This course is for anyone inhabiting a body, with a desire to translate your felt world into poetry. We will embark on exercises bringing keen attention to sensory input from our breathing, ever fluidly-changing selves, translating the deeply individual languages of the body into poetic exercises. However you identify the vessel you live in, this course takes on poetics as a tool to query how we write about our lived experiences; we’ll explore how to write what a body feels, and why we feel we must. We will encourage the translation of our corporeal experiences on the page to generate further investigation—of how the fundamental need to translate inner experiences meets the gap between us and other human and non-human entities.
Khairani Barokka is a writer and artist from Jakarta, whose work has been presented in 16 countries. Her work centres disability justice as anti-colonial praxis. She is currently Researcher-in-Residence and Research Fellow at UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute, and Associate Artist at the National Centre for Writing (UK). Among her honours, she has been Modern Poetry in Translation’s Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, an Artforum Must-See, and an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow. Her books are Rope (Nine Arches) and Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), and she is co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches). Her next book is poetry collection Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches, March 2021).