PSNY Virtual Workshop: Stop Making Sense

An all-levels generative virtual workshop with poet Christopher Brean Murray!

Talking Heads’ songwriter David Byrne called his band’s concert film Stop Making Sense because he believed that we are too often imprisoned by our need to think rationally. Byrne acknowledges that his music may make emotional sense, but he still aims to undermine rationality’s grip on his creative process. In this workshop, we will aim to generate poems that depart from an excessive degree of rationality. We’ll employ various generative procedures to produce raw material that can be revised into poems. We’ll make use of aleatory methods, collage techniques, arbitrary limitations, and other disruptive strategies to deactivate stale thinking, aiming, instead, to access deeper layers of the psyche. These activities will be undertaken in a spirit of mutual support, play, and experimentation.

About the Instructor: Christopher Brean Murray’s book, Black Observatory (Milkweed Editions), was chosen by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2022 Jake Adam York Prize and was included on the New York Public Library's list of Best Books of 2023. His chapbook, The Fugitive Lands, is forthcoming from Gasher Press in 2025, and his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Quarterly West, and other journals. He lives in Houston, TX.

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