Poetry is a vital part of Saudi culture celebrated through popular poetry festivals and in regional televised poetry competitions where Saudi poets excel. Drawing from this rich tradition is Abdulatif Yousef, a renowned Saudi-born poet known for dazzling audiences across the Gulf with his multimedia-rich poetry readings.

The Envy of the World is a series of collaborations and conversations focused on the theme of black male kinship. It is centrally concerned with how black men and boys understand themselves in relationship not only to one another, but to the myriad forms of institutional violence that circumscribe their being and becoming.

Between July 18 to July 23, poet CAConrad will be in the Prismatic Park to build personalized (Soma)tic poetry rituals, free and open to the public. He will also have daily talks on the occult and the (Soma)tic practice; please see schedule below.

The Ghazal is a form whose aesthetics allow it to make a grand gesture in merely two lines. How does a successful Ghazal string these “independent, epigrammatic” couplets without sounding archaic or sentimental? In this workshop, we’ll take a brief look at the rich tradition of the Ghazal in Urdu, and explore some well-crafted Ghazals by contemporary American poets. Workshop participants will engage in writing exercises and discussion on their way to writing their own Ghazal.

“O friend, we had not seen thee at this time,
And yet a power is on me and a strong
Confusion, and I seem to plant thee there.
Far art thou wandered now in search of health,
And milder breezes—melancholy lot—
But thou art with us, with us in the past,
The present, with us in the times to come.”
—Wordsworth, The Prelude

“Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.”
—Colson Whitehead, “City Limits”

What would you say to your ghosts? The ones that are deeper than nostalgia? The ones leaning against a New York that no longer exists; the way you are different than yesterday.

Ghost Walk explores, through text and image, the moments we recall and refeel stepping through this city’s transient memory.

"I like to think of moving through the sentence (as writer or reader) as moving through a kind of terrain. The sentence is at once a map of where we have gone and where we wish to go.”
–Renee Gladman