Naropa SWP Week Two 2012

June 18-24
Week Two
Cultural Rhizomes and Intentional Communities

The rhizome is a tuber system, horizontal, a veritable Indra’s Net of association and growth and “high energy constructs”. It furthers a view of our mutual interdependence. How do our individual cultures, or unsung and diverse communities, interact and foster new creative projects in exchange and translation? How do we represent and cultivate the tangibles and particulars of our languages, mores, poetic forms and alternative communities or “temporary autonomous zones”? Our work this week will seek inspiration from intentional communities such as Black Mountain College, diasporas of the Middle East and South America, and Native American praxis. Some of our guests have been instrumental in political activism on behalf of LGBT communities. Other have founded projects that support multi-lingual libraries and schools. Our own writing can be
radical and powerful and reflect the diversity in our world.

Non-credit Course #: WRI 052, tuition: $475 per week

WRI 452, tuition: $1350 per week

WRI 752, tuition: $1800 per week

Sherwin Bitsui Saad bee nááchá: PoetryThe poems we create and learn from in this is workshop will help enable us to connect to the land and each other. We will examine Dine’ world-view and poetics for inspiration and draw from them – continuing ways of re-embodying language with song, thus reconnecting ourselves to the world around us and each other. We will write from this space and speak forth new poems from the ground we uncover together.

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of two poetry books, Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003). His honors include a 2011 Lannan Literary Fellowship, a 2011 Native Arts & Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship for Literature, a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award and a Whiting Writers Award. He is originally from Baa’oogeedí (White Cone, Arizona on the Navajo Nation). He is Diné of the Todich’íi’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tł’ízíłání (Many Goats Clan).

CAConrad (Soma)tic Poetry: Flowers Dreaming The Elevation AllegianceThe aim of (Soma)tic poetry and poetics is the realization of two basic ideas: (1) Everything around us has a creative viability with the potential to spur new modes of thought and imaginative output. (2) The most vital ingredient to bringing sustainable, human changes to our world is creativity. Among other things we will build a Human Hibernaculum, a place for our poems to THRIVE by the very community of our workshop!

CAConrad is the author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012), The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010), Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010). He is a 2012 Ucross Fellow, a 2011 Pew Fellow, and has conducted poetry workshops in New York, Seattle, Boise, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

Danielle Dutton Writing in PlaceWe will engage a weeklong meditation on place in writing, discussing everything from maps by Denis Wood to installations by Do-Ho Suh to fiction by Renee Gladman. We’ll consider the myriad ways writers use place as more than simple backdrop – as character, philosophy, motivation, commentary, etc. Readings will be geared toward prose, but all are welcome. Assignments and exercises will allow you to explore aspects of place in your writing.

Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life and S P R A W L, a finalist last year for the Believer Book Award. From 2006-2012, she taught fiction writing and literature courses in the Jack Kerouac School; during four of those years she also designed books at Dalkey Archive Press. Danielle is currently assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and ditor of Dorothy, a publishing project.

Allison Hedge Coke Rhizomes: Ride of a Lifetime
Cultural duty and attentiveness is generated by kinships working on a community member and nurtured by the member's tangible return. In our work, our intentionality, our active involvement, our return is a perpetual embrace, one we adhere to, further, honor, and support each time we deliver ourselves into creative process and recognition of our inheritances. This multi-genre workshop brings us back to reason. This course will include an eco-ethos and employ the learned behavior in migration as impetus for kinship value.

Allison Hedge Coke is the author of Dog Road Woman, Off-Season City Pipe, Blood Run, and Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. Her edited collections include: Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Effigies, and Effigies II. Hedge Coke directs the Literary Sandhill CraneFest and has had recent fellowships with Weymouth Center for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and the Center for Great Plains. She is MFA faculty for the University of Nebraska.

Bob Holman An Ecology of Consciousness: From the Poetry Communities
of the Lower East Side to the Global Language Crisis, A Poetry Activist’s PrimerOr, How Running the Poetry Project w/ Bernadette, Being the Original Slam Master of the Nuyorican, Starting The Stoop @ Steve Cannon’s Tribes, and Founding the Bowery Poetry Club, w/ Stops Along the Way to Produce The United State of Poetry for PBS & Create Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, Led Me To Host Word Up! Languages in Danger on PBS. And How I Co-Raised the Kids, Wrote the Books & Moved www.bobholman.com to Tumblr, In the Meantime.

Bob Holman is a co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance. He is currently writing The Endangered Cento, a video poem where each line is from a poem in a different threatened language. His research into the roots of hip hop in Africa led him to the understanding that of the 6500 languages on earth, half will be gone by the end of this century, and redirected his work towards using poetry to illuminate this crisis.


Laird Hunt Technologies of Disruption
Through examination of some of the approaches taken in postmodern fiction we will attempt to deepen our understanding of the range of techniques and tactics 21st century writers have at their disposal. Come prepared to write.

Laird Hunt's novels include The Impossibly and The Exquisite. A new novel, Kind One, will be published by Coffee House press in Fall 2012.

Pierre Joris & Nicole Peyrafitte domopoetics wor(k)shi/op
This workshop is an open space in and around which to practice personal, collective and rhizomatic processes of writing, translation and performance. The workshop offers a collective experimental & heuristic daily practice that moves between Peyrafitte’s concept of “Vulvic space” — a homeomorphic topology or transformable conceptual space enhancing the exchanges between self & other(s) — and Joris’ nomadic writerly processes and their insistence on a “barzakh,” i.e. a navigable archipelago or archipelago “in-betweeness.”

Pierre Joris & Nicole Peyrafitte’s collaborations since the early 90s include a range of duo multimedia performances, many book covers & illustrations, & raising two sons. Peyrafitte’s latest multimedia performance (including texts, paintings & onstage food preparation) is “Bi-Valve;” she is presently co-directing a film on artist Basil King. Pierre Joris just finished an anthology of Maghrebian literature, & has two books of poems forthcoming, Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj and Aljibar America.

Vincent Katz Crossing Over: Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity
This course will start from the thesis that art is created by interactions between and among individuals. We will look at the rich history of collaborative efforts, from French modernism to American experiments in combining word and image, word and sound, word and film, and publishing. Nexuses will include Pound and visual art, New York School, Black Mountain, and Wallace Berman’s Semina. Students will be given assignments involving responding to works of visual art and sound, including experiments in collaboration.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and teacher. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, two books of translation, and numerous articles and essays. Katz curated an exhibition on Black Mountain College at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid and edited the catalogue, Black Mountain College: Experiment In Art (MIT, 2002). He translated The Complete Elegies Of Sextus Propertius (Princeton, 2004) and is the author of Alcuni Telefonini (Granary Books, 2008), a collaboration with painter Francesco Clemente.

Stephen Motika Rhizomatic Lives: A Multiplicity of Engagements

We'll read and discuss work by a diverse group of artists and writers engaging the representation of subjectivity, self and other(s), as we write about lives, our own and those around us. We'll think rhizomatically, across chronology and history, in an effort to break down the genres of autobiography and biography and radicalize our own ways of telling. We'll look at work by Etel Adnan, Joe Brainard, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Danielle Collobert, C.S. Giscombe, Lyn Hejinian, Harry Partch, and Lisa Robertson. We'll deconstruct several commons forms--diary, letter, memoir, interview, obituary--and experiment with our own writing practice to create new texts and poems that represent the complexity of our lives.

Stephen Motika's first book, Western Practice, will be published by Alice James Books in April 2012. He is also the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009). A 2010-2011 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Resident, he is the program director at Poets House and the editor and publisher of Nightboat Books.

Alexs Pate Engaging the Good: Community, Writer, CharacterThis is a fiction and prose poetry workshop that plays off of the Aristotelian idea of good as “the thing for which all other things are done.” We will examine the various communities represented in the class, the writers themselves and the characters they create and talk about the way goodness operates at each phase of a story’s creation.

Alexs Pate is the author of five novels including the New York Times Bestseller, Amistad commissioned by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks/SKG and based on the screenplay by David Franzoni. Other novels are Losing Absalom, Finding Makeba, The Multicultiboho Sideshow and West of Rehoboth which was selected as “Honor Fiction Book” for 2002 by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Alexs’ first book of nonfiction, In The Heart of the Beat: The Poetry of Rap was published by Scarecrow Press in January 2010. His memoir, The Past is Perfect: Memoir of a Father/Son Reunion will be published next year by Coffee House Press.

Wang Ping Kinship of Rivers
We’ll brainstorm and meditate on rivers, their beauty, symbols and movements, their connections with us, within us… Rivers run through us as blood, as poetry, as art. We’ll write river poems in various forms: lyrics, prose poems, collages, and we’ll make rivers flags with our words and art, hang them as prayer flags, and let the wind spread our wishes into the world. Please check out www.kinshipofrivers.org for more details.

Wang Ping was born in China and came to the U.S. in 1986. Her publications of poetry and prose include American Visa, Foreign Devil, Of Flesh and Spirit, New Generation: Poetry from China Today, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, The Magic Whip, The Dragon Emperor, and The Last Communist Virgin. She won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities and is the recipient of NEA and the Bush Artist Fellowship for poetry. Her photo and video installation, “Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three Gorges,” was exhibited at Macalester Art Gallery in March, 2007 and Ban-fille Lock Center, 2008. She is associate professor of English at Macalester College.

Margaret Randall Befriend the Rhizome
What is connected, what broken? A poetry workshop for students serious about craft. Prepare to bring poems to first session. Class will include exercises and writing assignments. "We who see a field of broken bones / view pale faces / on memory’s imprint / befriend the rhizome: / neither beginning nor end. / Balanced at midpoint, / we resist chronology and claim our place / as nomads on a savage map of risk…"

Margaret Randall is a lesbian feminist poet, essayist, photographer and social activist. She spent 23 years in Latin America (Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua) and returned to the U.S. only to be ordered deported because of the content of some of her books. She won her case in 1989. Recent books of poetry include As If The Empty Chair / Como Si La Silla Vacia and Ruins. She lives in New Mexico.

Julia Seko Typographic Conversations: Letterpress as Collective Art
We’ll bring our voices together in this introductory letterpress workshop by writing, designing, and printing a collaborative project. Students will learn about typographic design and the basic techniques of letterpress printing. We’ll create community by setting type, mixing ink, folding paper, and running machinery, and surprise ourselves with what comes off the presses.

Julia Seko is a letterpress printer, book artist, and proprietor of P.S. Press. She learned letterpress printing at the Women's Graphic Center in Los Angeles and has had inky fingernails ever since. She is adjunct faculty at Naropa University, where she helped set up the letterpress studio, and is active in the Book Arts League. Her letterpress work is in university and private collections and has been exhibited in the United States and abroad.