Workshop, 17 March 2026, 15h00-17h00, Sala Ferreira Lima (6º piso, FLUC)
Flacofolio: Micro-Essay, Counter-Narrative, and Image
In her "Composition as Explanation" Gertrude Stein writes of "recurrence" as opposed to "repetition", as well as a circumstance in language of "beginning again and again". In this presentation American poet Leonard Schwartz will both read from his work and speak in this context about his own writing practice, especially in his books IF and Flacofolio, as well as in relationship to structures of juxtaposition and montage first explored in avant-garde American poetics by Ezra Pound. The micro-essay is a form that allows for both distillation and range.
Leonard Schwartz is an American writer and the author of numerous books of poetry, including, most recently, Flacofolio (with artist Heide Hatry), Actualities I: Transparent, to the Stone, Actualities II and III: Two Burned Hotels, and Actualities IV/V Comic Earth (2021, 2022, 2023, Goats & Compasses). Heavy Sublimation (Talisman House, 2018), If (Talisman House 2012) and Salamander: A Bestiary (Chax Press, 2017), with painter Simon Carr, are also out and about. His work in poetics The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), is inclusive of poetry, essays, and interviews. Other titles include At Element (2011), which explore the idea of an eco-poetics, as well as The Library of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008). He edited and co-translated Benjamin Fondane’s Cine-Poems and Other, with New York Review Books. From 2003 to 2018 he produced and hosted the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics. He is a professor of Poetics at The Evergreen State College in Washington State and a Visiting Professor of Writing in Columbia University’s Master of Fine Arts Writing Program. Schwartz splits his time between New York City and the Pacific Northwest.