoa Nguyen, Airea Matthews and Trevor Ketner from Catapult Magazine in 2017, and at least one of these samples of divinated poetry by:
Hoa Nguyen from Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books, 2016),
Noah Eli Gordon from The Source (Futurepoem, 2011),
Cedar Sigo from Royals (Wave Books, 2017),
Losarc Raal (aka Carlos Lara) from No Material (Black Sun Lit, 2023).
Try your hand at writing a poem by divination. Bibliomancy, or divination by text, is an ancient form of this. To prepare, on a small slip of paper write down a word or phrase that stands for something that is personally vexing you – it should be something in your everyday experience (i.e. not some abstract idea like capitalism or Trump or cancel culture. You get the picture). Fold it up and put it somewhere on you (a pocket works well) and be sure to keep it on you until you’re done. A day or two later, go to your bookcase and grab a number of books. The actual number doesn’t matter but should be at least 3. Try to see if a number pops in your head once you start or if you experience a feeling that says you’ve got enough. Stack the books in a random order and put the stack near your writing space. Wait another day then sit down to write. Take out your slip of paper and read it to yourself. Then, take the first book in your stack and turn to page 26. Scan the page until a word or phrase (best if it’s 9 words or less) jumps out and write it down as a single line. Then pick up the 2nd book and repeat the process until you’ve used all the books. Read the poem out loud and take some notes on what the poem says about your vexation. DO NOT REVISE!!!!!
If you really want to have fun with it, have someone else write down the vexation and read the poem back to them and see what jumps out to them.
Listen: Here’s some aural journeys beyond the looking glass by a couple of Alices
Alice Coletrane, Journey in Satchidanda
Alice Notley, “Two of Swords” from Live in Seattle
Course Materials Week Four
(Sunday, December 1, 2024, 3-5 pm PDT)
Read: information coming soon
Listen: information coming soon
Course Materials Week Five
(Sunday, December 8, 2024, 3-5 pm PDT)
Read: information coming soon
Listen: information coming soon