October 9, 2026 Summer 2026
Teaching Page Against the Machine — a poetry workshop centered on practice, play, and finding new sites to weave language — for the second time with Ariel Yelen this summer was a true delight. Ariel is a deeply talented developer of prompts and other writing exercises, so even though we’d taught the same material together about a year prior, with each passing week I found myself chewing on something new.
In our first session, we were introduced to each other and the main goals of the class. Ariel wrote for our syllabus that these included “min[ing] the computational for what is poetic, center[ing] seemingly mundane interactions with everyday technologies, and critiqu[ing] techno-capitalist empire.” E.g. thinking of my computer while writing on it, I drafted a poem about a spacebar.
We also had our first exposure to Ariel’s prompts, which each week drew subtly on the assigned readings, exposing their internal structure or central conceit and challenging us to write with it ourselves. For example, after reading poetry by Etel Adnan that made heavy use of infinitives, we wrote poems starting each line with an infinitive of its own: “to … / to …” and so on.
Here’s a little peek into our class notes file, detailing in this case the prompt mentioned above! A screenshot of a Google document with black text and a white background. Text reads “Writing time!” with a series of bullet points that follow, including “A la Adnan, describe the events of your day thus far by using the present tense and infinitive “to __” (e.g. to wake up in a bed in Red Hook, to walk to the record shop, etc…) be as detailed as possible (2 min),” “Make a list of statements, leaving some white space in between statements (3 min),” and more. Week two had us consider how poetic form is [like] an algorithm, filtering a set of words through a set of rules to produce a text. We read villanelles, pantoums, sonnet crowns, and more. We also engaged with the seminal essay “The Rejection of Closure” by Lyn Hejinian, one of the postmodern “language poets” who emphasized poetic meaning as co-created by the reader. Hejinian introduces a distinction between “open” and “closed” texts, with closed texts proffering a preordained message and open ones inviting uncertainty and multiple interpretations. We considered how form (our poetic algorithm) and other tools create works that could fall into either category.
Next, we spent a week on writing which excavates the richness of daily life — from Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks” to a Kafka short story where Poseidon performs menial office work — in an attempt to discover which domains of our lives might be less subject to capitalism’s control, or more open to sly subversion against its demands. For instance, in her essay collection Calamities, Renee Gladman digests and transforms bits of jargon from her work, such as reimagining the “university level” (where she teaches) as a physical place that could be reached by bus and elevator. Similarly, Stacy Szymaszek’s Journal of Ugly Sites, which we also read together, collects gross and silly moments rather than the “beautiful” ones ubiquitous in lyric poetry: “having to say ‘I’m gay’ in this day and age,” “‘East Village frozen yogurt scene,’” “1% savings in pet store,” shoring up absurdity, some might say, against pressure to consume and produce.
Week four focused primarily on anti-war poetry. We began with Fargo Tbaki’s essay “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” which argues that “Craft is a machine for regulation, estrangement, sanitization,” and that as poets we must betray its stifling requirements in order to make our work alive and politically meaningful. We read works using a variety of tactics towards this end, including Etel Adnan’s “To Be in a Time of War,” where the narrator’s routine is repeatedly punctured by allusions to American wars abroad, and one of Diane Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, which encouraged us to stop settling for capitulations and to “ask for everything.”
During our final class, we shared projects developed during the workshop and reflected on what we’d learned. Some participants were able to submit work to be performed or displayed at SFPC’s residency at the National Academy of Design! These pieces included poems, videos, websites, and hybrid work. Thanks for following along with our course :)
A screenshot of our Zoom classroom on our final day! People are smiling against different backgrounds including a red-lit wall, the driver’s seat in a car, an outdoor area, and more. 
Here’s one of our participant projects that was presented at the National Academy! This is Erin Weeks’s poem, which she also coded into a website. A screenshot of a Zoom meeting shows a blue website with text and a column of spectators on the right side of the screen. The text on the website reads: “Forget your tech and your devices / forget photographs / let’s remember him the way a cyanotype remembers a flower / when the computers crash / the sun will last and last / when the archive flames flare / we’ll still remember his remembering / that we were seen by chromogenic eyes / seen and kept / there is longevity in that”.