A Class with Brigid Yuknavitch

Gesture

These experiments are about noticing gesture. Gesture arises between the body and language in ways that poetry does. Our experiments are to notice the body, to notice the everyday, the small moment that speaks to us through the body, that shows us life sometimes despite our ideas of life.

Thoughts:

A gesture is a language of the body. When it is spontaneous it expresses the body and its story. It seeks connection. Gesture may always suggest an intimacy, so close to the body and the desire to express. The child reaches for a mother’s face. An animal pushes up against us. A wild movement in us surprises us. Gestures are what we recognize and remember from our intimacies with ourselves and others: the gesture of the beloved, the child, the stranger, the mother, the father, the grandparent, the one who speaks with her hands or turns her head or taps her foot.

Our gestures can be trained to dance or to participate in organized forms of play or spiritual practice. These cultural gestures seem to me to always retain the intimacy of more spontaneous bodily language as they pass between one person and another: the artist and her partner or audience, the competitor, the one and the many or part and whole. And it seems that gesture erupts at the edges and interstices of language and culture ready to undo them and transcend them.

Symbolic gestures bring this body language into the field of social life where again the body or its movement seems to be necessary to speak what language alone cannot.

In this series of experiments you are invited to notice gesture in various ways. You will have poetic forms and examples from other poets to play with and help you notice gesture. All bodies welcome.

A six week group class

Purchase this class at corporealwriting.com under Online creative labs, current offerings