PSNY Virtual Workshop: Feminist & Queer Militant Poetry

An all-levels generative virtual workshop with poet Katharina Ludwig!

Despite the vital role many women and queer folk have historically played in armed uprisings, militant, guerrilla, liberation, and resistance movements, the image of the armed woman ready to fight still unsettles patriarchal ideas of essentialist gender norms. Violence, directed not toward oneself but against others, remains a clearly coded masculine trait. And yet: women with weapons, girls with guns, female/queer militants always have existed, fought, wrecked havoc, and – notably – have written poetry.

In this workshop we will be looking at poetry by women fighters. We will read Nikki Giovanni, Assata Shakur, Louise Michel, Fusako Shigenobu, Ulrike Meinhof, Katerina Gogou, and others. We will discuss gendered violence in writing and beyond. Where does violence begin, where is it directed towards? How do fantasies of violence manifest in the written word? How does activism feed into poetry? What constitutes a weapon at all? How does a poem become a means of expression from the battleground, from the prison, from the underground? Can poetry be considered as a form of revolutionary direct action? Is poetry an explosive, a bomb? Can poetry be a call to arms? From this we will be working with short prompts in free-writing exercises building our own arsenal of poetics around violence and resistance.

No previous experience in writing poetry is required. Open to all.

About the Instructor: Katharina Ludwig is a writer, poet, theorist, artist, and editor based in Berlin and London. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London. Katharina’s research is concerned with narrative holes in women’s writing and the temporalities of the 'wounded text'. She tries to activate textual holes as a subversive feminist practice of resistance with insurrectional potential that treats the textual wound as a political and writerly strategy in opposition to authoritarian systems. Katharina’s first single authored book 'The Hole: An Insurrectionary Poetics’ is forthcoming as a parallel publication of one book and three opuscules with MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE and Cutt Press. Katharina has a poetry chapbook forthcoming with Baulk Press and is co-editor of VORTEXT magazine.

**This workshop will take place on Zoom.**