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‘Merzbau,’ 1933, Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948, Hanover, Germany) . Installation, photographed by Wilhelm Redemann. As Karin Orchard of the Tate Modern writes, “one of the most important art works and myths in modern art, the inspiration for many installation artists, and still one of the most well known and published works by Kurt Schwitters, the Merzbau, in fact no longer exists. It was destroyed in a British air raid in October 1943 in Hannover. By 1937, when Schwitters left his hometown to follow his son into exile in Oslo, the Merzbau comprised a total of eight rooms in his house at 5 Waldhausenstraße in Hannover.” The Merzbau was an ongoing installation, a set of grotto-like additions to the interior of Schwitters’ home, constructed, like an oyster’s shell, of the digested detritus of its own surrounds. Inside its walls, Schwitters hid dirt, paint chips, newspapers, trash, jars of his own urine, the filched ephemera of friends. The installation was, in effect, an impossible archive

The Project 

The original impetus for Bread & Assembly was to – in some small way – address the Covid crisis: to provide ‘light relief’ to second-year poets in the form of cash ($100 per poet, real grocery money) and to offer an antidote to isolation, a living site for sharing our work with each other.

 

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Since first floating this idea, however, the world has changed. Many of us are protesting, giving money, participating in mutual aid as we can, and reading the news obsessively.  In light of this, we hope that Bread & Assembly can be understood as another way of thinking and acting through this time, in real-time, together: of trying out ways of articulating this moment and its legacy, and our responsibilities within it, and using poetry as an instrument to do so.

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The name of the project invokes a number of associations: the right to assembly, for starters, but also the poet Juvenal’s ironic summation of Rome’s tactics of domination –  ‘give the people bread and circus’ – cheap food and entertainment.  There is also the famous Bread & Puppet theater, and ‘bread and roses,’ a slogan (derived from a poem) used throughout the Suffrage movement.  ‘Assembly’ points to the practice of assemblage – of collage in three dimensions, and using often overlooked objects, detritus, and trash – and  ‘bread’ refers to food, materially and spiritually, but also $, because this is intended to help us all get through the summer. 

Eligibility

All students currently enrolled at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop are invited to submit. Only students  currently enrolled in the poetry program will receive a commission of $50 per work accepted, though all Workshop poets past and present are encouraged to submit. All who submit can have up to two pieces accepted, but are encouraged to continue to submit works for no additional compensation. 

 

The facilitators of this site will also be submitting work, but without receiving compensation.

 

Contributors retain the rights to their work if accepted and are welcome to publish elsewhere.

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String figure, Agukwu Nri.jpg

What to Submit

Standard Submissions

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Submitted work that responds to the prompt in the form of:

 

  • A PDF or word document of a poem/translation

  • An mp3 or voice memo

  • Video or digital art 

 

We encourage work that departs from the traditional text document and multimedial responses are most welcome.

 

Ephemera Submissions

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In addition to submitting works for publication, we will also be accepting more informal “ephemera” responses to be included on the site

 

Ephemera submissions include (but are not limited to):

  • Screenshots or photos of things encountered in daily life (some examples: grocery lists, emails, a particularly interesting leaf, etc)

  • mp3 of found audio or field recordings 

  • Notes or drafts of a work in progress/a partial work

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Prompt Submissions

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If you have an idea for our next prompt, please submit a short description (~200 words) to the Google form below. There is no payment for these submissions.

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