From Sappho of Lesbos, through Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Audre Lorde, all the way to Bowie who blends poetry with audio-visuals, telling stories from a queer perspective is part of a tradition left to grow somewhere between the margins and the mainstream discourse. Narrating queer stories is almost always telling personal stories, with an awareness that personal experience is tied to the social and political moment that has historically oscillated from fetishization to discrimination of queer individuals.
With postmodernism and the Beat movement in the USA, the boundary between prose and poetry becomes almost completely blurred, and the Beat Generation starts telling stories about the post-war world, psychedelics, and the exploration of sexual identities, thus heralding the global expansion of subcultures: hippies, rockers, punks, post-punks... Somewhere there, Aleksa's personal relationship with poetic text begins. Through clear imagery, communicated in everyday language and with a subtle dose of irony and self-irony, he tells personal stories, stories of activists, stories of victims of the system, our stories.
Throughout a one-day workshop, we will discuss the history of queer poetry, key queer authors, and ways in which social and political issues are communicated through poetic text. The workshop consists of two parts. In the first part of the workshop, we will discuss poetry as a form suitable for telling queer stories, with a historical overview of some of the most significant authors. In the second part, through a series of exercises, we will begin writing poetic text that tells a story.
Workshop Facilitator: Aleksa Krstić, poet
Date: Saturday, May 25th, from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. (Hartefakt House, Boulevard of Despot Stefan 7)
Find the application form HERE.
Application deadline: May 23, 2024.
Up to 20 participants will be selected and notified via email no later than May 24, 2024.
The workshop is organized as part of the Slavic Soundwalking project funded by the European Union through the Creative Europe program, conducted by Hartefakt in collaboration with partners from Croatia and Slovenia. Over the next month, four writing workshops will be organized in Belgrade.
