2013 Naropa Summer Writing Workshops

WEEK I: July 1-July 7 2013

History, Race and Polis, and “Karma" of the Modernists

The Kerouac School at Naropa University, founded in 1974 of its own volition and not as an extension or offshoot of an English Department, has roots in the most innovative aspects of the New American Poetry, and has extended itself over decades to include new praxis and world poetics, reveling in diversity and hybrid form. It seems important given the sorry divisive and tormented nature of US of A political adversity, including gender, class and racial divides, to review and examine “where we have been.” What is the legacy of Williams, Stevens, Pound and Stein, and their post-modern inheritors? How did they set the bar, what were their prejudices and why do we still feed off their work? What is the continuing narrative? Where has the gaze gone since, beyond Euro-centrism? This week we will look at our own modes of attitude, and the dark shadows of influence under newer world “orders.” The Kerouac School has always looked to collaboration amongst artists and art forms and the philosophies and orality of Asian and indigenous art forms. Poet/art thinker Bill Berskon will present a lecture on Gertrude Stein and her family art legacy, and Jerome Rothenberg will carry us forward to investigate the continuing shamanic powers of poetry.


Week Two: Hellfire, Drought, and Brimstone: A New Eco-Poetics

Week Three: Kulchur Connections and Beyond

Week Four: Third Mind: A Poetics of Performance, Cooperation and Affinity


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w1 History, Race, Polis: “Karma” of the Modernists

The Kerouac School at Naropa University, founded in 1974, has roots in the most innova tive aspects of

the New American Poetry, and has extended itself over decades to include new praxis and world poetics,

reveling in diversity and hybrid form. It seems important given the sorry, divisive, and tormented nature

of US of A political adversity, including gender, class, and racial divides, to review and examine “where

we hav e been.” What is the legacy of Williams, Stevens, Pound, Stein, and their postmodern inheritors?

How did they set the bar, what were their prejudices, and why do we still feed off their work? What

is the continuing narrative? Where has the gaze gone since, beyond Euro-centrism? This week, we

will look at our own modes of attitude, and the dark shadows of influence under newer world “orders.”

The Kerouac School has alwa ys looked to collaboration amongst artists, art forms, and the philosophies

and orality of Asian and indigenous art forms. Poet/art thinker Bill Berskon will present a lecture on

Gertrude Stein and her fa mily art legacy, and Jerome Rothenberg will carry us forwa rd to investigate the

continuing shamanic powers of poetry.

Noncredit Course: WRI 051, tuition: $500 per week

Kazim Ali Cities of the Interior

A city exists as a concatenation of time unfolding in space. Pretending to be

permanent as both political and physical entities, in fact they shift with alarming

speed. Reading (mostly) prose by Stein, Nin, Kapil, Perec, Mehmedinovic,

Kostelanetz, Adnan, Darwish, and others will help us to create texts that explore

both the internal and external architectures of cities and consider the ways they are

expressed by the writers who write within them and the ways they impress psychic

and creative pressures upon those same citizens.

Kazim Ali was born in the UK to Muslim parents of South Asian and Middle Eastern

descent. His books include four volumes of poetry, two novels, two collections of essays, as

well as translations by Sohrab Sepehri, Marguerite Duras, and Ananda Devi. Recently

he edited the essay collection Jean Valentine: This-World Company. In addition to

being associate professor of creative writing and comparative literature at Oberlin

College and founding editor of Nightboat Books, he teaches in the Stonecoast MFA

program and is a certified Jivamukti Yoga instructor.

Cara Benson & Jennifer Karmin

Language as Communal Action

Time and again, new forms of expression are created from the demands history

makes on individuals devising artistic strategies together. We take part in societal

currency: mouth opens, fingers tap, hands pull and push across the page. Drawing

on experiences in collectives and trans-situational manifestations, we will

investigate our own writing and engage in collaborative practice as a model for our

future world/s. We tape words to our faces and offer each other new names.

Cara Benson is the author of the poetry collection (made) and a forthcoming book for

SUNY Press on the poetry class she teaches in a New York State Prison. Her poems have

appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, Best American Poetry and are

forthcoming in Fence. Benson has performed poems in the offices of her Congressman to

the U.S. House of Representatives and on the streets of Washington DC, among many

other esteemed venues.

Jennifer Karmin’s multidisciplinary projects have been presented at festivals, artist-run

spaces, and on city streets across the U.S., Japan, Kenya, and Europe. She is the author

of the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice and her writing is published in the anthology

I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. In Chicago, she works

with immigrants as a community educator at Truman College, teaches in the Creative

Writing program at Columbia College, and curates the Red Rover Series.

poets, poems = telepa thic

landing pa ds

so here one sits

“airside”

wa iting for long-ago vessel

sailed into one’s dream last night

—Anselm Hollo

Amina Cain

 

Anselm Berrigan Listening as Practice

We’ll take as given that listening is an inherent component of reading and

writing, that listening is a mode of performance (to read a poem to yourself is to

perform that poem, however silently), and that listening is a skill, which means

one’s ability to listen (and by extension attend to the prosodic micro-elements of

sound and space that ultimately differentiate poetry from prose) can improve over

time. Readings to include Fred Moten, Dana Ward, Hoa Nguyen, Julian Brolaski,

Joanne Kyger, Harryette Mullen, Clark Coolidge, and Melvin Tolson. A complete

group reading of Douglas Oliver’s “The Infant & The Pearl” will also take place

across the four classes.

Anselm Berrigan’s books of poems include Notes from Irrelevance, Free Cell, and Zero

Star Hotel. Skasers, a book written jointly with John Coletti, was recently published by

Flowers & Cream. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, former artistic director

of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, consciously a member of no particular school of

poetry, and co-chair of writing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Sherwin Bitsui The Landscape of We

In this workshop, we will create poems by allowing certain shifts in our

perspectives to challenge our notions of place and identity. The space we create

together will be the ground on which our voices mingle with the present. We will

explore how contemporary Indigenous American poetry and perspectives help

renew our understanding of our connection to our shared world.

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press) and Shapeshift

(University of Arizona Press). He is Diné of the Deer Springs Bitter Water People

and is born for the Manygoats People. He is from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo

Reservation. His honors include the 2011 Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native

Arts & Culture Foundation Fellowship for Literature, a PEN Open Book Award, an

American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award.

Julie Carr My Wife My Car My Color and My Self: What

belongs to you? To what do you belong?

We will read and respond to texts from the 1950s and 60s that explore the notion

of belonging in order to ask: What belongs to you? To what do you belong? What

does it mean to be a citizen? What does it mean to “have” a color? a family? a

history? How do we both own a heritage and belonging to a nation? Own our

things and belong to the earth?

Julie Carr is the author of four books of poetry, including 100 Notes on Violence and

Sarah-Of Fragments and Lines. Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics

of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry is out from Dalkey Archive in early 2013. A new

book, RAG, is forthcoming from Omnidawn. She teaches poetry and poetics at the

University of Colorado, Boulder, and is the co-editor of Counterpath Press.

Rikki Ducornet Revelation / A Practice

I propose giving space to a series of small pieces that will reveal themselves as they

are being written. We will work organically and imaginatively, always attentive to

the profound sympathy between the creative process and rigorous thinking. Expect

to have a sequence of pieces that will both stand alone and work interactively,

informing one another with energy and lunacy.

The author of eight novels, three collections of short fiction, a book of essays, and five books

of poetry, Rikki Ducornet has been twice honored by the Lannan Foundation. She has

received the Bard College Arts and Letters award and, in 2008, an Academy Award in

Literature. Her work is widely published abroad. Recent exhibitions of her paintings

include the solo show Desirous at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

in 2007, and the group shows: O Reverso Do Olhar in Coimbra, Portugal, in 2008, and

El Umbral Secreto at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago, Chile,

in 2009. She has illustrated books by Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Forrest Gander,

Kate Bernheimer, Joanna Howard, and Anne Waldman, among others.

 

Lisa Jarnot Rogue State Epics

Beginning with Pound’s Cantos, we’ll branch out to look at contemporary

variations of the personal political epic, including Anne Waldman’s Iovis, kari

edwards’ a day in the life of p, and Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day. Come

prepared to think about your place in the polis and begin an epic.

Lisa Jarnot is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Some Other Kind

of Mission (Burning Deck Press, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001 and Salt

Publishers, 2003), Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003), and Night Scenes

(Flood Editions, 2008). Her biography of the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan was

published by the University of California Press in 2012 and a Selected Poems will be

published by City Lights in 2013. She currently lives in Sunnyside, New York, with her

husband and daughter. She works as a teacher, writer, and freelance gardener and is a

founding member of the Central Park Forest Nursery Preschool Cooperative.

Jade Lascelles

A Machine Made of Words: The Poetry of Letterpress Printing

William Carlos Williams describes a poem as “a small (or large) machine made

of words.” The Naropa letterpress imprint, Kavyayantra Press, takes its title from

a Sanskrit word meaning “poetry machine.” In this workshop, we will learn basic

letterpress techniques while considering this connection, our bodies as writing

technologies. Metal type, presses, and hands as different cogs in a single poetic

apparatus. How we can be both machines made of words and machines which

make words.

Jade Lascelles is a poet and letterpress printer based in Boulder, Colorado. A graduate of

the Kerouac School, she now serves as the Harry Smith Print Shop assistant and the book

review editor for Bombay Gin. She is a founding member of the eco-poetic publishing

project Inukshuk Collective and teaches writing and literature at Naropa University

and Front Range Community College. She is also quite fond of yoga and dance parties.

Rachel Levitsky Recuperative Strategies (OoRS .net)

OoRS is a mobile research laboratory that explores tactics to promote the reuse,

perversification, and reparation of precarious, outmoded, and correctable cultural

phenomena. In this workshop, we will deploy a range of modes including strategies

(detourning, queering, rearranging, assisting), documentary tools (pen, camera, tape

recorder, video), and research methodologies (archive investigation, field-notes,

sampling, collecting, inserting) towards a practice that both denaturalizes the

present and opens up new modes of hybridity, activism, and dwelling.

Rachel Levitsky is the author of Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003), NEIGHBOR

(UDP, 2009) and the novel, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013), and

the founder of the feminist avant-garde network, Belladonna* Collaborative. In 2010, with

Christian Hawkey, she started The Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS.net), a mobile

research unit variously located in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boulder, Brooklyn, Cambridge, New

York City, and the Universität Leipzig in Leipzig. She teaches writing at Pratt Institute.

Anna Moschovakis Poem-Essays and the Poetics of Ignorance

Reliance on partial knowledge; appropriation of material that is not understood;

a willfully ignorant stance; empathic imagination; irresponsible research;

untenable argument; aggressive wrongness; inexpert testimony; deliberate

decontextualization—these easily criticized attributes of a text can also be

powerful techniques for writing discursively, often wielded for political and ethical

uses. We will think—and write—through this hypothesis together, considering

also the question of privilege in relation to these approaches. We’ll read Redonnet,

Hawkey, Catherine Taylor, Markson, Spahr, others.

Anna Moschovakis’s recent books are: You and Three Others Are Approaching a

Lake and The Jokers, a translation of La violence et la dérision by Egyptian-French

novelist Albert Cossery. She teaches in the Writing Program at Pratt Institute and at

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is also a member of

Brooklyn-based publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, for which she heads up the

Dossier Series of Investigative Texts.

Mikey Muscat Joan Beard

 

Julie Patton Where the Wild Thinks Are

Out of classroom field notes and thrifts re cycle natural rhythms, far ranging

botanies of the soul, geologies spur’d risk. On a humble. Reading writing &

writing reading spellbound around all. Trace, list, lisp, map presence songs. Scout.

Common ground-selves turn inside out recall invoiced beeings (babbling brook,

magpies, aspen, boulders, insects) within and without. Being in touch with

inner elders, buried beoples stretch perceptual limits, dispell received categories

positing a “nature” here, “culture” there, and “human” and “other” tongue ties as

separate wear and tear. Sound musings, found objects, letters, textures, smells and

other tones be pencorporated into a collective holding pattern, swarm, lemming

aid or perfume. Performance, installation, or scat reference the tickled journey.

Permaculture as an ecopoetic framing device, Boulder: A Rock Opera and other ripe

callings may stir the pot.

Julie Ezelle Patton’s recent paper-piper planes bees Notes for Some (Nominally)

Awake (Yo Yo Labs, 2010), forthcoming F (Field Books, 2013), and Writing with

Crooked Ink (Belladonna 2013). Julie is a performance poet, visual artist, and

permaculturist who lives in New York City. Her visualertness can be found in I’ll

Drown My Book: Conceptual writing by Women (Les Figues), ((eco(lang)

uage(reader)), and Critiphoria. Julie’s Building by the Side of the Road (About

Place Journal: Rust Belt Tales, 2012), chronicles a storied land conservation and

eco-artist housing project she established in a povarty city 180 miles from the rock star

Detroit. Poet Tree Mitigation Services, Let it Bee Green, Salon des Refusé, Community

Service Berry Jam are some of niches mined in this rust belt galaxy. Julie vocallaborates

with composer/instrumentalists Daniel Carter, Paul Van Curen, Drew Gardner. Fall

2012 found her wording notes with Brad Jones at the Stone in New York City, and

noting words with Anne Waldman at Poets House and Lee Ann Brown at a Museum

of Moving Images Event dedicated to John Cornell. Julie has been honored with a

Doan Brook Association 2012 Watershed Hero Award, a 2010 and 2008 Acadia Arts

Foundation Award, and a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (Poetry).

She’s an award-winning educator who has taught in public schools, museums, and

universities in the Americas and abroad.

Frances Richard

Language Has a Body: Writing as an Energy Container

Language is immaterial—it is made of signs, follows rules, and outlasts its users.

But language has a body, too—it takes form in synaptic flashes, breathing, muscle

movements, typography, radio waves, electronic pulses. How do we write across

these valences? How do nonsense and invented music work in this technology of

mind, which is not private but shared? How do we track libidinal rhythms, say the

unsayable, and risk gobbledygook, yet communicate with other people? Letting

what we write become an energy container, we’ll experiment.

Frances Richard’s books include Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012), The Phonemes (Les

Figues Press, 2012), See Through (Four Way Books, 2003), and the chapbooks Shaved

Code (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) and Anarch. (Woodland Editions, 2008).

She writes frequently about contemporary art and is co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner and

Sina Najafi, of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet

Books, 2005). Currently she teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Christopher Stackhouse

Revisiting James Baldwin’s Views on the Artist In American Society

In James Baldwin’s Uncollected Writings: The Cross of Redemption, he

uncompromisingly puts the responsibility of telling the essential truths about the

society that produces an artist on the artist. The artist is a model of expressive

individuality in his/her culture fostering healthy heterogeneous discourse. Using

Baldwin’s texts to configure models of thought and approach, we will discuss the

socio-political agency in the work of American artists in various fields to inspire

analytically informed poetry and prose.

Christopher Stackhouse is a writer and artist. Plural (2012) is a volume of his poetry

published by Counterpath Press. Seismosis (2006) is a collaborative book of Stackhouse’s

drawings in dialogue with text by writer John Keene. He is a recent visiting critic at

the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art, Hoffberger School of Painting, and, guest

lecturer at Bethel University’s, New York Center for Art & Media Studies.

Virgie Patton

 

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w2

Alarm! Human driven modification to the planet’s ecosystems contributes to rising atmosphere greenhouse

gas levels, causing extreme fluctuations in weather, altered species distribution, and increase in

extinction rates. Whole cultures and languages are going out of existence as well, affected by basic

human struggle for surviva l under increasing duress. As we experience, our planet is undergoing

unprecedented instances of climate change, with wa ter clearly emerging as the inestimable element in the

balance of our “oikos” (root of the word “ecology” meaning house). Fire, floods, and drought hav e been

causing hav oc, as well as strange denial in the will or the polis around issues of gun control in a

culture run wild with violence. The connections between man-made plunder, from fracking to wa r, hav e

been established in terms of how we eschew guardianship of our planet and our own communities. Can

poets and artists envision an alternative to this dystopia? How do we address violence, amnesia, deathwish,

and the extreme, almost biblical, conditions of an altered world? How are we adapting?

Noncredit Course: WRI 052, tuition: $500 per week

Rae Armantrout Going Negative

How have poets said “No!” or “Enough!’ to the excesses of global capital? In this

course we will look at the minimalist poetics of writers such as Lorine Niedecker

and Graham Foust along with the erasure techniques of Ronald Johnson and Susan

Howe. Students will produce their own “erasure poems.” They will also respond

(in poetry) to the work of poets such as Rodrigo Toscano and Vanessa Place who

use their positions inside major institutions (criminal courts and labor unions,

respectively) to de-form and repurpose dominant narratives, jamming the circuits.

With the poets above (and others) as examples, you will be encouraged to “talk back.”

Coming from the nexus of Bay Area Language Writing, Rae Armantrout has published

eleven volumes of poetry. Her book Versed won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and

the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her 2011 collection, Money Shot, focused, in

part, on the impact of the Wall Street mentality on our culture. A new book, Just Saying,

appeared this year from Wesleyan.

CA Conrad Integral Crystal Application For Dispelling Information

Fatigue: A New (Soma)tic Poetry Primer for the Ritual of the

Everywhere Poem

This mechanistic world, as it becomes more and more efficient, resulting in

ever increasing brutality, has required us to find our bodies to find our planet in

order to find our poetry. (Soma)tic poetry rituals aim our attention at two basic

principles: (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, humane changes to our world is creativity.

CA Conrad is the author of TRANSLUCENT SALAMANDER (TROLL

THREAD Press, 2012), A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON:

New (Soma)tics (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 2011 PEW Fellow, a 2012 UCROSS Fellow,

and a 2013 BANFF Fellow.

“Bardic, O Self, Visitacione, tell naught

but what seen by one man in a va le in Albion,

of the folk, whose physical sciences end in Ecology,

the wisdom of earthly relations,

of mouths & eyes interknit ten centuries visible

orchards of mind language manifest human,

of the satanic thistle that raises its horned symmetry

flowering above sister grass-daisies’ pink tiny

bloomlets angelic as lightbulbs—”

—Allen Ginsberg, “Wales Visitation”

Samuel R. Delany The Maze and The Mirror

What do you want to do with your writing? Because the workshops are small,

we can be surprisingly focused for each student. We can talk about what makes

writing last through time. We can talk about where you’d like your writing to go.

There will be some intermittent reading, in both poetry and prose. We shall share

our efforts through reading aloud in the classroom.

Samuel Delany’s stories are available in Aye, and Gomorrah and other stories and

Atlantis: Three Tales. His novels include Nova, Dhalgren, the award-winning Dark

Reflections, and—most recently—Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and a

revised and enhanced edition of his 2004 novel Phallos. His essay collections comprise

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Starboard Wine, Longer Views, and Shorter Views. A judge

for the 2010 National Book Awards, he was the subject of a documentary The Polymath.

His interview in the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series appeared last spring.

Robert GlUck

Lost in Strangeness: Writing in Heav en: Endless Narration

Jesus saw some little ones nursing—He said to his disciples, “What these little

ones who are nursing resemble is those who enter the kingdom.” They said to him,

“So shall we enter the kingdom by being little ones?” Jesus said to them, “When

you make the two one and make the inside like the outside and the outside like

the inside and the above like the below, and that you might make the male and the

female be one and the same, so that the male might not be male nor the female be

female, when you make eyes in the place of an eye and a hand in place of a hand

and a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image then you will enter the

kingdom” —from The Gospel According to Thomas.

Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including two novels,

Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist and a book of stories, Denny Smith. Glück

prefaced Between Life and Death, a book on the paintings of Frank Moore, and he

edited, along with Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting

The Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Glück was co-director of Small Press Traffic

Literary Arts Center, director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, and associate

editor at Lapis Press. His first book of stories, Elements of a Coffee Service (1982),

has just been republished by Ithuriel’s Spear.

HR Hegnauer The Least Deformed Book

We’ll root ourselves in Robert Glück’s question, “What kind of representation

least deforms its subject?” While also keeping in mind the week’s ecological

themes, this class manifests itself out of the destruction of the planet, the human,

and language. We’ll focus on publishing as an archive of our time and then create

a new press with a necessary mission. We’ll also physically publish our first book

from a collection of the week’s writing.

HR Hegnauer is a writer, freelance book designer, and website designer who specializes

in working with small presses and individual artists. She is the author of Sir (Portable

Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2011). As a designer, HR has worked with more than 350 writers

and translators. She is a member of the feminist publishing collaborative Belladonna*

and the poets’ theater group, GASP: Girls Assembling Something Perpetual; she has also

acted in movies directed by Ed Bowes.

Fred Moten The General Balm

On the poetics of drought and flood, nothingness and abundance, privation and

fullness, thirst and saturation: John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Charlie Patton,

Steven Feld, M. NourbeSe Philip.

Fred Moten is the Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke University.

He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

(University of Minnesota Press), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works), B. Jenkins (Duke

University Press), and of two forthcoming books: The Feel Trio (Letter Machine

Editions) and consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press).

..

 

Eileen Myles Long Poems

Let’s write a long poem all week looking at such artists as Whalen, Scalapino,

Snyder, Waldman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and CA Conrad as our guides. We’ll

work inside & outside and definitely consult a book that deals with a philosophy of

intimacy & space by Peter Sloterdijk called Bubbles. Give that a look now if you can.

Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moved to New York (where

she still lives) in 1974 to be a poet. Latest books are Snowflake/different streets,

Inferno (a poet’s novel) and The Importance of Being Iceland for which she received

a Creative Capital/Warhol art writing grant. She’s a 2012 Guggenheim fellow.

Kristin Prevallet Surviva l Poetics

As writers we live in this culture of fractured consciousness with our antennae

tuned into the frequency of apocalyptic urgencies as they surface in the

unprecedented ecological and personal shifts of these times. We tune in, investigate,

and find poetic and other artistic forms to address the world in its state of constant

change. This workshop will integrate your creative vision with its potential to heal

symptoms manifesting in your body and mind—and use all of your resources to

begin imagining possible futures that will allow you to open larger fields of creative

awareness and in doing that, learn how to survive. We will read, write, and think

in relation to sources including Akilah Oliver, Anne Waldman, Leslie Scalapino,

Francisco Varela, V. S. Ramachandran, and Amit Goswami.

Kristin Prevallet is a poet, performer, and change worker whose fifth book, Everywhere

Here and in Brooklyn (A Four Quartets) was published by the Belladonna*

Collaborative. She edited and introduced the critical edition of Helen Adam’s work,

A Helen Adam Reader (National Poetry Foundation) and recent writing appears

in Reality Sandwich, Spoon River Review and Fourth Genre: Adventures in

Nonfiction as well as in the anthologies I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing

By Women and Rhythm of Structure: Mathematics, Art, and Poetic Reflection.

Founding director of the Center for Mindbody Studies, she is a board certified

hypnotherapist and integral health coach with a private practice in Manhattan.

Julia Seko The Word/World Transformed

Letterpress printing is a dynamic interaction between the printers, the text, and

the craft itself—the materials, tools, and presses. Through this process we craft

and envision worlds on paper. In this introductory workshop, we’ll cover basic

letterpress skills and discuss choices in typography, materials, and structure.

Together we’ll find our way to the finished work.

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 her letterpress work is in university and private collections.

Most recently, she participated in the Al-Mutanabbi Street project.

Ron Silliman Post-Everything Poetics

The history of poetry is the history of change in poetry, closely intertwined with

changes in the material world. But what happens when global empires come

apart? When all options have been tried? When there are a million poets & only

capital & the biosphere are truly global? How do you write what’s next if next isn’t

a given? What then?

Ron Silliman has written and edited more than thirty books, most recently Wharf

Hypothesis, and had his poetry & criticism translated into twelve languages. He has

edited In the American Tree, Tottel’s, and The Socialist Review. Silliman was a Kelly

Writers House Fellow, winner of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and a

fellow of the Pew Foundation & the NEA. His blog has had over 3.5 million visits.

Tineke de Lange Leopoldine Core

 

 

Orlando White Desire Lines

A desire line is a pathway constructed by footfall with an impulse to navigate inbetween

manmade structures like sidewalks and paved roads. To create a trail from

one place to another, not only to establish a short distance of travel, but also enact

a personal intuitive design. In this workshop, we will explore desire lines and write

unconventionally about how this concept adapts into imagination to encourage

our instinctual risks even more.

Orlando White is the author of Bone Light (Red Hen Press, 2009). Originally from

Tółikan, Arizona, he is Diné of the Naaneesht’ézhi Tábaahí and born for the Naakai

Diné’e. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Evening Will Come: A

Monthly Journal of Poetics, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of a Lannan Foundation

Residency and the 2012 Bread Loaf John Ciardi Fellowship. He teaches at Diné College

and lives in Tsaile, Arizona.

Elizabeth Willis

Freecycle Aesthetics?: Taking Poetry Off the Grid

What does the future sound like? If we change its sound, what will follow? Is

your poetic practice sustainable? What would a ‘progressive’ poetics look like?

Can poetry be useful? What kinds of unmaking will lead us to remaking? What

is gained by re-engaging with the handmade, the salvaged, the wild? In this

workshop, we will practice acts of cultural dumpster-diving, in search of a reopening

of the field.

Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book, Address (Wesleyan, 2011), was awarded the PEN

New England / L. L. Winship Prize for poetry. Other books of poetry include Meteoric

Flowers (Wesleyan, 2006); Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003); and The Human

Abstract (Penguin, 1995). She is also the editor of a volume of essays entitled Radical

Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (Iowa, 2008). She teaches at

Wesleyan University and is a 2012–13 Guggenheim fellow.

Lidia Yuknavitch Corporeal Writing

How do we address violence, amnesia, death wish, and the extreme—almost

biblical conditions—of an altered world? How are we adapting? To these

questions I counter with: What does it mean to write from the body as an

epistemological site? What forms reveal themselves when we turn away from

inherited cultural scripts and focus on developing stories, voices, rhythms, images

that are body-born? Back to our animal selves, back to our breathable blue past, in

this course we will create a series of “alternative warrior myths” and “eco-prosaics”

that stake claims on how we endure.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the anti-memoir The Chronology

of Water, the novel Dora: A Headcase: A Modern Farce, and

three books of experimental short fictions. She is the recipient of

an Oregon Book Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award,

and she was a finalist for the Pen Center Award in Creative

Nonfiction. She lives, loves, teaches, and commits art banditry in

Portland, Oregon.

Tom Fitzsimmons

a book about trees

It’s like a park

except that all its windows

face outside

you look up at the world &

go: oh

—Eileen Myles

 

[

 

w3

 

This week we are reaching out to poets and writers whose work has been strategic in addressing other

kulchurs through translation, educational projects, investigative poetics, and cross-cultural collaboration

of all kinds with forays into Morocco, the UK, India, and pockets of our own continent. We are asking

our guests to bring us the news from other zones of creative and generative activity. How are we

suited to create our own schools and cultural programs, and raise support for artist-run enterprises

that might be sustainable into the future? How can we be progressive entrepreneurs of a new crosscultural

dynamism? How can we better understand and enlarge our awa reness through forums, archives,

libraries, international online magazines, study centers, and residencies that promote exchange through

study and scholarship of languages and cultures? The projects to consider might reach back centuries, or

exist in the interstices of a new hybrid diaspora.

Noncredit Course: WRI 053, tuition: $500 per week

Meena Alexander

Poetry, Landscape, Identity: Elements of India

How is identity made and unmade in poetry? What might it mean to evoke

a poetics of dislocation? We’ll read poems from the Indian classical traditions

and discuss poetics—notions of rasa and of akam and puram (inner and

outer landscapes); poems by Dalits (members of the so called `Untouchable’

community); poems from the diaspora. We’ll figure out how the landscapes of

poetry might flow through layers of time, how poetry and history are bound

together, even as they split apart.

Meena Alexander was born in India. Her poetry has been anthologized, translated, and

set to music. Her most recent book of poetry is Quickly Changing River; a new volume

Birthplace with Buried Stones is forthcoming. Poetics of Dislocation appears in the

Michigan Poets on Poetry series. She has received awards from the Guggenheim and

Fulbright foundations and the Arts Council of England. She lives and works in New

York City.

Tim Atkins

Poetry and the Art of Playing: words, games & wonder(s)

We will make poems with the aid of John Keats and his concept of Negative

Capability, Zen master Dogen’s Buddhist notion of emptiness, and Andrei

Codrescu’s Ten Muses of Poetry: Mishearing, Misunderstanding, Mistranslating,

Mismanaging, Mislaying, Misreading, Misappropriating clichés, Misplacing

objects belonging to roommates or lovers, Misguided thoughts at inappropriate

times, funerals &c., and 10. Mississippi. Bernadette Mayer once asked: “Are you

supposed to write only one kind of poetry? I don’t think so.” Serious, silly, free,

formal, wild and/or withdrawn—all poems/poets are welcome!

Tim Atkins is the author of Horace, 1000 Sonnets, Petrarch (three volumes), Folklore,

and Honda Ode (a Japanese translation of On the Road). Editor of the long-running

online poetry journal onedit, he teaches at the University of East London, and is

London correspondent for Lungfull! magazine.

I carry buckets

from the pond

more than my arms can bear.

Under a full moon

fish appear

like flies in amber.

—Jerome Rothenberg

We hav e to understand that since the planet is taking care of us, our job is to protect ourselves from

ourselves. And once that change is made, that we are protecting ourselves from ourselves inside a symbiosis,

then we can go on and create a politics that is different from the politics we hav e now...

—Peter Warshall

Kulchur Connections and Beyond

marion ettlinger

Max Regan

 

 

Omar Berrada & Sarah Riggs Creating/curating the between

This workshop is a virtual invitation to Morocco and France to hatch your own

fresh writing. Participants will view film poems we’ve produced in Tangier, witness

the translation of poems from the 1001 Nights, and of contemporary French poet

Oscarine Bosquet, as well as “guest curate” art happenings at Dar al Ma’mûn in

Marrakech. No foreign language experience necessary, just a willingness to let your

writing grow out of collaboration and an international context.

Omar Berrada directs the library and translation center at Dar al-Ma’mûn in

Marrakech. Previously, he hosted shows on French national radio and public programs

at the Centre Pompidou, and curated Tangier’s International Book Salon. He translates

American poetry and philosophy into French, and has recently edited, with Erik Bullot,

Expanded Translation – A Treason Treatise (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2011) and,

with Yto Barrada, Album – Cinémathèque de Tanger (Virreina/LDC, 2012).

Sarah Riggs, the author of Autobiography of Envelopes (Burning Deck, 2012), 60

Textos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), Waterwork (Chax Press, 2007), and Chain of

Minuscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling (Reality Street Editions, 2007), has

(co-)translated from the French poets Isabelle Garron, Marie Borel, Etel Adnan, Ryoko

Sekiguchi, and Oscarine Bosquet. A member of the bilingual poetry collective Double

Change (www.doublechange.org), and founder of the interart nonprofit Tamaas

(www.tamaas.org), she lives in Paris, where she teaches at NYU-in-France.

Lisa Birman Writing Home

What is home? A country? A house? A body? A person? Can our writing be a

home? Can we write ourselves (a) home? Where do we write from? Whom do we

write to? In poetry, in prose, in reading, in conversation, we will explore these and

other questions. We will write the grounds, the memories, the hopes, the sounds, the

communities that make our homes. Writers of any genre and experience are welcome.

Lisa Birman is the author of For That Return Passage—a Valentine for the United

States of America, and co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics

in Action. Her work has appeared in Floor Journal, Milk Poetry Magazine,

Trickhouse, and not enough night. Lisa was the director of the Kerouac School’s SWP

for more than a decade and taught for Naropa’s MFA in Creative Writing.

Junior Burke Sentient Verse

In this course, we will infuse contemporary issues and sensibilities into classical

modes from the expanse of world poetry. Proposed forms include: Sapphic

(Greek), Pantoum (Malayan), Qasida (Arabic), Choka & Katuata (Japanese),

Villanelle & Sestina (French), Madrigal & Rispetto (Italian), plus the English

Ode & Sonnet. As a starting point, bring two to four selections of your work (no

formal structure necessary) to be read aloud.

Junior Burke is a novelist, dramatist, and lyricist. His novel, Something Gorgeous,

which explores the world behind Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, was republished in

2012. A set of his first studio recordings tentatively titled With You in Rockland, is

being readied for release on the Di-Tone label. He has taught at the Kerouac School since

1999, and served as chair of Writing & Poetics from 2006 to 2010.

Victor HernAndez Cruz Bi-lingualism and American Poetics

This course will explore migratory poetics, modernism in Latin America, and

Modernism in the United States. We will discuss sociologies, politics, and cultural

traits that exist right through the Saxon/English occupation. We will read and

discuss some of the early bi-lingual poems of William Carlos Williams, dwell

upon the difficulties of Translation; how to integrate and melt two languages

within a single poem: does it enhance the creative process of the poem or thus

it create chaos? The class will encourage bi-lingual readings and even tri-lingual

situations.

Víctor Hernández Cruz was born in the small mountain town of Aguas Buenas, Puerto

Rico. Reading the Beats and Afro American poets and writers he began to write as a

teenager, producing his first booklet Papo Got His Gun in 1966. Some of these poems

made it into Evergreen Review, poems along with a spread of photos. It opened up a

new level of audience; Random House published a volume called Snaps in 1968. He

currently writes in both Spanish and English and divides his time between Puerto Rico

and Morocco where his wife and son live. His poems have been translated into Dutch,

German, French, Greek, Turkish, and Chinese.

‘

‘

Janet Feder

 

 

Tonya Foster Dislocations: Place and Poetry

“Weaving together the two sides of the road/Joining the two banks, below and

above the water.” Reading the poem as a site/sight of encounters between material

and conceptual geographies, this workshop will explore poetic elaborations of

space, place, and time in the works of Aimé Césaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Frantz

Fanon, and others.

Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a

variety of journals from Callaloo to The Hat to Western Humanities Review. She

is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna Press) and co-editor

of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art. A recipient of fellowships

from New York Foundation for the Arts, Macdowell Colony, the Mellon and Ford

Foundations, she teaches in Bard’s Language & Thinking Workshop and is a student at

the CUNY Graduate Center in the doctoral program in English.

C.S. Giscombe

Wandering Carniva l/Carniva l Wandering Theatre for Poets

The aim here is for angel-headed poetry to meet and interact with the low haunt

of county fairs, sideshows, games of chance, etc. (M. Bakhtin hovering, a serious

afterthought, in the background); out of this meeting will be produced a theater

of danger, a performance made by and of several voices and concerns, and a

unrepairable fissure in things as they are (one that will involve and disquiet the

citizenry). Bring a mask or something that might be a costume.

C. S. Giscombe’s recent poetry books are Prairie Style and Giscome Road. His prose

books are Into and Out of Dislocation and (forthcoming) Back Burner. Prairie Style

was awarded a 2008 American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation;

Giscombe is the 2010 recipient of the Stephen Henderson Award in poetry, given by

the African-American Literature and Culture Society. He is a long-distance cyclist. He

teaches poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bhanu Kapil & Andrea Spain Writing the Event

We hope to create a space in which a philosophy of the event cross-germinates

with creative practice. Short talks on post-colonial theory will be transposed with

physical experiments of all kinds. Please come prepared to perform anti-clockwise

and clockwise movements as an activity of form. Please come prepared to write the

vectors that orbit the event, or approach it, refuse it, burn up: absorbed, instantly,

by a space that’s never seen. Novelists, poets, and cross-genre writers are very

welcome. You will leave the week with a radical revision of work you’ve already

begun, or a set of notes [vectors] with which to: continue, write forward, begin.

Bhanu Kapil is the author of five books of experimental writing, most recently Notes for

a novel not yet written: Ban. She is a core faculty member who teaches year-round in

the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Andrea Spain’s work investigates philosophies of time, materiality, and becoming.

Her manuscript Postcoloniality and Event, explores the role of time, memory, and

perception in the postcolonial present. She teaches literature and cultural theory at

Mississippi State University. Bhanu and Andrea have been in symbiotic conversation

about the event, Elizabeth Grosz, and the form a book might take [never take] since

1995. They co-taught a class on Francis Bacon, Deleuze, and triptych forms in a prior

Summer Writing Program.

M. NourbeSe Philip

Noise, Silence, and the Sacred: Performing Trauma, Ritualizing the Archive

How do we translate the silence of the archive into the noise of the text? Is there

a role for the “sacred”? How do we untell the histories of trauma? These are some

of the questions the workshop will explore through techniques such as erasure.

We will pay particular attention to how we may find the/our/my/your Story in

the silence of the archive. We will explore how to read Silence and find our way

through the Noise. We will read out loud in ensemble to explore the boundaries of

sound and silence. Students are encouraged to bring their own archives—public or

private—to work on.

M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright living in the space-time

of the City of Toronto. Her most recent work, Zong!, is a genre-breaking poem which

engages with ideas of the law, history, and memory as they relate to the transatlantic

slave trade. Her honours include the Pushcart Prize, the Casa de las Americas prize

for She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks, and fellowships from the

Guggenheim and Rockefeller (Bellagio) Foundations.

 

Michelle Naka Pierce & Chris Pusateri

The Poetics of Ruin

Writers and artists such as Bataille, Abramović, and Mendieta explore how

impermanence acts as a basis for artistic exchange. In a culture that emphasizes

preservation and the myth of lasting value, what is the function of decay, remnant,

absence, or ephemera? What constitutes identity in the performative? The

Poetics of Ruin problematizes the relationship between artist, audience, and art

production and recasts art and its cultural value.

Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of Continuous Frieze Bordering Red (2012),

awarded Fordham University’s Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize; She, A Blueprint

(2011); Beloved Integer (2007); TRI/VIA (2003); and several chapbooks. Pierce has

collaborated with artists, dancers, and filmmakers and performed internationally. Her

work has been translated into French, Spanish, Japanese, and Hebrew. Born in Japan,

Pierce currently teaches in and directs the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at

Naropa University.

Chris Pusateri is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Common Time

(Steerage Press, 2012) and Molecularity (Dusie, 2011). His work appears in many

journals in the U.S. and abroad, including Chicago Review, Fence, Jacket, Verse and

others. A librarian by trade, he has lectured on poetry and poetics at The School of the Art

Institute of Chicago, Wittenberg University, University of New Mexico, and the École

Polytechnique in Paris.

Eleni Sikelianos Medley

Roots of mix, according to www .edenics.net:

Ma$eKe(S) is a web (Judges16:13) - a fine source for MESH. MESH is linked to mezg

(to knit); MaZeG is a mixed or blended drink in Songs 7:3.

MISHMASH, MUSIC (mixed sounds) and MUST ANG. Massak in Inupiat means mixed snow

and wa ter. “Together” in Modern Greek is μαζι.

Proverbs 9:2: “She hath prepa red her meat, she hath mingled her wine; she hath also

furnished her table.”

In this workshop, the plan is to try various forms of mingling—we’ll look at texts

by Moroccan writer/filmmaker Bouanani, perhaps read some young Egyptian

poets, “translate” from film to text, maybe try our hand at Cambodian poetic forms

or French Alexandrines, and study/create mini-lingua-culturo-bio-spheres.

Eleni Sikelianos’ next book of poems is The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead.

Mary Tasillo Tactile Writing: Letterpress, Printing, and Exchange

Experiment with writing from the constraints posed by setting metal type in

the composing stick and on the press. Look to the map, the timeline, and other

diagrams to control or stretch your writing through spatial systems. Look to

posters of Mai 68 and of Spring 2012 to consider the way the visual components

of the letterform reinforce meaning. Examine the potential of the print shop and

the hand-printed to promote community exchange.

Mary Tasillo is an internationally exhibiting artist working in printing, text, zines,

and artist books, with a focus on art in public spaces. She is co-proprietor of The Soapbox:

Independent Publishing Center, a do-it-yourself art space in West Philadelphia featuring

a zine library and community-accessible printing facilities. As half of the collaboration

“Book Bombs,” she creates prints, publications, and interactive art experiences for

distribution in the streets.

all that occurs all that creeps

that sinks that sneaks all that works in broad daylight

all

in deep night

—Eleni Sikelianos

 

[

 

w4

 

The Kerouac School’s final SWP week is a concatenation of many voices, seeing that poetry, and

storytelling, and cut up, and vocal play in its many guises are not closed systems. Rather we delight in

the possibilities of an applied poetics, applied in this case to working with others, be it the recording

studio, the letterpress print shop, the meditation hall, the hallwa ys, bywa ys, and hiking trails of our

“experiment” in collaboration. The term “third mind” comes from the collaborations and cut-up and

erasure experiments of William S. Burroughs (former teacher at the JKS ) and Brion Gysin, writer and

visual artist. We will create libretti, music, oral duets, movies, multifa ceted narrations, and innova tions

with montage, and see what emerges “dreaming as one.”

Noncredit Course: WRI 054, tuition: $500 per week

Christian Bok Writing from Beyond the Third Mind

Poets in the modern milieu have already begun to question, if not to abandon,

the lyrical mandate of originality in order to explore the readymade potential of

“uncreative” literature—be it automatic, mannerist, aleatoric, or readymade, in its

literary practice. This course traces how the notions of both the accidental and the

procedural have increasingly informed current writing by poets who find inspiration

in stolen texts, random words, forced rules, boring ideas, even cyborg tools.

Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (1994), a pataphysical

encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia

(2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has won the Griffin Prize

for Poetic Excellence. Currently, Bök is working on an unusual project, entitled The

Xenotext—a genetically engineered poem, designed to persist forever in the genome of

an unkillable bacterium. Bök teaches English literature at the University of Calgary.

Ambrose Bye Spontaneous Production

Using the recording studio as a classroom, we will examine the relationships

between sound, noise, word, and song. Drawing inspiration from the ever-noisy

universe (from strings to things), we will develop collaborative poetic collages in

sound. We will also be touching on recording techniques, sound processing, and

analogue/digital technology. Working in conjunction with additional workshops,

we will bring our colleagues into the studio and produce, produce, produce.

Performance poets, musicians, geeks, and luddites all welcome. In the end we will

compile our sonic treasures and give them back.

Ambrose Bye, composer/musician/producer grew up in the environment of the Jack

Kerouac School, graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was

trained as an audio engineer at the music/production program at Pyramind in San

Francisco. Working primarily with poets, he has produced four albums with Anne

Waldman. Most recently he produced, Harry’s House, a compilation from recordings

done at Naropa University, and the soundtrack for Soldiering with jazz artist Daniel

Carter. www.wix.com/fastspeakingmusic/fsm.

touch you, gossamer,

streaks strands hair filament

splash in raw daylight

dragonfly

signal of gnat-life

and with light

striation

expa nds explodes

further

to complex va riant

double of the dreamer

who is both author and character (pa rticipa nt?) behind the wa terfa ll

—Anne Waldman

..

Third Mind:

A Poetics of Performance,

Cooperation, and AfFInity

Lenny Lesser

Amy Catanzano

The Alphabets of the Future Are Wormholes: Nu-Languages, Nu-Century

We investigate nu-languages, imaginary languages, and expanded languages while

writing, composing, computing, performing, or collaging our own from the course

materials; anything ambitious goes. We explore nu-languages as nu-poems and

nu-fictions in the nu-century as traversable wormholes, crossed in both directions,

with 2D topological “mouths” and 3D topological “spheres”: from where do they

“begin,” and where are they “going”? The “why”: to travel. And: in what ways

might these U+F+O+L+A+N+G+U+A+G+E+S render us nu?

Amy Catanzano is the author of Multiversal (Fordham University Press), recipient

of the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry and the POL Prize; iEpiphany (Erudite

Fangs Editions), published by Anne Waldman’s independent imprint; and a forthcoming

volume of cross-genre fiction, Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella,

recipient of the Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction. She currently teaches at Chatham

University in Pittsburgh. Previously, she taught in Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of

Disembodied Poetics.

Jack Collom Comedy and Nature

Henri Bergson said that what’s funny is always “something mechanically encrusted

upon the living.” Also, “language is too rigid to be an accurate mirror of an

infinitely fluid universe.” Sounds like a wacky combo biology and physics lecture?

Historically, “The Fool” may well have begun with intoxication. And incongruity

may have been first played as animal heads jammed with human bodies. This

course will explore conjunctions of nature and comedy, and what to do.

Jack Collom was born in Chicago in 1931 and grew up in small town Illinois. Much

walking and bird watching in the woods. Moved to Colorado in 1947, studied Forestry.

Wrote first poems while stationed in Libya. Time in Germany. Twenty years factory

labor, now for nearly forty years a freelance teacher of poetry, all ages. MA University

of Colorado. Twenty five books/chapbooks of poetry, three books on/of children’s writings.

Interested in nature. Thinks the world is funny. Prizes and awards. Married to writer

Jennifer Heath and is the father of four grown children. His book, Second Nature, was

published by Instance Press in 2012.

Erica Hunt & Marty Ehrlich Music and Words

In the right circumstances, a musical phrase can set you off—somewhere between

reverie and roll, a perilous Senegalese rotation on bent and weak knees, a risky

speculation, a wild association word chase into a microcosm found and fashioned.

Sound embodied and word souled in the rise and swerve of notes. Discernible

innovation in the tumble of hierarchy, where top, bottom, interior, exterior, the

entire tool box can be animated, thoughts’ enactment, elements of language that

take the breath away or restore breath to ordinary life. In this class we will listen to

classic and avant recordings and collaborations, and we will listen to and work on

some of our own forays into music and words.

Erica Hunt is a poet, essayist, and author of Local History, Arcade, as well as two

poem chapbooks, Piece Logic and Time Flies Right Before the Eyes. Publications

include BOMB, Boundary 2, Conjunctions, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse,

various anthologies and the Politics of Poetic Form. Hunt has received awards from the

Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation.

Marty Ehrlich is a multi-instrumentalist and is considered one of the leading figures in

experimental or avant-garde jazz. He has performed with a who’s who of contemporary

composers, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Bobby Bradford, Anthony Braxton,

Andrew Cyrille, Jack DeJohnette, Anthony Davis, Mark Dresser, Marianne Faithful,

Don Grolnick, Julius Hemphill, and John Zorn. He appears on more than one hundred

recordings with these and other composers. As an ensemble leader, he has made twentyfive

recordings of his compositions for ensembles. Recent projects include a work for large

ensemble, “Trumpet in the Morning.”

Laird Hunt Histories

Historical figures like Herodotus, Hannibal, Billy the Kid, and Calamity Jane

have all served as energy nodes around which writers have built significant works.

In this workshop we will examine texts like Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through

Slaughter, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz as part of an

exploration of that prose which, if we can kick awake that poor overworked pearl,

posits the historical as its grain of sand. Come prepared to write.

Laird Hunt is the author of five novels. His fiction, translations, reviews, and essays

have appeared in The Believer, Bookforum, the Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s

among many other places. He is currently on faculty in the creative writing program at

the University of Denver and is the editor of The Denver Quarterly. 15

 

Thurston Moore OMFUG ’77 “The decidedly not-Dylan language &

lyric writing of the CBGB/Max’s punk era axis.”

This course will investigate the lit language of the progenitors of punk music:

Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, David Byrne, Johnny Rotten. And

with focus on the marginalized: Lydia Lunch, Sumner Crane, Arto Lindsay, and

contempo outliers Lou Reed, Brian Eno, Captain Beefheart. Discussion and

practice will reference the intentional and accidental relationships betwixt poetry,

confessional and language, and lyrics as defined by musical context.

Thurston Moore was the founder in 1980, of the New York City rock group, Sonic Youth.

He records and performs as a solo artist as well and has worked collaboratively with

Merce Cunningham, Cecil Taylor, Lydia Lunch, and Glen Branca. His writing has been

published through various imprints. He runs the Ecstatic Peace records + tapes label,

edits the Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal, and is chief editor of the poetry imprint

Flowers & Cream.

Brad O’Sullivan Listening with Your Fingers

Letterpress printing enables writers to physically interact with readers by forcing

language into the page, a tactile sensibility not possible with more contemporary

forms of printing. Reading can become a fully sensate experience, where the

psychological and aural qualities of language combine with the physical and textural.

The printing press then, along with other physical items in the printshop, becomes

another of our writerly compositional tools. We’ll get dirty and inhabit these tools in

the production of a collaborative printed piece.

Brad O’Sullivan is the founding member of underscore, a typewriter band. He’s a writer,

teacher, letterpress printer, bike tinkerer, and proprietor of Smokeproof Press, a letterpress

workshop in Boulder, Colorado.

Steven Taylor Song Works

In this class, you belong to a band for a week. At our first meeting we use the

Smithsonian Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music to model various song

genres. The class then becomes an ensemble where we collaborate on one another’s

performance pieces. No previous experience required. All you need is a willingness

to sing. Please bring whatever instruments you have, the more diverse the ensemble

the better.

Steven Taylor is a musician and writer based in Brooklyn. For twenty years he was Allen

Ginsberg’s principal musical collaborator. He has been a member of The Fugs since 1984.

His account of touring the European underground rock scene, False Prophet: Field Notes

from the Punk Underground, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2003.

Cecilia VicuNa Spoken Through

Listening to what the Earth needs, as spoken through us, we hear the voice of the

commons. Collaboration emerges from the exchange. It is created in the moment,

sharp and fuzzy, wave and particle. It knows what it wants, and we are in its service.

In this course, we’ll create a collaborative performance from the notes gathered from

the previous three weeks; a new composition, a cooperation with the enlightened

words heard throughout the SWP.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, and filmmaker from Chile. She performs and exhibits her

work internationally. The author of twenty poetry books, she co-edited The Oxford Book

of Latin American Poetry, 2009. Her most recent books are: Spit Temple, Selected Oral

Perfomances by Cecilia Vicuña, edited by Rosa Alcalá (UDP, 2012). Chanccani Quipu

(Granary Books, 2012), Sabor a Mí (Chain Links, 2011).

Anne Waldman Myth, Allegory: The Map, The Performance

The pre-utterance of muthos (mouth) plus logos (word) will guide us. How do you

document destructive events? How do you testify, how are you tested. And how does

imagination locate your own symbiotic cosmology? What is the allegory of your life

in “relation”? “By Myth I mean the arrangements of the incidents”—Aristotle by way

of Jane Harrison by way of Artaud. We will write our own myths/allegories and work

collaboratively to shape, perform, and record in The Harry Smith recording studio.

Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor, cultural activist. Author of more than

forty publications of poetry, her most recent books include The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in

the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, 2011), which won the PEN USA

2012 Award for Poetry, Soldatesque/Soldiering (Blaze [Vox], 2012) and Gossamurmur

(Penguin Poets, 2013). She has worked extensively with video movie writer and director

Ed Bowes, and producer/musician Ambrose Bye. She is a recipient of the Shelley Memorial

Award for Poetry and has been deemed a “counter-cultural giant” by Publisher’s Weekly.

She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. www.annewaldman.org

~

Eva Sikelianos

Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, New

Jersey. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of

Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on March 24, 1964. The

controversial play consequently won an Obie Award and was made into a film. The

Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984. Other publications

include Y’s/Why’s/Wise (3rd World, 1992), Funk Lore (Littoral, 1993), Eulogies

(Marsilio 1994), Transbluesency (Marsilio, 1996), and Somebody Blew Up America &

Other Poems (Nehesi, 2002). His recent book of short stories, Tales of the Out & The

Gone (Akashic Books) was published in late 2007. Home, his book of social essays,

was re-released by Akashic Books in early 2009. Digging: The Afro American Soul

of Music (Univ. of California) was also released in 2009. His latest book RAZOR:

Revolutionary Art for Cultural Revolution (3rd World) will be out soon.

Baraka will deliver a lecture and participate in a reading on July 11.

Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco

Art Institute. His most recent books include Portrait and Dream: New & Selected

Poems; a collection of art writings, For the Ordinary Artist; Not an Exit, with

drawings by Léonie Guyer; and another words-and-images collaboration, Repeat

After Me, with watercolors by John Zurier. He is a contributing editor (poetry)

for artcritical.com, and a corresponding editor for Art in America. He was the

Paul Mellon Distinguished Fellow at the Skowhegan School of Painting and

Sculpture for 2006 and awarded the Goldie for Literature by the San Francisco

Bay Guardian in 2009.

Berkson will deliver a lecture on July 5 and participate in a reading on July 6.

Anne Carson & Robert Currie]

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living,

sometimes at New York University.

Robert Currie is an artist and sometime randomizer living and working in New

York City and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Carson & Currie will host a special workshop and deliver a slide lecture on

July 23, and give a reading on July 24.

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known poet with more

than eighty books of poetry and several assemblages of traditional and avantgarde

poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and, with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey

Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, volumes 1–3. Recent books of poems include

Triptych, Gematria Complete, Concealments & Caprichos, and Retrievals: Uncollected

& New Poems 1955-2010. He is now working on a global anthology of “outsider

and subterranean poetry” and, with Heriberto Yépez, Eye of Witness: A Jerome

Rothenberg Reader for Black Widow Press.

Rothenberg will deliver a lecture and participate in a reading on July 2. 17

guests

more Ronaldo V. Wilson Show & Tell: Subjectivity Performances

This course will revolve around shared objects, fetishes, charms, art/ artifacts,

real or imagined to explore the relationship between material and materiality,

and how these categories are articulated through our mutual and/or contrasting

subjectivities. Participants will bring in objects for “show and tell,” exchanging

with one another, and looking to visual artists, theorists, and poets such as Adrian

Piper, William Pope.L, Coco Fusco, Torkwase Dyson, Truong Tran, Wayne

Koestenbaum, and Eve Sedgwick in our efforts.

Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the

White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry

Prize, and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the

Thom Gunn Award and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry. Co-founder of

the Black Took Collective, Wilson is also a visiting assistant professor in the Literature

Department at University of California, Santa Cruz.