Spring 2026 Course Search

In an interview with the Paris Review in 1984, James Baldwin spoke of creative writing as a means of "finding out": "When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway." This is writing as a form of inquiry, so deep-seated that it's involuntary: the only real, consistently available means we have of gaining better purchase on the world around us, and on ourselves.

“When I combine imagery and text, I'm really just trying to surprise myself,” writes poet Diane Khoi Nguyen. In fact, there are many pathways to surprise when we start to experiment with multimedia. Certainly the result must have been surprising when the late John Giorno, in 1968, developed the phone-based, poetry performance project, Dial-a-Poem.

It is a commonly felt experience, in our current age of climate crisis, misinformation, pandemics, declining birth rates, late-stage capitalism, and the apparent twilight of democracy, etc., that we are living through (or at, or near) the end of the world. Where do we look for precedents for this feeling? To what extent does this dark life imitate art, or vice versa? Where does ‘dystopia’ end and realism begin?