Introduction: An Experimental Workshop Towards a Critical Flash Poetics

In September 2023, a group of seven Tibetan and non-Tibetan colleagues—who each embody various roles as writers, translators, scholars, and practitioners—gathered at Bard College for a panel called “Tibetan Writers Reflect on Practice, Memory, and Identity,” organized by Dominique Townsend and supported by the Warren Mills Hutcheson Memorial Fund. This public discussion of Tibetan literature was followed by a weekend of creative writing together. It was the continuation of the recent events celebrating Tibetan women writers that began at the University of Virginia in April 2022. And it was the culmination of an experimental writing group that met online at the fall and spring equinox throughout the covid pandemic as a source of connection and a creative outlet.

Despite torrential rains and floods that swept through New York City that weekend, disrupting travel and delaying trains, we arrived at Bard and were fortunate to enjoy a fruitful period of writing together. We are, each in our own way, invested in and shaped by Tibetan and Buddhist literatures, as writers (creative and/or academic) whose work engages with Tibet, the Himalayas, and Buddhism. As an exercise in experimental writing, before meeting we all composed short pieces of 500 words in response to an open-ended prompt on responsibility: What are the boundaries of and possibilities for responsibility? How might we break down or expand upon las ’gan as a translational starting point—a mode of action or a way of being in the world?

Over the weekend and in a follow-up virtual session, we spontaneously responded to a series of 20-minute writing prompts, crafted by Sienna Craig. These prompts touched on the following themes: ‘circles of motion’ inspired by Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem”; the source of feminine power, inspired by Ada Limón’s poem, “How to Triumph Like a Girl”; the overarching question of what ‘practice’ means; having to prove what you know is true, a prompt that emerged from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Blood”; and the concept of ‘the degenerate age,’ inspired by our own degenerating social and political times. While in the Hudson Valley, in a country home sitting around a fire, we read, listened, and shared impressions together.

The following are the fruits of our experiment in critical flash poetics with two to three pieces per contributor, arranged according to the prompt that sparked each piece. ‘Critical’ here refers to theoretical reflections embedded in our creative writing, and ‘flash’ to the imperatives of brevity and spontaneous writing, grounded in lived experience. The works are all ‘poetic’ in one way or another. We hope that readers enjoy the brevity of form at the intersections of literary lineages, languages, and experiences—Tibetan and Himalayan, English and American—with themes that echo in the multiple languages and worlds we mutually inhabit.

— Sienna Craig, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Tenzin Dickie, Holly Gayley, Tsering Yangzom Lama, Annabella Pitkin, and Dominique Townsend

Acknowledgements

For the prompt on response-ability, we acknowledge the important work on the topic by Dawa Lokyitsang, Sofia Ugarte, and contributors to the recent anthology Anthropology and Responsibility, edited by Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, and Christos Lynteris. Sienna Craig would like to acknowledge her fellow contributors in this collection, not only for their writings, which serve as exemplars and inspirations within and well beyond the bounds of Tibetan literature, but also for their friendship and collaboration. The work of Joy Harjo, Ada Limón, and Pádraig Ó Tuama shaped this writing. Craig would also like to acknowledge friends and collaborators Kunzom Thakuri, Yungdrung Tsewang Gurung, and Tashi Wongdi Gurung as well as colleagues Melanie Taylor, Abigail Neely, Christopher MacEvitt, Janice McCabe, and Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch and students Henry Eberhart and Jovani Orta. For Holly Gayley it is an honor to collaborate with such phenomenal women writers who bridge cultural worlds between Tibet and North America. This experimental writing group has been a lifeline, helping to share her lived experience in some of its most challenging contours. Annabella Pitkin would like to express her gratitude to her fellow writers in this collection for their dazzling writing, their insight, and their collaboration and friendship.   Her pieces here emerge in conversation with the work of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen, Ursula Kroeber LeGuin, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Joy Harjo. Dominque Townsend has been honored to spend time and share writing with these brilliant thinkers and writers and is also deeply indebted to her students and colleagues from Bard College, and to the Warren Mills Hutcheson Memorial Fund, which supported this group’s gathering at Bard College in 2023.