Ga(s)p: The Poetic Caesura as Embodied Archive
Environmental Writing Studio Workshop
28.10.2025 12:00 – 14:00
Location: Rachel Carson Center, fourth floor, Conference Room, Leopoldstr. 11a, 80802 Munich, Germany
Guest Speaker: Alexa Luborsky
We all begin life in water
We all begin life because someone once breathed for us
Until we breathe for ourselves
Someone breathes for us
Everyone has had someone—a woman—breathe for them
Until that first ga(s)p
For air
—M. NourbeSe Philip
A unique feature of poems is the opportunity for fragmentation. The expectation, unlike in prose, is that the line will not continue, but will enjamb (will cut itself in the middle of a clause) or end stop (will cut itself at the end of a clause) as an inherent part of its shape and movement. Sometimes even, the poem will ask for a break in the middle of the line itself. This specific kind of break is called a caesura. This workshop will focus on what opens when we break. Where we’re not “supposed to.” And if we might, in the end, see this break as a chance for breath. Our own, or the chance to breathe for someone else. Perhaps even, we’ll begin to think of the caesura, or gap, as a gasp in the embodied archive.
The workshop is limited to 15 people. To sign up, please email pauline.kargruber@rcc.lmu.de.
Alexa Luborsky is a writer and multimedia artist of Western Armenian and Jewish descent. Her poems and hybrid works have appeared in the Academy of American Poets University Prize Series, Adroit, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, and West Branch, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia and is currently a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. You can find out more at alexaluborsky.com.