Craft Seminar: Unrelenting War on Evil: Reading and Writing Poetry Against the State with Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
Craft Seminar: Unrelenting War on Evil: Reading and Writing Poetry Against the State with Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
2 Sessions: Tuesday, January 12 + Thursday, January 14
6:00-8:00pm ET
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist and poet. He is the author of Terror Culture, longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Big Other Book Award in poetry, and Antigone. Velocity. Salt.. His performance and installation work has been programmed at the Arab-American National Museum, the Center for Performance Research, the Whitney, the Poetry Project, the Abrons Art Center, and elsewhere, and has been supported by the National Performance Network, the MAP Fund, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and more. He has taught at Kundiman, Towson University, and the Poetry Project, and delivered guest lectures and workshops for universities and community organizations across the U.S. and abroad.
In a 2004 lecture, Amiri Baraka argued that the artist’s job is “to make war. The artist’s job is unrelenting war on evil.” This two-session craft seminar will take this charge as its starting point, thinking through what poetry might contribute to the struggle to transform and reshape the world by writing against state power and its attendant violence. As the political and social structures of this country continue to erode and transform under the pressure of overlapping, ongoing, and escalating crises, how might poets continue to develop resistant positions on and off the page? What are the limitations of these positions? We’ll grapple with these questions together, sharing our own theories and developing new ones, and working to understand how and where poetry might move in opposition to the contemporary world and its abundant cruelties.
We’ll discuss poems by Solmaz Sharif, Bertolt Brecht, Amiri Baraka, Samih Al-Qasim, Wendy Trevino, Sean Bonney, and others, developing close communal readings to extrapolate strategies, techniques, and aesthetics for poetic resistance to state power. We’ll then work to integrate these strategies into our own existing writing practices, building and refining our own embodiments of political resistant aesthetics through poetry. All levels of experience are welcome; “poetry” is defined as loosely as possible.
Highlights:
Think through the limitations and possibilities of poetic approaches to resisting or acting against the state, through close reading, analysis, and discussion
Develop theories of the strategies, techniques, and aesthetics of resistant poetry, and integrate those techniques into an existing practice
Receive generative prompts, and community feedback on drafts working with those prompts
This class has 3 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Monday, January 4.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist and writer. His debut poetry collection, Terror Counter (Deep Vellum, 2025) was longlisted for the National Book Award. His next book, Antigone.Velocity. Salt., is forthcoming from Deep Vellum in 2027.
His writing has been published and anthologized widely, including in Mizna, Foglifter, the Academy of American Poets, the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Protean, and elsewhere. His performance and installation work has been featured at the Center for Performance Research, Cannonball Festival, OUTsider Fest, Rhizome DC, the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival, the Washington Project for the Arts, Amherst College, Arizona State University, the Abrons Art Center, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and support from Hamiltonian Artists, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Poetry Project at St. Marks, the Arab-American National Museum, the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, and elsewhere. He has taught in the Theater Department at Towson University, and has given lectures or workshops at a variety of institutional and independent educational forums.
