Naropa University's SWP Blog

New Models in Publishing from PPW

2012-01-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

Want to Learn How to Publish in the Crazy World of New Publishing? Deb Courtney, DeAnna Knippling and Robert Spiller will reveal all their NUMEROUS secrets to survive in today's new publishing models.

When: Tuesday, January 17, 2012, 6:30-8:30 p.m. (doors open at 6:00 p.m.)
Where: Celebration Place at the Citadel Mal, CO Springs
Who: Open to the public
Cost: FREE!

For more info, visit: http://www.pikespeakwriters.com/html/write_brains.html

Week 4 Course Descriptions

2012-01-12T11:31:00.001-07:00

July 2– 8
Week Four

Performance & Collaboration

In our traditional 4th week or 4th dimension, The Kerouac School invites recognized and unique performers and songsters in a tradition of vocalizing, to teach and expand the fascinating possibilities for play with language-orality. Poetry is not a closed system. The elements of old language patterns reconfigure, making new hybrid connections. Life eats entropy. What might also be the role of other voices, music, dance, gesture, and visuals with our texts? How do we construe our libretti or plays or texts for performance? What is our praxis with the Internet and other technologies? We suggest a spirit of moisopholon domos, or house of those who cultivated the Muses, much like the one Sappho was purported to found in the 7th century B.C.E. Greece. We also honor the collaborative work of the ever-expanding poetics sangha in the realms of letterpress and digital printing, recording studio and small press publication, all elements of our study and passion at The Kerouac School.

Non-credit Course #: WRI 054, tuition: $475 per week

Laurie Anderson (placeholder)

Using simple means – walking, writing, singing, talking, moving - we will study and invent various ways we can teach ourselves to be free as artists. Along the way we will investigate the questions many artists ask: How does this work? When is this finished? Who am I in the larger world? We will study work with solitude as well as the dynamics of interaction with other people, animals and nature.

Laurie Anderson is a multi-media artist who has made works including films, records, books, and musical instruments. She served as NASA’s first artist in residence. She is currently active in OWS.

Kenneth Goldsmith Uncreative Writing

Traditional notions of creativity are under attack, eroded by file-sharing, media culture, widespread sampling, and digital replication. How does writing respond to this new environment? This workshop will employ strategies of appropriation, replication, repetition, boredom, identity falsification, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, plundering as compositional methods. We'll trace the rich history of forgery, frauds, hoaxes, avatars, and impersonations spanning the arts, with a particular emphasis on how they employ language.

Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews. In 2011, he co-edited, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing and published a book essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania.

Bhanu Kapil Performance and the Novel: A Gesture-Posture Workshop on the Scene
This week, we will build a performance from the materials of a book, as yet unwritten. What do you want to know more about? Sometimes I lie down on the sidewalk, for example, next to the ivy, for BAN. I combine three scenes into one. To be not only the butcher, but the meat too. Not just the meat but the vortex of neighbors, on-looking. How can we work out the witness positions of a novel, as well as its sensations? The sensorimotor sequence, a glitch, the windowpane vibrating inside our own bodies, though our voice is outside, in a bush? (Looped.) After compounding and embodying narrative/sensory elements, how can we return our findings to the page? Come prepared to disseminate a text then call it back again: that flux. Of particles, force and joy. A "cry below the level of sound." Come with a section of your work that is not progressing in some way, and leave with a revision derived from its: re-performance. You don't have to be a novelist. You might be a novelist. The idea of what a novel is: is up to you.

Bhanu Kapil teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She is the author of four works of experimental writing: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), and Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011.) Currently, she is writing a novel of the race riot, BAN.

Thurston Moore Caught On Tape

I plan to have each student, either separately, and/or as collective, discuss and create poetry/lyrics/shouts/whispers in both compositional and improvised contexts of music/sound/noise/silence.

Thurston Moore was born in 1958, moved to NYC in 1977 to hang out at CBGB and Gotham Book Mart, started Sonic Youth in 1980 as a manifestation of the living underground of record albums, poetry books and penniless romance.

Jena Osman Walking Mapping Tracking Writing: An Experiment in Psychogeography

Our starting point will be the Situationist “dérive,” or drift, which requires breaking usual habits of moving through a place. We’ll read related works and then take a series of walks (alone and together, actual and imagined) in order to explore local terrains. Prompts for these walks will be constructed collaboratively; we’ll use the information gathered to create maps that will lead us to writing. Bring whatever portable recording devices you have on hand (cameras, smartphones, notebooks) to help us document our drifts.

Jena Osman’s latest book, The Network, was a 2009 National Poetry Series selection. Other books include An Essay In Asterisks and The Character. She co-edits the ChainLinks book series with Juliana Spahr and is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.

SWP 2012 Lineup!

2011-11-09T15:10:00.001-07:00

The Iovis Trilogy

2011-08-30T10:15:00.000-06:00

Here is a review for The Iovis Trilogy by Anne Waldman from Powells.com’s Review-a-Day feature.

http://www.powells.com/blog/review-a-day/anne-waldmans-magnum-opus-by-review-a-day/
“Waldman takes you by the collar and slams you down with language, image, and message, leaving you breathless and shattered in the aftermath of her incantatory vision. . . . The poems repeat themselves, wrap around themselves, glide through linguistic holes that only the poet herself could have seen. They trumpet, blare, and whisper vision upon vision of a world gone crazy with war and patriarchal mores, then proceed to share another vision, one of healing and peace. . . . This is a book of action, a poetic clarion call. Huge and weighty, it will be compared to The Cantos and Paterson. It is neither. It is Iovis; it is an act of incendiary love, and it stands alone.”

Open Workshops (as of 6/23/2011)

2011-06-23T10:52:00.003-06:00

Register for any of these open workshops:

Week 3

Jonathan Skinner - Disrupted Environments / Poetic Changes
Marcella Durand - The poetical ecological journal
Lara Durback - Printing: Repurposing and Giving

Week 4

Hal Willner - Music Production in the Arts; Past, Present & Future
Lewis Warsh - No Secrets
"Margaret Randall - Memoir, The Dangerous Genre: ""truth"" in the information age"
Edwin Torres - Body-Roar/Brain-Lingo: Writing the voice of the body
Steven Taylor - Song Works
Jane Sprague - Whose Writing Who?: Poet-Editor-Publisher Agents of Activist Production
DJ Spooky - Sample This!
Bobbie Louise Hawkins - Monologue

Where in the World is Anne Waldman?

2011-05-19T13:00:00.001-06:00

Anne Waldman at Music Store in the Medina, Marrakech May 2011

Poetry & Film Conference ~ June 24-26, 2011

2011-05-19T10:33:00.003-06:00

Poetry & Film Conference
June 24-26, 2011

FRIDAY
June 24, Friday night: Performing Arts Center, Naropa University
7:30 – 10:30: Naropa Summer Writing Program event
A short film program, in which the works are juxtaposed with poetic responses by writers. Writers include Reed Bye, Junior Burke, Anne Waldman, Jack Collom, and Danielle Vogel. Films include Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie), Colors of Concealment (Ed Bowes and Anne Waldman), White Rose (Bruce Conners), covert action (Abigail Child), First Hymn to the Night – Novalis and Two Creeley McClure (Stan Brakhage), Aubade (Nathaniel Dorsky), Study in Choreography (Maya Deren), Ostensibly (Rudy Burckhardt and John Ashbery), Cocteau Cento (Dan Boord and Luis Valdovino), and Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger).

SATURDAY
June 25, Saturday: VAC 1B20, CU campus
10am-1:30pm: Panel on Moving Image organized by Tom Gunning
Presenters: Michele Menzies, Sarah Keller, Tom Gunning, Robert Bird

1:30 – 2:45: Lunch break

3pm – 5pm: VAC 1B20, CU campus
CU Film Studies – Organized by Phil Solomon, Jennifer Peterson

5pm – 7:30pm: Dinner break

7:30 -10:30: VAC 1B20
Naropa’s Summer Writing Program film event curated by Anne Waldman:
Introduction by Anne Waldman, Ed Bowes, and Daniel Kane.
"The Value of Small Skeletons” by Ed Bowes
"The Time We Killed" by Jennifer Reeves

SUNDAY
June 26, Sunday: VAC 1B20, CU campus
11 – 2:00pm: Conference panel organized by Tom Gunning
Presenters: Daniel Kane, Christophe Wall-Romana, James Rosenow

2:00 – 3:00: Lunch break

3-5pm: VAC 1B20, CU campus
CU Film Studies organized by Don Yannacito
Filmmaker Emily Duke and Cooper Battersby in person

5:30 -7:30 VAC 1B20, CU campus
Organized by CU Creative Writing, Julie Carr
Guest presenters: Julie Carr & Christina Battle, David Gatten, Erin Espelie. Other contributors: Claudia Rankine and John Lucas; Norma Cole, Wayne Smith, and Taylor Brady; Jeanne Liotta and Lisa Gill.

From Alan Hatchett

2011-05-09T13:19:00.001-06:00

I'm a filmmaker finishing up a feature length documentary about The Beat Hotel and Allen Ginsberg's time there in Paris. To raise the last bit of money we need to finish the film we've launched an IndieGoGo campaign and one of the perks we're offering is an exclusive t-shirt design of Allen Ginsberg. Its young Ginsberg from his time at the Beat Hotel. The campaign is only running for the next two months, after which this t-shirt design wont be available again.

http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Beat-Hotel
http://www.thebeathotelmovie.com/

LESLIE SCALAPINO AWARD

2011-03-21T11:00:00.000-06:00

LESLIE SCALAPINO AWARD

We’re very excited to announce this new scholarship opportunity for MFA students.

The Leslie Scalapino Award will be given to one student who demonstrates excellence in the field of experimental postmodern women’s poetry and poetics. Only students
enrolled at Naropa University in the MFA in Writing and Poetics or MFA in Creative Writing are eligible.

AWARD AMOUNT: $2,000 towards tuition for the Summer Writing Program.

ELIGIBILITY:
Applicants must be:
1. enrolled at Naropa University in the MFA Writing and Poetics or the MFA Creative Writing, and be attending the Summer Writing Program;
2. have a body of work in the field of experimental postmodern women’s poetry and poetics;
3. have a demonstrable financial need (students must submit a FAFSA);
4. be a US citizen or permanent resident;
5. have a GPA of 3.5 or higher.

SELECTION PROCESS:
Because scholarships are need-based, students wishing to be considered for this aid must complete a FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid).
Students should also submit:
1. A personal letter, 500-700 words, discussing:
a. Your contributions and activities within the Jack Kerouac School, Naropa University, and/or the local/national artistic community;
b. Recent accomplishments, current projects or publications of your work;
c. Your interest in experimental postmodern women’s poetry and poetics, including but not limited to the work of Leslie Scalapino.
2. A writing sample of 5-10 pages of your current work.

Decisions will be made by the Financial Aid Office in conjunction with faculty from the Jack Kerouac School. Decisions will be based on the quality of the individual’s work, their letter, and financial need.

Please save your complete application as a single document (letter and writing sample all as one document) with your last name and first name, and name of scholarship for which
you are applying, and email to finaid@naropa.edu.

Deadline for Application: April 1, 2011, by 5 p.m. (MST) to finaid@naropa.edu

Decisions on all awards will be made by May 1. All applicants will be notified by mail in May 2011. For more information, contact Julie Kazimer, SWP Finance & Registration Manager, at 303-245-4600 or by email at jkazimer@naropa.edu.

Anne Waldman weighs in on VIDA, culture, and life in general

2011-03-11T14:21:00.000-07:00

Anne Waldman weighs in on VIDA, culture, and life in general

Selah Saterstrom's Week 3 Workshop

2011-03-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

Selah Saterstrom - Dreaming Language

How is writing a mode of dreaming, and how does a dreaming-language become a transgressive, necessary act? What happens when the book (the world) becomes unbound? Using the question as a path of inquiry - and allowing the logic of divination to inform our experiments - we will engage with such concerns orbiting Dharma Poetics and also produce a series of short, hybrid text installations.

A Memorial for Akilah Oliver

2011-03-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/03/the-teachings-of-akilah-oliv
er-remembered/

~ Akilah Oliver, You Will Be Missed

2011-02-24T11:36:00.001-07:00

HOWL in it's Glory

2011-02-22T11:14:00.001-07:00

Award-winning, Boulder-based square product theatre presents Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL, adapted and performed by Naropa MFA Theatre: Contemporary Performance alumna Teresa Harrison, with original music composed and performed by Naropa Music Faculty Paul Fowler!

8 p.m., April 21 – May 7, 2011 (Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights)
The Wesley Chapel
1290 Folsom St. (across from Folsom Field)
Boulder, CO

Praise Day

2011-02-14T11:31:00.000-07:00

NEAL CASSADY DAY ~ Mark Your Calendars

2011-01-25T10:18:00.001-07:00

Mayor Guillermo V. Vidal of Denver has proclaimed February 4, 2011 as "Neal Cassady Day." In his proclamation the Mayor cited Cassady's, "major impact on American literature as an author and as the muse of literary figures including; Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey and Thom Wolfe."

The Second Annual Neal Cassady Birthday Bash will take place on February 4th, 8-10 pm at the Mercury Café located at 2199 California in Denver. The ³Bash² is free and features special guests including Neal's daughter and son Jami and John Allen Cassady, David Amram and Rev. Steve Edington of Lowell Massachusetts.

Janine Pommy Vega, Beat Sister

2011-01-03T11:28:00.001-07:00

Janine Pommy Vega, Beat Sister
February 5, 1942- December 23, 2010

A great sister spirit, woman extraordinaire of the Beat literary movement who left her home in Union City, New Jersey age 15 to seek out the Beats, died December 23rd at her home in Willow, New York, outside Woodstock. She was close to Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Peter was her first lover at a tender age. They lived together and she confronted the complicated sexuality and male chauvinist ethos early on when Allen took Peter off to India, with nary a thought to her feelings. “Is this the way it is with the poets? This is my first lover and this is the way it goes? Fuck those people, man, I don’t want to know about the writers. I rather meet the painters, the musician, the magicians, let’s get to the street.” And meet them and the street she did. Janine was a populist, a street fighter, a survivor, a world traveler and hugely prolific writer many decades. Tracking The Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents is an amazing account of an adventuresome life. She spent the last 11 years with poet Andy Clausen, tending her garden when she wasn’t traveling the world performing her magnetic and politically engaged poetry, and doing the scholarly work as well, burning the midnight oil. Even after being hampered with debilitating arthritis she was out on the road, her uplifted voice and spirit cutting through anyone’s gloom.

We were together in Prague at the height of celebration right after the Velvet Revolution, dancing in the streets, and I was with Janine as she shook her egg rattle and up and down Italy on the Pullman Bus Tour, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others. People loved her at every turn, moved by her warmth and deep-rooted compassion. She was a guest at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics recently, admonishing students to get active and do the work to benefit others. I count her in our band of “tattered bodhisattva” poets. At Naropa she spoke of “serving something other than the ego, serving as the glue of a civilization, serving clarity of thought, the specific vision of your truth”.

Janine was an indomitable activist on behalf of women’s rights and taught tirelessly inside the prison system, working many years for the PEN Prison Writing Committee. A poem from her collection, The Green Piano (David R. Godine, Published, 2005):

Christmas at Woodbourne

Sodden cardboard manger
at the front gate
to Woodbourne Prison
shrouded hills, lone gull’s
screech atop the searchlight

Who says we are separate
from what we love?
Ramakrishna
would call that ignorance
separate voices, separate
troubles, separate cells –
connectedness is
inseparable
from the consistency
of grace
(Janine Pommy Vega, Woodbourne C.F., Woodbourne, New York, December 1996)

Janine: you continue to soar with your dignity and exquisite -- yet fearless -- grace.

Anne Waldman
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
Boulder, Colorado
12/23/10

Printshop Article in The Chronicle of Higher Education

2010-12-15T15:38:00.002-07:00

Great printshop Article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Read full article: http://chronicle.com/blogs/postcards/a-letterpress-shop-survives-printing-poems-in-the-era-of-youtube/654

VIDA Interview with Anne Waldman: “From the Larynx”

2010-12-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

Amy King Interview with Anne Wald man:

http://vidaweb.org/vida-interview-with-anne-waldman-%E2%80%9Cfrom-the-larynx%E2%80%9D

Margaret Randall Reading

2010-11-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

New Course Descriptions are Up

2010-11-30T14:32:00.002-07:00

New Course Descriptions are up at http://www.naropa.edu/swp

Week One
June 13-19
Gender & Hybridity, and Should We Consider the Cyborg?

“We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” – Donna Haraway
How is our writing mediated and motivated by considerations of gender and hybridity? We’ll look at some of the movements in recent decades across less represented writing communities: gay, trans, war vets. We’ll take inspiration from Homi K. Bhabha’s diasporas and new definitions of hybridity. How has the “democracy” of the Internet opened up floodgates of “untested” material? What of the cult of blogs, everyone’s story, confession, the manufactured memoir? What is interesting? Do our bodies become speedier and more mechanized as we plug in? What capabilities are gained in the age of the ebook and text message novels?

Non-credit Course #: WRI 051, tuition: $475 per week

Amy King & Ana Božičević - The Trans Cyborg

We will mine materials from your reading origins/personal mythologies through to the present-day “information infrastructure” to create the poem as cyborg. Specifically, we will explore the ways your cyborg poem can transgress constraints of gender (male=to be feared; female=to be f’ed) and poetic convention. How does the trans cyborg poem function as a trans vehicle of empathy? How does it behave politically beyond the tropes of destroyer, sex slave, servant, as Other/collective self?

Amy King's most recent books are Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox), and forthcoming, I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press). She is preparing a book of interviews with poet, Ron Padgett, teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY NCC, works with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, co-edits Esque with Ana Božičević and co-edits Poets for Living Waters with Heidi Lynn Staples.

Ana Božičević is the author of Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press), a Lambda Literary Award in Poetry finalist. Currently she’s working on translations of Croatian and Serbian poets, and has edited The Mysteries of Vision: Some Notes on H.D., a lecture by Diane di Prima. She also works with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and co-edits Esque with Amy King. She is the Program Manager at the Center for the Humanities, CUNY.

Rebecca Brown - Transforming Characters and Hybrid Forms

Writers have been writing about bodily transformation for centuries (Homer, Ovid, Kafka, Woolf). What do these stories tell us about ourselves? Writers have also been writing in what we now call “hybrid” forms forever (haibun, prose poem). What do these forms tell us about the limits and opportunities of literary forms? In this workshop we’ll read hybrid texts and texts about transformation then write our own. Handouts provided by instructor.

Rebecca Brown’s twelfth book, American Romances (City Lights, 2009), received a Publishing Triangle Award. Other titles include The Last Time I Saw You, The End of Youth, The Dogs, The Terrible Girls (all with City Lights), Excerpts From A Family Medical Dictionary (Granta, UK) and The Gifts Of The Body (HarperCollins). A frequent collaborator, she has written numerous texts for dance, theater and visual art.

Melissa Buzzeo - For Debris

We will think about value – the flickering line between meaning and non-meaning, the starving gaps. What is inertia in text, death? What can waste mean? What is to be changed, charged to allow integration, flame in writing? Is gift an object, are matter memory address? We will strive towards locating the abundance in impoverishment and vice versa in our own texts, opening a space for the future fluidity, the dreamt desire of all things.

Melissa Buzzeo is the author of What Began Us (Leon Works, 2007), Face (BookThug, 2009) and the forthcoming For Want and Sound (Les Figues, 2012). She has taught at Brown and Pratt Institute, has lectured on hypnosis, palmreading and body based writing and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Samuel R, Delany

Rob Halpern – Pornotopias

Is porn a regime of representation, or an erotic utopia where identities are shorn and desires socialized? Pleasure’s “bad infinity” or democracy’s frontier? Commodity or commons? The media’s lingua franca, or poetry’s scene of resistance? What can so-called “pornographic” language activate? Might it even offer a strategy for responding to social crisis? We’ll run with these questions while investigating a range of writers and practices.
Rob Halpern is the author of two books of poems, Rumored Place (Krupskaya 2004), which was nominated for a California Book Award, and Disaster Suites (Palm Press 2009). Music for Porn is forthcoming (Nightboat Books, Fall 2011). With Taylor Brady, he also co-authored Snow Sensitive Skin (Atticus/Finch 2007). He’s taught at Bard College, San Francisco Art Institute, and now teaches at Eastern Michigan University. Rob is an active participant in the Nonsite Collective.
Bhanu Kapil

Erica Kaufman - Prosthesis & Procedure

“I like what I see to be real, or to be my idea of what is real.” – John Cage
This course will engage in a series of “thought experiments”¬¬ writing against, over, and through our own “real(s)” – virtual, versatile, fictional, animal, cyborgian, internalized, prosthetic. We will play with a variety of procedural and chance-based approaches to writing, keeping in mind the idea of the “prosthesis” as an “addition” (not a “replacement”), and expand the materials our words travel through.

Erica Kaufman is the author of censory impulse (Factory School, 2009) as well as several chapbooks, and is co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Venn Diagram, 2010). Poems from her most recent project, INSTANT CLASSIC, can be found online Little Red Leaves and Elective Affinities. Recent prose can be found in The Poetry Project Newsletter and Rain Taxi. Kaufman received an MFA in Poetry from The New School, is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center in Composition & Rhetoric, and teaches at Baruch College and Bard College’s Institute for Writing & Thinking.

Akilah Oliver

Maureen Owen - Lyrical Acrobatics

“… any possible circumstance of language is a possible circumstance of poetry. It is the job of the poet to invest that circumstance with energy.” – J. Rosenberg
What creative possibilities await us in today’s ever-expanding digital discourses? We’ll explore the digital age of the Internet with its blogs, daily narratives, and possibilities for mechanical constructs. From forerunners Jackson MacLow and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, we’ll continue our investigations into present day text-selection procedures and develop some unique capabilities and methods of our own. Be ready to write!

Maureen Owen is the author of ten poetry titles, most recently Erosion’s Pull from Coffee House Press was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. American Rush: Selected Poems was, a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She teaches at Naropa University, both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program, and is editor-in-chief of Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night.

Vanessa Place - I Will Not Represent You: Gender Dismembered

Baudrillard wrote that all (self) knowledge comes from knowledge of the other. Current avant-garde practices such as conceptualism engage in radical representations that discard the (gendered) self in favor of a (gendered) other. The writer becomes like the computer, neuter, yet stuffed with all kinds of corpora. What are the aesthetic/ethical implications of echoing without mirroring? What happens when the only subject is the one at hand? Put another way, should the cyborg consider us?

Kenneth Goldsmith has called Vanessa Place’s work “arguably the most challenging, complex and controversial literature being written today.” Place writes poetry, prose and art criticism; she is also a criminal defense lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. Her most recent work is available in French as Exposé des Faits, and in English as Statement of Facts.

Max Regan - Stealing The Dictionary

There are over 40,000 dictionaries currently in circulation. In this writing workshop each student will excavate a theme from their own history, from which their unique narrative dictionary will be made. Our writing will trespass into invisibility, memoir, confession, witness, presence, absence, performance, hybrid forms and the false geography of language. Sources will include Lisa Birman, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Harryette Mullen, Rebecca Brown, Czesław Milosz, Ann Marlowe and others. Students of any genre are welcome.

Max Regan, MFA, is a teacher, poet, writer, and the founder of Hollowdeck Press LLC. He teaches poetry, prose, memoir and experimental writing and offers annual writing journeys to the city of Prague in the Czech Republic and other cities around the world. Max sponsors writing guilds in Boulder, Baltimore and Houston, and he has taught and lectured at the University of Colorado, Colorado State University and Naropa University.

Julia Seko – One Craft, Many Hands, Big Machines: Letterpress Printing
Letterpress printing is inherently a collaborative process, a dynamic interaction between the printers, the text, and the craft itself – the materials, tools, and presses. In this introductory workshop, we will cover the basic skills of the printshop and use them to create collective visions in text and image. We will discuss choices of typography, materials, and structure and together find our way to the finished work.
Julia Seko is a letterpress printer, book artist, and proprietor of P.S. Press. Trained in letterpress printing at the Women's Building in Los Angeles, 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 Ireland.

giovanni singleton – bluesography 5.0
In this course we will explore the “blues” through a variety of lenses including visual art, music, food, and the natural world. From “afro blue” to “mood indigo” the color blue and its attendant music has more hues and more vibrations than any other color in the spectrum. Blues keep records, document lived experiences, transmit/transcend history. They are indigenous and contagious. Expect to discover your own “blues” through discussion, readings, and daily writing.
Former debutant and Richmond, VA native giovanni singleton is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view, a journal dedicated to innovative and experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Alehouse, the Best of Fence, and is forthcoming in Writing Self and Community: African American Poetry Since the Civil Rights Movement. Her AMERICAN LETTERS series was selected for San Francisco’s 1st Visual Poetry and Performance Festival. She collects bookmarks and enjoys figs and greek style yogurt.

Week Two
June 20-26
Fictions: The Story (Narrative and Anti-Narrative)

“The distinction between daily speech and poetry, documentary and fiction, is here manically blurred.” – Daniel Kane
How is “story” still valid? We’ll look at the dance between poetry, fiction narratives, and
investigative research. How does a novel become a script? What of the meta-text? The
post-modern “script”? Are you an “eye” or “sound” poet? How does the anti-narrative
recalibrate expectation and anticipation? We’ll conduct Oulipo and other experiments. At the end of the week, we’ll celebrate moving image poetics, with luminaries from the avant-garde film and poetry worlds.

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

Junior Burke

Colin Frazer – Printshop
In this course we will use simple construction techniques to develop a brief collaborative text. We will then give form to this writing in a colorful installation project and a book-like artifact using letterpress printing from metal type and from the artist’s own wood type at the Kavyayantra Press. We will stress excellent typography as well as creative thought about non-traditional ways of presenting a text. Students will learn hand typesetting, ink mixing, and basic bookbinding as well as printing on the platen and flatbed cylinder presses. No prior experience is necessary, but students should be prepared to get their hands dirty.
Colin Frazer is an artist, adventurer, designer and printer. His work seeks to document the invisible world
and draw out the sublime in the mundane. He has exhibited internationally and his work is held in collections including the Walker Art Center and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. He teaches at Colorado College and the Rhode Island School of Design.

C.S. Giscombe – Poetics of Location, Writing Across the Genres
Maurice Blanchot – “Nomadism answers to a relation that possession cannot satisfy.”
We’ll experiment with making statements about and inquiries into the nature of location. Is it possible to write about place – to write place into being – without resorting to sentimentality? The answer must be Yes. But how? We’ll write deliberately across genres and try to open up various fields. Writing prompts, talking, field trip, raucousness. Readings from Basho, Jean Toomer, Margaret Atwood, others.

C. S. Giscombe was born in Dayton, Ohio. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry books are Prairie Style, Giscome Road, Here, etc.; his prose book – linked essays about Canada, race, and family – is Into and Out of Dislocation. Book-in-progress is Railroad Sense, writing concerning metaphor, “the spaces between location,” music, gender, race, public transportation.

Renee Gladman – Story Space: Maps, Models, Versions
How do we represent ideas and questions in a drawing space? Can we show how a story works through visual mapping or diagramming? Can we use the drawing space to capture collaborative thinking? In this class we will make a collaborative map of a story structure – thinking through ideas of time, event and relation – then each of us will use that map to generate our version of the story. An ideal course for the deeply curious and inventive.
Renee Gladman is the author of five works of prose, most recently a novel Event Factory, and one collection of poetry, A Picture-Feeling. Forthcoming in fall 2011 from Danielle Dutton’s Dorothy project is The Ravickians, the second installment of the Ravicka series. She is the publisher for Leon Works, teaches at Brown University, and lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Anselm Hollo – How to Say What You Did Not Mean to Say
A look at various ways to overcome the fear of the blank page, including the “cut-up technique” (Burroughs, Gysin), Dadaist methods of composition (Tzara), The Oulipo Group’s theory and practice, and Bernadette Mayer’s and Charles Bernstein’s long list of “things to do” when the Muse does not descend.
Anselm Hollo, poet and literary translator, is a Professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His most recent books are Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Coffee House Press) which won the San Francisco Poetry Center's Best Book Award for 2001, and Guests of Space, also from Coffee House Press, 2007.

Laird Hunt – Contemporary European Fiction
In this workshop we will take our inspiration from fiction being produced in Europe. Ishiguro, Smith, Ndiaye, Toussaint, Echenoz, Redonnet, Tulli and Goerke will be among those we consider. Come ready to write.

Laird Hunt is the author of four novels, including, most recently Ray of the Star.

Stephen Graham Jones – My Life Story is Two Pages Long
Here we’ll make up completely real people, then brutally dissect their lives down to a few jangly, unrelated pieces, and present those pieces not as fiction, but as whatever it is that exists between a lyrical history and a joke told by a drunk person, all with the intent of getting the reader not only to engage this character, this person, but to remember that person as a real person, maybe even to miss them when the page is turned. It’s the first step in getting the reader to buy into all the lies you’re always pretending are a story: you have to believe in it first.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of nine books, so far. The last two are It Came From Del Rio: part one of the Bunnyehead Chronicles, and the horror collection The Ones That Got Away. He teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

David Matlin – Hybrids, Prose, and “The Marriage of Heaven & Hell”
If Blake’s book is one of the first hybrid experiments then how might a writer at the beginning of the 21st century read the energy of this material into the forms of daily life, daily attentions, and the pressures of information that need and demand imaginative translation and commentary. With Blake’s challenge in mind, this course will be an examination of the Arts of Prose and Prose Hybrids. Students will have the chance to discover the range, care, and resonances these most provocative forms might offer.
David Matlin is a novelist, poet, and essayist. His two most recent books are, Prisons: Inside the New America from Vernooykill Creek to Abu Ghraib, (North Atlantic Books), and It Might Do Well With Strawberries (Marick Press). David Matlin teaches at San Diego State University’s MFA Creative Writing Program.
Kabir Mohanty & Sharmistha Mohanty – Arcs, spaces, wholes
We build our wholes from encounters, between ways, architectures, objects, truths. These encounters are incomplete arcs, there is space between them, and through this space they become related. We build our wholes from the incomplete arcs of the subjective being, the objective evidence, the fictions of conjecture such as inform the work of W.G. Sebald, Claudio Magris, filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak. We will look at the building of wholes in and through prose and film.
Kabir Mohanty is a filmmaker and a video artist. His most recent work is a four hour, on-going four part video, Song for an ancient land, that sees the outside world and the subcontinental self as interpenetrated. Song is to be shown at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in February 2012.

Sharmistha Mohanty has two works of prose, Book One and New Life, and is currently working on her third. She has translated the fiction of Tagore from the Bengali, in Broken Nest and Other Stories. Mohanty is founder editor of the online literature journal Almost Island, www.almostisland.com. She is on the faculty of the Creative Writing MFA at the City University of Hong Kong. Mohanty has worked in film, with some of India's most innovative filmmakers.

Karen Weiser – Writing Through Texts from Other Centuries
What happens to our understanding of the past when it comes to us through a poem or is re-visioned into poetry rather than historical prose narrative? We will look at pairings made up of contemporary poems and the works (or historical subjects) they converse with, seriously engaging both texts on their own terms and together. We will then write poems that make use of the past to open new vistas of inquiry.
Karen Weiser is a mother, poet and doctoral candidate in early American literature at The CUNY Graduate Center. Her first full-length collection, To Light Out, is recently out from Ugly Duckling Presse. Other poems have appeared in various and assorted chapbooks as well as in The Chicago Review, Cy Press, and The Brooklyn Rail. She lives in New York City where she teaches literature classes and poetry workshops.

Ronaldo V. Wilson – Narratives as Archives and Ephemera
Students shall work from their own archives and ephemera, anything that can fit in a standard sized brief case or grocery bag, depending on one’s records, habits, findings, and tastes. Collections such as a small archive of photographs, clippings, or journals; or short lived things, such as a series of loose notes, sketches, objects, or partial but striking drafts previously left untouched shall serve as the primary material
from which students will generate new narratives.

Ronaldo V. Wilson, Ph.D. is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry, 2010. Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, he teaches at Mount Holyoke College.

Week Three
June 27 – July 3
Ecology, Urgency, Dharma Poetics

“Nature is us, as in language.” – Leslie Scalapino
“More than ever before, humans are now directly implicated in the survival of other species; we cannot try to save everything and will have to make some difficult choices. Most of all, we will have to be inventive.” – Jonathan Skinner
What is the role of the writer, thinker, scholar, dharma-practitioner relative to the continuing degradation of the environment? How do we still our minds and meditate, as we consider the massive BP oil spill and its effects on generations of sea creatures, turtles, pelicans, manatee, whales, whole ecosystems? Consider indigenous cultures that have an ethos that respects environment. Who is your totem animal? Your totem ecosystem? What do we need to know so we are not fun hogs on this planet, or self-serving artists?

Non-credit Course #: WRI 053, tuition: $475 per week
Jack Collom - Comedy & 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 1931 in Chicago. Birder and woodswalker from an early age. Early onto humors of language. Moved west at 15, attended Forestry school in Colorado. USAF four years. Worked in factories 20 years, writing poetry on the side. Two NEA Fellowships, 23 books and chapbooks. Works with kids a lot. At 79, he’s writing more than ever. Thinks everything is funny, perhaps also very sad. Latest book: Situations, Sings, with Lyn Hejinian.
Marcella Durand
Lara Durback - Printing: Repurposing and Giving
Letterpress printing is one way to keep a lot of useful equipment out of the landfill. Printers have infinite control over materials. Students will challenge themselves to hunt down repurposed paper, ink, and printmaking materials. Printing is a body-centered, slow-paced approach to production that makes one contemplate all the machinations, waste, and people’s labor that sustain our everyday lifestyles. Beyond that, we’ll consider how we can be effective in engaging poets as well as a non-poet audience with our print work.
Lara Durback writes about interactions in public with actual handwriting. She is currently letterpress printing text on old photography magazine pages using lead type in a collaboration with the artist Ariel Goldberg. She searches for things to scan and upload on deepoakland.org. She is the Studio Manager in the Book Art Program at Mills College.

Barbara Henning - Expanding the Narrative I/eye(s)
How can an eco-poetic intention inform/transform fiction writing or poetic prose? In this workshop, we will write autobiographical and fictional narratives with a sensitivity to expanding the environmental consciousness of the text. We will read inside and outside of (Eco (Lang) uage (Reader)), including Charles Olson, Nathalie Sarraute and others. To write differently and more inclusively, we will experiment with transforming our narratives through various lenses and focuses, including equanimity, interruption, investigation, interrelatedness.
Barbara Henning is the author of three novels, seven books of poetry and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her most recent books are a collection of poetry and prose, Cities & Memory (Chax Press, 2010), a novel, Thirty Miles from Rosebud (BlazeVox, 2009), and a collection of object-sonnets, My Autobiography (United Artists, 2007). Henning lives in New York City and teaches for Long Island University Brooklyn Campus, as well as for Naropa's online MFA program.

Laura Mullen - Margin Release: The Reinvention of Love (open genre)
The object of this course is to open our vision and enlarge our capacities for sight and insight. We will focus (on the level of both form and content) on ignored or "invisible" areas, working to reverse the usual figure ground relationships and to find out what our art has or what we have, in terms of subject matter or modes of proceeding, forgotten or failed to touch. NOTE: Bring, to the first class, some writing of your own you would be inclined to throw out.
Laura Mullen is a Professor at Louisiana State University. She is the author of six books: four collections of poetry and two hybrid texts. Dark Archive (University of California Press, 2011) is her most collection of poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Action Yes!, The Fairy Tale Review, The Colorado Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
dg nanouk okpik - TBA

dg nanouk okpik is Inupiaq, Inuit from Alaska. She is a graduate from Salish Kootenai College, Flathead Reservation Montana with an AFA in Liberal Arts, an AFA and BFA in Creative Writing from The Institute of American Indian Arts, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine, Stonecoast College. Her work has been published in Many Mountains Moving, NYU Washington Square and featured in The Academy of American Poets Fall issue 2009 of American Poet by Arthur Sze her teacher for six years.

Jed Rasula - Ecology of Language
This course will take a close look at Thoreau’s Walden. A canonized classic of American literature and ecological thought, Walden is intriguingly and oddly a book about words, subjecting its major themes to a bluffing, carnivalesque punning caricature of its own earnestness. We’ll dip a plumb-line to the antic depths of Thoreau’s performance to reflect on the heft, torque and value of words in a political economy that seems increasingly bent on reducing words to slogans.
Jed Rasula is a poet and scholar, author of The Compost Library: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (2002) and numerous other books on modern poetry and poetics. He has also edited Imagining Language: An Anthology (1998) and Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (2011). He teaches English and Art at the University of Georgia.

Selah Saterstrom

Andrew Schelling - Writing In The Southern Rocky Mountain Watershed
This poetry workshop will take the land as basis for writing. We’ll work within the parameters of this particular ecosystem, as long-term residents or as transient visitors. Explorations of the local natural and ecological situation – mountains, creeks, weather patterns, flora and fauna. Some solo writing, some collaboration. Topics and sources to explore will include Native place-names, maps, field guides, archaeological records (which go back 13,000 years), and toxic waste sites. As much as possible we will write outdoors.
Andrew Schelling lives in the Southern Rocky Mountain bioregion and has taught poetry and Sanskrit at Naropa University since 1990. Active in land use issues in the American West, he is a student of natural history, mountaineering, and Indic languages. Books include Old Tale Road, Wild Form, Savage Grammar, and The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry. Newest project is Arapaho Songbook – a poetry sequence based on watershed explorations and Algonkian language study – Volume I forthcoming from La Alameda Press in 2011.
Eleni Sikelianos – At Play in the Ecozones
In this workshop, we’ll scavenge terms from the sciences and retrofit them to the poem’s needs. How can we devise a field theory or “life space” that relates the page to other ecosystems, post Olson, post installation, post Land Art? We’ll re-think Robert Smithson’s notion of site and non-site, and we’ll travel in the trajectory between those two as we inscribe a fauna and flora of language. What might guide us: Lynn Margulis’s endosymbiotic theory; research into various earth zones, i.e. “what’s currently at play in the Pacific,” “the Gulf,” “the state of the Mojave desert,” etc. It’s all to be seen.
Eleni Sikelianos is the author of a book-length eco poem (The California Poem), as well as five other books of poetry and a hybrid memoir. She is a translator and translatee, and is a graduate and devotee of the Kerouac School.

Jonathan Skinner - Disrupted Environments/Poetic Changes
Bark beetle, forest fire, sudden aspen decline . . . the Rockies are changing, with a shifting climate, and with them the cultures they feed (notably a culture of reckless water consumption, spanning the deserts). “What does not change/ is the will to change,” asserted Charles Olson, in “The Kingfisher.” Sixty years later, poetics has yet to locate forms adequate to that change, on a planetary scale. We will consider, and try out, some possibilities.

Jonathan Skinner's poetry collections include Birds of Tifft (BlazeVox, 2010) and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). He founded and edits the journal ecopoetics (www.ecopoetics.org), which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. Skinner has published numerous essays, including an introduction to Gilles Clément, Gardens of Resistance (Qui Parle 19.2). A book on the parks of Frederick Law Olmsted is in the works. With the artist Isabelle Pelissier, he lives in central Maine.

Eleni Stecopoulos – Dreaming in the Fault Zone: Poetry, Healing, Earth
This course will explore the efficacy of poetry as a healing modality. We’ll experiment with writing as somatic and therapeutic practice, focusing on language as material power, living energy, medicine...part of ecology and sometimes even originating from earth. As sensitive bodies proliferate with ecological imbalance, how might we cultivate sensitivity as a method of receiving earth’s signs, forms, rhythms – collaborate with earth’s own poetics? We’ll work with sources from divinatory and medical systems, myth, geoarchaeology.

Eleni Stecopoulos is the author of Armies of Compassion (Palm Press, 2010). She curated “The Poetics of
Healing” series for the Poetry Center at SFSU and is at work on a related book, in addition to Earth Also is a Private Language, a poem investigating ecology through kinship and ritual landscapes. She lives in Berkeley and teaches at the University of San Francisco and Bard College.

Tyrone Williams - HOCUS-LOCUS: Occultation, Place, Placelessness
This workshop explores the mystifications of both place and placelessness that orient and thus, often, anchor poetics as aesthetic practices and social/political activism as seats/chairs (thrones?) of judgment. We will read and analyze critiques and enactments of this aesthetic/ethical impasse in specific essays from ) (Eco (Lang) uage (Reader)) and the prose and poetry of Spring Ulmer, cris cheek, and David Buuck.

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of three books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008) and The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press, 2009). A prose eulogy is forthcoming from Hooke Press in 2010. He has completed a manuscript of poetry commissioned by Atelos Books. His website is at http://home.earthlink.net/~suspend/

Week Four
July 4– 10
Economics of the Counter-Culture: Performance, Publishing, Collaboration

“Memory is the object of war. War is the attempt to replace one archive with
another.” – Steven Taylor
How does the experimental community survive during harder times? The ongoing
“gift economy”: exchange of information and goods, the freeing yet fraught reality of the
Internet. We will talk about The Archive as a practice, performance as a practice, our small press histories and current activities. We’ll look at collaboration between writers and musicians/composers, both now and historically. In a culture with so little serious media attention on our projects and products, how do we cultivate a critical perspective and keep doing the work?

Non-credit Course #: WRI 054, tuition: $475 per week

Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Thurston Moore – IN SILVER RAIN WITH A PAPER KEY
SILVER RAIN is the poetry, the music, the thoughts, the dreams, the visions alive in the universe. PAPER
KEY is the unlocking, unfolding, unleashing of the elements stated above as gifting. Utilizing nature (ink, paper, metal) and strategies without (non-tactile media) the course will focus on THE BEAUTY OF THE PRODUCTION AND THE PRESENTATION of text/sound (book, sheet, recording, object, E-light). Also: Archiving, Collecting and Imprinting as a personal and collective means of enlightenment, education and humanist/cosmic good-will.

Thurston Moore was born in 1958, moved to NYC in 1977 to hang out at CBGB and Gotham Book Mart, started Sonic Youth in 1980 as a manifestation of the living underground of record albums, poetry books and penniless romance.

Harryette Mullen

Eileen Myles – The Performance of Fiction
I’m thinking that story-telling is one of the ways we know ourselves in community. Often when a friend
tells a story part of what everyone laughs at is that that story could have only happened to them. Do we all
live in radically different worlds stitched together by recognition and laughter? Come as you are, be prepared to lie and blend your versions of reality in a tuneful way. That’s what’s happening here.

Eileen Myles was born in Boston and moved to New York in 1974 (to become a poet.) Her Inferno (a poet’s novel) came out this year from orbooks.com. It’s about the sex of poetry or the poetry of sex. John Ashbery calls Inferno “Zingingly melancholy.” The Importance of Being Iceland came out last year and received a Warhol/Creative Capital grant. If you’d like to know more go to eileenmyles.com. She lives in New York.

Margaret Randall - Memoir, The Dangerous Genre: “Truth” in the Information Age
We will write and critique memoir in a variety of genres, with particular attention to identity, point of view, context, and audience. In this time of instantaneous information exchange, economic hardship, war without end, and conflicting political positions, does creative expression reflect or counter these realities? What shifts? What endures?
Margaret Randall was born in New York (1936), spent many years in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, now lives in New Mexico. Returning to U.S. in 1984, the government ordered her to be deported because of the content of her books. Won case in 1989. From 1962 to 1969, founded and edited bilingual literary journal El Corno Emplumado in Mexico City. Recent books: Stones Witness, Their Backs To The Sea and My Town (poetry) and First Laugh (essays).

DJ Spooky - Sample This!
Paul D. Miller's course offers a survey of the history of collage through the prism of digital media and its uneasy relationship to contemporary art. The course will explore the hidden connections between arts practices from a wide variety of sources to parallel the process of how artists, writers, and composers throughout the last several centuries have engaged the process of inter-disciplinarity as applied to the creative act.
Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky is a NYC writer, artist and musician. He has performed in venues around the world, from Lincoln Center to Luanda, Angola to The Herod Atticus Theater at the Acropolis. Miller’s latest book is Sound Unbound (MIT Press). djspooky.com

Jane Sprague - Whose Writing Who?: Poet-Editor-Publisher Agents of Activist Production
A reciprocal relationship is forged as poet-editors work closely with other poets to create works which might not otherwise find “cultural space.” Working together, we will write in order to use editing and publishing as catalyzing agents for the production of our own work and that of others. We will read, edit, publish and distribute our work on campus and beyond in acts of subversion and resistance as the feral operatives of activist poetry/poetics.
Jane Sprague is author of The Port of Los Angeles and *Belladonna Elders Series 8 (with Tina Darragh and Diane Ward) in addition to many chapbooks, essays and reviews. She edits and publishes Palm Press, an independent imprint committed to making possible works that interrogate contemporary politics, poetry, pedagogy and poetics. Her current writing and editorial work includes My Appalachia (poetry) and Imaginary Syllabi, a book of radical, utopian, fabulist and generative student-centered pedagogies.

Wesley Tanner

Steven Taylor

Edwin Torres - Body-Roar/Brain-Lingo: Writing the Voice of the Body
The poem begun, the moment we breathe. The life in the mouth, as told by the body – is it possible to convince the brain of its roar? To allow the senses a place in writing? Using performance as a guide, this workshop is an active creative laboratory, exploring what happens to words when unobstructed by the body. Work will be created, discarded, renewed – if we allow the voice its depth, can the stage transform to breath?

Edwin Torres is a bi-lingualisualist rooted in the languages of sight and sound. Recipient of fellowships from NYFA and The Foundation For Contemporary Performing Arts among others, he has performed his poetics worldwide. His books include, The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language, In The Function Of External Circumstances and most recently, Yes Thing No Thing from Roof Books.

Anne Waldman

Lewis Warsh - No Secrets
We’ll explore the way daydreams, memories and fantasies are the key to who we are and to the dark and light sides of the characters we write about, using sentences that might go on forever. How to go off on a tangent in the middle of a sentence, or in a conversation, or in the middle of a thought – and never return. Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya will be one of our models. As much time as possible will be spent reading and discussing our work.
Lewis Warsh is the author of four novels, most recently A Place in the Sun (Spuyten Duyvil, 2010), and numerous books of poems, including Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005 (Granary, 2008) and The Origin of the World (Creative Arts, 2001). He is editor and publisher of United Artists Books and director of the MFA program in creative writing at Long Island University in Brookyn. (www.lewiswarsh.com).

Hall Willner

SWP Special Guests

Rikki Ducornet - Week 2
Rikki Ducornet has twice been honored by the Lannan Foundation; she has received The Bard College Arts and Letters Award and, in 2008, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent exhibitions of her paintings include El Umbral Secreto in the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago, Chile. NETSUKE, her eight novel, is to be published by Coffee House Press in May 2011.

Rick Moody - Week 4
Rick Moody's first novel, Garden State, won the 1991 Editor's Choice Award from Pushcart Press. The Ice Storm was published in May 1994 by Little, Brown & Co, and a film version, directed by Ang Lee, was released in 1997. Other works include The Four Fingers of Death, Right Livelihoods, The Diviners, Purple America, and The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven. He is the recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award and a Guggenheim fellowship.

From Westword

2010-11-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

Thurston Moore, DJ Spooky to teach classes at Naropa next summer

http://blogs.westword.com/backbeat/2010/11/thurston_moore_dj_spooky_to_te.php

Karen Tei Yamashita - Kirkus

2010-11-04T10:20:00.002-06:00

SWP Faculty for week 2, Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel is reviewed by Kirkus.

http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/fiction/karen-tei-yamashita/i-hotel/

Thurston Moore - Speaking at London's Serpentine Art Gallery.

2010-11-03T11:56:00.000-06:00

VOTE!

2010-11-02T10:49:00.001-06:00

Go out today and vote.
Let your voice be heard.
We can make a difference.
Even a small one if we all show up.

RIP Jack Kerouac - October 21, 1969

2010-10-21T12:09:00.001-06:00

From The Beat Museum:

RIP Jack Kerouac - October 21, 1969

JACK KEROUAC DIED FOR YOUR READING ENJOYMENT
Old Jack passed away 41 years ago today. When he died he had $91 in the bank and his entire estate was worth less than $10,000. By the mid seventies just about all of his books (with the notable exception of On The Road) were out of print. Today, there are over thirty books in print, many published posthumously.

James Franco - Writer

2010-10-20T11:59:00.002-06:00

James Franco of HOWL fame will release a short story collection called Palo Alto Stories this week. I'm looking forward to reading it. Mainly because I'm a sucker for James Franco. I've read a couple of his short stories before, and while I don't think he's Ginsberg reincarnated, he isn't as bad as some of the reviews claim. So James, if you're googling yourself, know three things.

1) The SWP would love to have you with us this summer, if you're not busy...

2) We're very happy that you've gotten your collection published. As most writers know it is near impossible to get a short story collection picked up by a major house.

3) If the reviews get you down, always remember, the SWP loves you, bad prose or not!

Jon Hamm on Ginsberg of Our Time

2010-10-14T08:00:00.001-06:00

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

Mary-Louise Parker Interview from Wall Street Journal

2010-10-13T15:52:00.002-06:00

From Mary-Louise Parker Interview from Wall Street Journal:

What made you take a cameo role in "Howl"?

I'm a huge poetry geek, and it's one of those things you would know about me if you knew me for more than a half an hour. My brother came to the hospital the day my son was born and read him "Howl." It was wonderful. So I kind of did it for my brother in a way.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703846604575447473114630484.html

Patti Smith, Peter Carey Among National Book Award Finalists

2010-10-13T14:29:00.000-06:00

Patti Smith, Peter Carey Among National Book Award Finalists

Congrats to Patti Smith, CD Wright, and mostly to SWP Faculty 2011, Karen Tei Yamashita!!!!

Thurston Moore is Coming!

2010-10-06T10:41:00.001-06:00

Just found out this very morning that Sonic Youth great, Thurston Moore will be teaching for us week 4 of the SWP! Can you believe it? That will be one kick ass week!

Week 4 Lineup:

Rick Moody, Thurston Moore, Eileen Myles, Margaret Randall, DJ Spooky, Jane Sprague, Wesley Tanner, Steven Taylor, Edwin Torres, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Hal Willner & others.

Michael Gizzi 1949-2010

2010-09-29T16:19:00.000-06:00

We were so sad to hear of Michael Gizzi’s passing this morning. A great poet and editor.

Only You Know What This Means

I’ll tell you about it, what each syllable says.
Doors opened. You must have been in there. We halved the distance, lost in a weightless environment.
One hotel contained a clipper ship. We must have been on board.
The only heroic thing was a dot, emerging in the sky.
A still from a silent movie about the sea,
a towel by the edge of the sink.

HOWL Reviews

2010-09-27T10:29:00.001-06:00

New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/movies/24howl.html?src=me

LA Times:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/09/james-franco-howl-aurally.html

Speakeasy:
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/26/howl-the-accidental-courtroom-scenes/

Newsweek:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/16/movie-review-james-franco-in-howl.html

SWP Faculty for 2011 (as of 9/24/2010)

2010-09-24T11:24:00.002-06:00

June 13 - July 10, 2011

Week 1: June 13 -19
Gender & Hybridity, and Should We Consider the Cyborg?
Ana Bozicevic & Amy King, Rebecca Brown, Melissa Buzzeo, Samuel R. Delany, Rob Halpern, Erica Kaufman, Akilah Oliver, Maureen Owen, Vanessa Place, Max Regan, Julia Seko & Others.

Week 2: June 20 - 26
Fictions: The Story (Narrative and Anti-Narrative) & Moving Image Poetics
Junior Burke, Rikki Ducornet, C.S. Giscombe, Renee Gladman, Anselm Hollo, Laird Hunt, Stephen Graham Jones, David Matlin, Kabir Mohanty & Sharmistha Mohanty, Evie Shockley, Karen Weiser, Ronaldo Wilson, Karen Tei Yamashita & Others.

Week 3: June 27 - July 3
Ecology, Urgency, Dharma/Activist Poetics
Jack Collom, Lara Durback, Barbara Henning, Laura Mullen, dg okpik, Jed Rasula, Selah Saterstrom, Andrew Schelling, Eleni Sikelianos, Jonathan Skinner, Eleni Stecopoulos, Tyrone Williams & Others.

Week 4: July 4 - 10
Economics of the Counter-Culture: Performance, Publishing, Collaboration
Rick Moody, Eileen Myles, Margaret Randall, DJ Spooky, Jane Sprague, Wesley Tanner, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Hal Willner & Others.

Catalogs will be available in February.
Check us out on the web: www.naropa.edu/swp
Email us anytime: swpr@naropa.edu or call 303-245-4600
Friend us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SummerWritingProgram
Read the SWP Blog: http://naropaswp.blogspot.com/
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Naropaswp

HOWL Festival Kicks Off in NY

2010-09-13T10:30:00.001-06:00

http://afilreis.blogspot.com/2010/09/howl-festival.html

Also, The Chronicle of Higher Educations review of HOWL:

http://chronicle.com/article/Howls-Echoes/124339/?sid=wb_source=wb_medium=en

SWP 2011 Faculty as of 9/8/2010

2010-09-08T12:56:00.001-06:00

Ana Bozicevic, Rebecca Brown, Melissa Buzzeo, Jack Collom, Samuel
R. Delany, Lara Durback, C.S. Giscombe, Renee Gladman, Barbara
Henning, Laird Hunt, Stephen Graham Jones, Erica Kaufman, Amy
King, David Matlin, Laura Mullen, Eileen Myles, dg okpik, Akilah
Oliver, Vanessa Place, Margaret Randall, Jed Rasula, Max Regan,
Julia Seko, DJ Spooky, Jane Sprague, Eleni Stecopoulos, Wesley
Tanner, Anne Waldman, Karen Weiser, Tyrone Williams & Others.

HOWL Book Trailer Contest from City Lights!

2010-09-08T10:38:00.001-06:00

In honor of the Sept. 24 release of ‘Howl’: the movie starring author and actor James Franco, City Lights, publisher of Howl, is sponsoring a book trailer contest. They’re asking entrants to film their own 90 second book trailer for Howl and submit it by the 24th. Here are the rules from the official contest Facebook page:

Here’s what you do: create your own personal book trailer for Allen Ginsberg’s notorious epic poem “HOWL” no longer than 90 seconds. Email us a link to your trailer to contest@citylights.com. For examples of book trailers, check out the 2010 Moby Awards.

The prize: the 4-color HOWL 2′x3′ movie poster, a HOWL T-shirt, a “HOWL if you heart City Lights” bumper sticker, and a copy of City Lights’ book HOWL on Trial.

Message From Anne Waldman

2010-07-05T08:45:00.001-06:00

Dear Committee, attn: Lina Oh & Adriana Karagosian.

Thank you for your letter Lina and Adriana, and your apologies.

I was extremely distressed to hear about the shameful violation of Dr. Lord
at the Friday night student reading, and will be reviewing the video of the
performance in the next day. I strongly recommend that you desist from this
kind of hateful display. I suggest that all of you read the Code of Conduct
for the Naropa community and formulate your questions with scholarship and
details and respect, and know what you are talking about and not be simply
reactive and emotional. I don't think you have been listening to what Lisa
and I have been saying in our letter to the community nor what we said (with
Reed Bye) during the 45 minutes of Socratic Rap. I am surprised you would
view me or Lisa or any of your faculty as "enemies". This is pure
ignorance. The people who have been guest faculty this summer also ARE you
faculty. The SWP is part of the degree program as you must know.

I don't know if you have any idea what it takes to put the SWP together and
what it takes to have it run this intense month. The "protest" has run us
ragged. We have scores & scores of emails & calls coming in- totally
misinformed inquiries about the school & its future. This alarmist activism
has not been constructive. We need to stay on track with our own roles in
this SWP community.

Lisa and I have our own concerns, naturally, about the "cuts" & the future
of the school & it's the STUDENTS we are thinking about! Not just ourselves
& our vision. But we are working with perspicacity and making our concerns
known through respectful action, writing informed queries & engaging in
dialogue. We are working CONSTRUCTIVELY with the new re-structuring plan.
The Kerouac School is not folding. We want it to survive for all our sakes,
and especially your sakes.

We cannot support your protest outside the door of Dr. Stuart Lord. We
also are not excusing anyone from classes. We would like you to respect the
guest faculty this week and not try to pull them into this maelstrom, which
has not been productive. Teachers will be teaching in their classrooms.
Other students have also urged us to make this request. They feel their time
here has been compromised. Many of the other students do not support your
protest & the form it has taken. They are here to write and study and spend
time with this extraordinary faculty this final week. It is a precious
opportunity to work with these writers as writers yourselves. My advice is
not to squander it.

I was extremely impressed by Val's presentation on Diversity on Friday -
his statement- written with intelligence and sincerity was very moving. We
support this and have made our support known.

Further clarification: Dr. Stuart Lord was not responsible for not renewing
Elizabeth Robinson's visiting faculty position. The position ran out. Other
people lost their jobs, Elizabeth Robinson is not the only person in our
universe. I have supported her as a teacher here, I respect her as a poet
and a member of the poetry community at large and I am sorry it did not work
out for her to have the position renewed. I am saying it again, it was not
renewed. She was not fired. I am sorry the situation became so inflamed and
was not handled properly. It has now escalated and been tainted by a very
acrimonious document which unfortunately reveals a counter-productive
mentality. I highly recommend "closure" at this point. This is now a dead
issue. SWP directors do not want to hear of it again. Elizabeth Robinson-
in case you didn't notice- has been working for us all summer! We hired her
this summer!

Dr. Lord has been president for 1 year. He has inherited a difficult
situation he did not create. Michele Naka-Piece from the FEWG has offered to
meet with students and there are local Board members in town who can be
contacted, but we say it again: GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER. Make informed
inquiries & decisions about your actions.

There was a question about the "Naropa" sign on the lawn absent the dharma
wheel. Everyone assumed Dr Lord had it removed. It was a Board decision 3
years ago. It is important to get the facts. Now you can query the Board
about the decision.

It doesn't seem to us and others in this community you are doing the real
work at this point. We invite you to go deeper into what it means to be a
responsible member of a community. We teach Investigative Poetics here. Lisa
Jarnot taught this Week 2. I handed out the Sanders document.
Steven Taylor also pointed to the work of Ed Sanders the other day.

Many of the problems- as with the rest of the world (wake up people!)- are
financial. Do you have any idea of the cut backs in education and other
services ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. We are in a recession. Naropa is struggling
for its very survival. We need to raise more endowment, we need support for
the archive work and many other things.

It is important that we honor the colleagues and friends who have been laid
off. I don't the sit-in will accomplish that. Lisa and I ask you: what do
you hope to accomplish at this point with your sit-in?

Lisa Birman, Reed Bye as Chair of W&P , and I will be addressing students
at 2:30 pm after the Monday panel. We will not have time for a discussion at
this time. We need to clarify the decorum for this week. We are also writers
ourselves who have spent our lives on a creative path. We have also worked
for years with Naropa and will struggle in hopes of having it survive with
its original vision.

With respect and encouragement to stay on track with your writing & study
and with your generosity and compassion, and respect for others.

Warm wishes,

Anne Waldman

A Messgae from Anne Waldman & Lisa Birman

2010-07-02T13:06:00.000-06:00

Dear Community & Friends of the Jack Kerouac School:

Lisa Birman and I are writing to you from the Summer Writing Program Office. We know that the Naropa environment has suffered because of the recent downsizing of Naropa staff at large. 23 staff members, though no one from Summer Writing Program or Writing & Poetics, were laid off in June. The community has suffered tremendously as these individuals were part of our world and community. We all have questions and concerns. Our hearts and support go out to those individuals.

However, there are some clearer answers now, and we are more than willing to address your grievances as much as we can. Students are gathering these days to address and protest their concerns, which center on issues of transparency, student involvement in university-wide decisions, diversity issues, and the well being of the campus and all who are engaged here. We are all going through this process together and we support this deep engagement on the part of the students. We acknowledge the financial sacrifice and contributions our students make to this environment. They have prepared a respectful statement of concerns. We are urging them to be accurate and to check facts and details.

We know that the Higher Learning Commission (which grants accreditation) in a visit to the University has made strong critiques and recommendations concerning the way Naropa works with its budget. The situation as it has been is not sustainable for a school this size. A group of university-wide faculty (FEWG) has been working to make proposals concerning a re-structuring of the school that would not go into effect most likely until the fall of 2012. One of the proposed models is that the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics would hold all its wings together (MFA, Low-residency MFA, BA, Summer Writing Program and Writing Center, Print Shop). We think that is likely. We have been told in a meeting with the Office of Academic Affairs yesterday (July 1) that the Summer Writing Program 2011 will retain its current structure, although there will be some budget cuts.

There also appears to be some misunderstandings about the current structure of the Kerouac School. In its current incarnation, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics consists of two departments: The Department of Writing and Poetics (which houses the MFA in W&P, the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, and the BA in Writing and Literature) and the Department of the Summer Writing Program. The Kerouac School also has various other responsibilities and interests, such as the Kavyayantra Printshop (primarily under the purview of W&P), and the Audio Archive (the content of which is primarily SWP events and classes). Under the proposed new structure, both W&P would stay under the umbrella of the Kerouac School, possibly joined by the Naropa Writing Center.

One of the problems, as we see it, has been a silence around the layoffs, although there have been some “healing circles” and meditation sessions. It seems there are legal issues of confidentiality. And we are trying to understand those implications ourselves. The uncertainly of Naropa’s future has also been a huge issue, we are both feeling more confident now as we ourselves seek answers from the NU Administration. The school has always been a ground of struggle and sacrifice. I have been here every summer since 1974, and Lisa — an MFA graduate — has been in her role 10 years! We can certainly attest to the upheavals of the past.

But we want you to know that The Kerouac School community has been sharing a terrific pedagogical and creative summer together; every panel, lecture, reading, and discussion has been of the highest quality — all of us have been present. The caliber of student work — readings, panels, and discourse — is excellent. The guest faculty have been stellar, their engagement, as well, is incredibly inspiring. We have a week to go, which will highlight themes of performance, collaboration, and small press publishing. Our protest is part of our practice.

We want you to know that we are here, that we support and acknowledge our students, that we are up and running, and that the SWP staff, Reed Bye, interim Chair of the W&P Department, and Naropa administrative staff and trustees are willing to meet with students to clarify and listen to concerns. We are part of a larger world and culture that is going through tremendous change, paradigm shifts of all kinds. We will all have to do with less and continue to cultivate our empathy and compassion and our artistic paths. We exist amidst huge waves of suffering as the oil spill continues to gush and harm many sentient beings and the vegetal world, as war rages, as financial cuts are made that affect everyone. It is our duty to stay awake and to provide feedback in our own communities. The writing community here at Naropa has always been an activist one, and a spiritual one. We honor this lineage.

“And while I’m here I’ll do the work. And what’s the work? To ease the pain of living — everything else, drunken dumbshow” - Allen Ginsberg
“The ground of imagination is fearless” -Diane di Prima

With gratitude and respect,

Anne Waldman Lisa Birman
Co-founder, KSDP Director, SWP
Chair, Artistic Dir, SWP Faculty, Low-Res MFA
Core Faculty, W&P

RIP

2010-06-14T10:15:00.001-06:00

For those our community has recently lost:

Anne Waldman on Peter's passing: http://pierrejoris.com/blog/?p=3758

Leslie Scalapino's memorial info: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/scalapino/obit.html

Peter Orlovsky's NY Times Obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/arts/03orlovsky.html

You will be missed

Workshops Start at 9:30am!!!!!

2010-06-11T12:03:00.001-06:00

SWPers, workshops start at 9:30 am, printshops at 9am! Please don't be late!

Peter Orlovsky (July 8, 1933 – May 30, 2010)

2010-06-01T15:51:00.001-06:00

http://www.archive.org/details/Peter_Orlovsky_Poetry_for_Dumb_Students_June_1981_81P138 to a recording of a class by Peter Orlovsky.

Peter, you will be missed.

SWP Open Workshops as of 5/25/2010

2010-05-26T11:14:00.001-06:00

Register at www.naropa.edu/swp/register

Week 1:

Charles Alexander - (printer) - The printed word strikes with FORCE!
David Trinidad - The Personal Poem
Jaime Manrique - Dreams, "Voices," Visions, Riffs, Meditations, Rants
Jennifer Moxley - Radical Receptivity
Jennifer Scappettone - Languages of Dislocation: Poetry Of & Off the Page
Julie Carr - Writing and Violence: Invoking, Avoiding, Inviting
Junior Burke & Bobbie Louise Hawkins - Delivering Performance Text
Ross Gay - Mastery or Mystery?
Thalia Field - Logic Defiled: Essays in Practice

Week 2:

Brenda Hillman - "Our ecopoetics, her inner life, its vocabulary, your-my-and-their activisms"
Elizabeth Robinson & Helen Howe Braider - Wordscapes
Evelyn Reilly - Ecologies of the Unpoetic
James Stevens - Shock of the (Old) New: Writing of New World Nature
Jane Augustine & Michael Heller - POETIC ECOLOGIES AND RADICAL OBSERVATION
Lisa Jarnot - Investigative Poetry!
Tracie Morris - Sound Poetry

Week 3:

Anselm Hollo - Morphing Texts: Translation, Transformation
Bob Holman - Disappearing Tongues: Orality, Technology and the Poetry of Endangered Languages
Damion Searls - The Whole Fling of a Sentence
Dolores Dorantes & Jen Hofer - Sad and Sweet (Trilce): Unmapping Structures of Power, Mapping Acts of Agency
Julia Seko - (printer) - Letterpress Printing: On the Page
Murat Nemet-Nejat - A Rhetoric of Rebellion
Sherwin Bitsui - Shifting Modalities
Xi Chuan - Discussions on Tang Poets in English Translation

Week 4:

Allan Kornblum
Douglas Dunn
Julie Patton
Laynie Browne
Patricia Smith
Penny Arcade
Rachel Levitsky
Steven Taylor

Jack Hirschman Performs for One Night Music - Jack Hirschman Live Poetry | One Night Music

2010-05-06T11:37:00.000-06:00

Jack Hirschman Performs for One Night Music - Jack Hirschman Live Poetry | One Night Music

SWP Faculty Daniel Pinchbeck on Colbert Report

2010-05-05T14:46:00.000-06:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Daniel Pinchbeck

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

Article by Anne Waldman and Kiki Smith in The Brooklyn Rail

2010-05-04T11:38:00.000-06:00

If I Could Say This With My Body, Would I. I Would
by Anne Waldman and Kiki Smith

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/04/poetry/if-i-could-say-this-with-my-body-would-i-i-would

NY Post Article about Disappearing Language

2010-04-30T12:18:00.001-06:00

Bob Holman's workshop in week 3 deals with this issue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html.

Waitlisted Workshops as of 4/13/2010

2010-04-13T15:24:00.002-06:00

The following workshops are wait listed:

Bhanu Kapil - Week 1
Laird Hunt - Week 1
Linh Dinh - Week 1
Stephen Graham Jones - Week 1

Daniel Pinchbeck - Week 2
Samuel R. Delany - Week 2
Alan Gilbert - Week 2
Elizabeth Robinson & Helen Howe Braider - Week 2

Akilah Oliver - Week 3
Dolores Dorantes & Jen Hofer - Week 3
Margaret Randall - Week 3
Semezdin Mehmedinovic - Week 3
Sinan Antoon - Week 3
Julia Seko (printer) - Week 3

Brian Evenson & Joanna Howard - Week 4
Selah Saterstrom - Week 4
Penny Arcade - Week 4
Colin Frazer (printer) - Week 4

If you would like to wait list for any of these workshops, please email Julie at swpr@naropa.edu.

Post AWP Coverage

2010-04-13T10:20:00.001-06:00

Great article about the AWP:

http://boulderreporter.com/2010/04/women-writers-shine-brightly-at-denver-events/

MFA Class Reading Assignments

2010-04-12T13:19:00.000-06:00

MFA Reading Assignments

Texts:

1. Kane, Daniel (Ed). Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New York School (Dalkey Archive, 2006)
2. Retallack, Joan. The Poethical Wager. University of CA Press, 2003)

Brian Kiteley: Monday, June 14

Kane: Deep Image (Rasula, 29)
Retallack: The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein (145)

Akilah Oliver: Monday, June 21

Kane: Against the Speech of Friends (Epstein, 3)
Retallack: Wager as Essay (1)

Elizabeth Robinson: Monday, June 28

Kane: Standing Corporeally in One’s Time (DuPlessis, 173)
Retallack: The Scarlet Aitch (102)

Michelle Naka Pierce: Monday, July 5

Kane: Angel Hair Magazine (Kane, 90)
Retallack: The Poethical Wager (21)

Photos from AWP of Gary Snyder & Anne Waldman

2010-04-12T11:06:00.002-06:00

AWP Booth

2010-04-07T12:03:00.002-06:00

Come see us at the AWP Denver Convention Center Booth 406! We'll be the ones with all the cool people.

AWP Event

2010-04-06T18:54:00.000-06:00

7:00–11:00 p.m.
Sponsored by Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

Mercury Café Reading

Please join us for a reading and celebration with Kerouac School faculty and staff, past and present. Readers include Anne Waldman, Lisa Birman, Reed Bye, Amy Catanzano, J’Lyn Chapman, Jack Collom, Danielle Dutton, HR Hegnauer, Laird Hunt, Bhanu Kapil, Julie Kazimer, Maureen Owen, Michelle Naka Pierce, Elizabeth Robinson, Andrew Schelling, Eleni Sikelianos, Daniel Staniforth, Sara Veglahn and more.

Location: The Mercury Café: 2199 California St., Denver

AWP!!!! Denver Baby!

2010-04-05T15:50:00.004-06:00

Come down to the Denver Convention Center for the 2010 AWP Conference. We'll be there.

Waitlist Workshops as of 3/30/2010

2010-03-30T12:41:00.003-06:00

The following workshops are wait listed:

Bhanu Kapil - Week 1
Laird Hunt - Week 1
Linh Dinh - Week 1

Daniel Pinchbeck - Week 2
Samuel R. Delany - Week 2

Akilah Oliver - Week 3
Dolores Dorantes & Jen Hofer - Week 3
Margaret Randall - Week 3
Semezdin Mehmedinovic - Week 3

Brian Evenson & Joanna Howard - Week 4
Selah Saterstrom - Week 4

If you would like to wait list for any of these workshops, please email Julie at swpr@naropa.edu.

Hurry! Only two days left for free money!

2010-03-30T12:38:00.002-06:00

Remeber the deadline for applying for any of the SWP scholarships is April 1st by 5pm (MST)!!!!

Download the application: http://www.naropa.edu/tuitionfees/documents/SWPScholarshipApplication_000.pdf

Happy World Poetry Day!

2010-03-21T19:01:00.003-06:00

To all the poets around the world.

To all the people who love poetry.

Happy World Poetry Day!

Where in the World is Anne Waldman?

2010-03-20T13:02:00.000-06:00

Thursday March 25
Olson Centenary
AW reading Worchester Polytechnic Institute
Discussion Poetry & Activism
Higgins Lab 3 PM
Readin/performance 7 PM
Salisbury Labs
Contact Mark Wagner
markwagner@charter.net

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Register NOW for the 2010 SWP

2010-03-18T11:21:00.000-06:00

Priority Registration

2010-03-17T00:25:00.000-06:00

Naropa students:

Priority registration opens today. Please check you Naropa email account for detailed instructions on how to register for workshops.

Contact Julie at jkazimer@naropa.edu with any questions.

SWP Registration

2010-03-16T11:17:00.002-06:00

If you are a Naropa W & P student, or an undergraduate student, you should receive an email from jkazimer@naropa.edu with important information about how to register for this summer's program. If you did not receive the email at your Naropa email account, please contact Julie Kazimer at jkazimer@naropa.edu, by phone at 303-245-4600, or drop by the Arapahoe House as soon as possible.

Questions? Join the SWP staff on March 17th from 12 - 1:30 in the Student Center to answer any questions, help students register, and share our green licorice.

Sample Day

2010-03-16T11:16:00.001-06:00

Check out a day in the life at the SWP.

Photos by Nathaniel Siegel from Anne Waldman's RED NOIR

2010-03-11T12:21:00.003-07:00

RED NOIR Photos

Where in the World is Anne Waldman?

2010-03-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

Sunday March 14th
Arizona Book Fair
Tucson
Contact: Charles Alexander CHAX
Release of CHAX chapbook, MATRIOT ACTS

2010 Intro Prize in Poetry Contest

2010-03-10T10:51:00.000-07:00

2010 Intro Prize in Poetry
Judge: Alan Shapiro

Submission Dates: January 1 - March 31, 2010
electronic or mail submissions accepted

Awarding publication of a book-length collection and $1000.00

Open to any poet writing in English who has not previously published a book-length poetry collection

For Complete Guidelines please visit:
www.fourwaybooks.com

Screening of Guggenheim Winner Ed Bowes - "Entanglement"

2010-03-08T12:16:00.001-07:00

Entanglement

Date: Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 7:00 PM

Location: Canyon Theater Boulder Public Library - Main Branch

Entanglement
This film is an experimental narrative directed, photographed and edited by Ed Bowes and written by Bowes and Anne Waldman (2009). It is a story about a group of friends, how they think, what they want, and the ways they see and remember. Entanglement features performances by Eleni Sikelianos, Oona Fraser, Ange Yeowel and Michael Jones. (62 min.) Ed Bowes makes long form, experimental fiction films¯this is the third film of a series he has made in and around Boulder. Bowes teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he also directs a Masters of Fine Arts video program. Notes by Ed Bowes. The filmmaker answers questions after the screening.

http://boulderlibrary.org/events/films.html

SWP Alum Ellen Weiss's Play to Open on April 9th

2010-03-03T11:19:00.003-07:00

Verve of Verge: A Puzzle Play

A stage perfomance of poetry-driven comedy and giant jigsaw puzzles!

This is a not-for-profit production.
50% or more of the proceeds go to benefit the Pacific Pride Foundation

http://www.pacificpridefoundation.org/

Friday, April 9
Saturday, April 10
Saturday, April 17

Doors open 7pm

Goleta Public Library, Multipurpose Room
500 North Fairview Ave., Goleta, CA, 93117

http://www.sbplibrary.org/hourslocations/goleta.html

Tickets sold 6pm at the door. $10 cash or check.
No advance ticket purchase available.

For more info, email: nervelantern@hotmail.com

Where in the World is Anne Waldman?

2010-03-02T12:57:00.002-07:00

Saturday March 6th
Zen Temple
Brooklyn, NY
Workshop 11am-1pm
2 pm-4 pm
reading to follow
mro@mro.org
http://www.mro.org/mro.html

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2009 Derringer Awards Nomination

2010-02-26T14:11:00.003-07:00

SWP Staffer j.a kazimer's short story, EXCUSE ME, BUT THERE'S A KIDNEY IN MY SOUP, was nominated by Back Alley Webzine for the 2009 Derringer Awards presented by the Short Mystery Fiction Society.

Read EXCUSE ME, BUT THERE'S A KIDNEY IN MY SOUP

Congrats Week 2 Faculty - Brenda Hillman

2010-02-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

Brenda Hillman's Practical Water (Wesleyan University Press) is a finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.

List of other finalists.

Buy the book.

Where in the World is Anne Waldman?

2010-02-24T12:55:00.001-07:00

Friday Feb 26th
Downstairs at the Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street, NYC
212-989-93196:00 PM.
Anne Waldman
Devin Waldman
Ambrose Bye

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Where in the World is Anne Waldman?

2010-02-23T12:53:00.001-07:00

Thursday Feb 25,
White Columns
320 West 13th Street
212-924-4212
7-9 PM
go to whitecolumns.org
with Thurston Moore, renowned & celebrated guitarist, songwriter, poet and composer
musicians: Ambrose Bye
Devin Waldman (sax)

Devin Waldman, musician and jazz composer, has his own band Brahja Waldman
Quartet and has performed recently at the Bowery Electric, The Bowery Poetry Club and
in many venues around the east coast. He makes his home in Montreal.

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Where in the World is Anne Waldman?

2010-02-20T12:49:00.002-07:00

Tuesday, February 23
Riggio Forum: Anne Waldman with Ambrose Bye
Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, 5th Floor, NYC
6:30 pm

The well-known New York poet, activist and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute, reads from Manatee/Humanity (Penguin, 2009)
and her ongoing project Iovis: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment. She will be
accompanied by her son, musician Ambrose Bye. Moderated by Robert Polito, Director
of The New School Writing Program. Riggio Forum events are presented by the Len and Louise Riggio Writing and Democracy Initiative at The New School.
Ambrose Bye, musician (keyboard, guitar, voice) and composer, grew up in the
environment of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University,
counting Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs as “poetic” godfathers. He graduated
from The University of California, Santa Cruz and is has studied at the music /production program at the Pyramind Institute in San Francisco. His most recent CD is “Matching Half” with Anne Waldman and Akilah Oliver, produced by Farfalla,McMillen,

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SWP MFA Student - Steve Scheuer

2010-02-19T11:32:00.002-07:00

Steven Scheuer, a first-year MFA student in the Jack Kerouac School, will read at the 4x4 Reading Series, hosted by the University of Colorado-Boulder on Thursday, February 25 at 7pm in the Eaton Humanities Building, 150.

I Do Declare

2010-02-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

Flash Fiction Contest from NPR

2010-02-19T10:52:00.002-07:00

NPR is hosting a flash fiction contest. The premise of our contest is simple: Send in your original short story that can be read in three minutes or less. That's no more than 600 words. Your essay must be inspired by the photo provided, and we must receive it by 11:59 p.m. ET on Feb. 28, 2010.

More information: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123573329

Good Advice

2010-02-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

We're a Bollywood Sensation!

2010-02-18T00:00:00.001-07:00

<a href="http://www.grapheine.com" title=typographie experimentale>logotype definition</a>

2010-02-17T15:17:00.001-07:00

www.naropa.edu/swp/register

SWP Informational Meeting - TODAY!!!!

2010-02-17T00:43:00.000-07:00

The SWP will hold its annual non-mandatory SWP informational meeting tomorrow, February 17th from 12:00 – 1:30pm in the Student Center (Goldfarb) for any students interested in learning more about the summer program.

Pick up a catalog, ask questions about the SWP, learn how to register for the program, find out who the 2010 visiting faculty are, apply for scholarships, get a summer workstudy job with us, or just hang out and eat pizza.

2010-02-16T16:27:00.000-07:00

Review of Red Noir by Steven Taylor at Reality Sandwhich

2010-02-16T10:49:00.001-07:00

Read Steven Taylor's review of Anne Waldn't play Red Noir from Reality Sandwhich. Trust me, it's worth your time.

Sad Weekend for the Art World

2010-02-15T12:57:00.002-07:00

RIP - Lead singer of The Knack Doug Fieger, Author Dick Francis & Poet Lucille Clifton.

Happy Shambhala Day!

2010-02-15T12:54:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the year of the Iron Tiger.

SWP Informational Meeting

2010-02-12T04:22:00.000-07:00

Feb 17th
12–1:30 p.m.
Student Center, Arapahoe Campus

Learn more about the Summer Writing Program, including how it fits into your degree, how to register, and what visiting faculty are here for the summer. Pick up a catalog, ask questions, and eat pizza.

For questions, please contact Julie Kazimer, jkazimer@naropa.edu / 303.245.4600.

Congrats to Lisa Birman

2010-02-11T16:50:00.002-07:00

A review of Lisa Birman's for that return passage–A Valentine for the United States of America (Hollowdeck Press) written by the wonderful Margaret Randall will appear in Rain Taxi. We'll keep you updated.

SWP at the AWP in April

2010-02-11T04:20:00.001-07:00

Non-Credit Registration IS OPEN!!!!

2010-02-10T00:00:00.002-07:00

SWP Week 3 Faculty - Bob Holman's Journey to West Africa

2010-02-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

A poet's journey into endangered languages, culture, art, food and culture from around the world.

SWP Week 3 Faculty - Xi Chuan Reads at Beijing Bookworm's International Literary Festival

2010-02-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

From the literary festival program: "Xi Chuan, one of the most influential poets in contemporary China, presents an evening of readings from his wide-ranging and varied body of work, which spans from his associations with avant-garde poets in the eighties, to recent pieces set to music and performed by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra."

Event Manager & Hell of a Musician Daniel Staniforth Performs at SWP 2009

2010-02-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

SWP Week 1 Faculty - Linh Dinh Reads At Pegasus Downtown Berkeley

2010-02-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

SWP Week 1 Guest - Joanna Kyger

2010-02-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

SWP Faculty for Week 4 - Penny Arcade Performs "Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!" at Bad Reputation Launch

2010-02-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

Read interview with SWP Faculty Damion Searles

2010-02-02T14:51:00.001-07:00

http://hotelstgeorgepress.com/2010/01/interview-with-damion-searls/

SWP Catalogs - Feb 9th

2010-02-02T11:32:00.001-07:00

The Summer Writing Program is gearing up. Swing by our office after February 9th to pick up a catalog, or to chat about the upcoming program.

We have some exciting job opportunities for the summer too. If you are interested in working as a Magazine Editor, a Student Activity Coordinator, a BA Discussion Group Leader, a MFA Lecturer, or as a Faculty Liaison, apply today. The deadline is February 20th. You can read more about the positions or apply at http://www.naropa.edu/swp/finaid.cfm.

We are also offering two scholarships for the summer, Zora Neale Hurston Awards and the Aimee Grunberger Memorial Award. Apply for either award at: http://www.naropa.edu/tuitionfees/documents/SWPScholarshipApplication_000.pdf.

Naropa student priority registration for workshops will start on March 17th. You will receive an email from Julie Kazimer with information about online workshop selection and web reg registration. If you do not receive the email, please contact Julie (jkazimer@naropa.edu/ 303-245-4600) immediately. You will have priority registration until the 21st of March.

The online faculty & guest sourcebook can help you in making a decision about what workshop to take. The sourcebook is available at: http://www.naropa.edu/swp/swp2010_sourcebook.cfm

If you have any questions about the program, please contact Julie Kazimer at jkazimer@naropa.edu, or by phone at 303-245-4600.

SWP Informational Meeting

2010-02-02T11:31:00.002-07:00

Hey, anyone interested in attending the SWP this summer, join the us on Feb 17th for an Informational Meeting. I'll buy you pizza...no beer...quit asking...anyway, from 12 until 1:30 drop by the Student Center in the Admin Building to answer any burning SWP questions...an no, that burning sensation isn't normal, and it doesn't happen to everyone...

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Week 2 Faculty - Lisa Jarnot

2010-02-01T08:20:00.000-07:00

Lisa Jarnot was born in Buffalo, New York. She received a BA from the State University of New York and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. She has edited two small magazines (No Trees, 1987−1990, Troubled Surfer, 1991−1992) as well as The Poetry Project Newsletter and An Anthology of New (American) Poetry. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Some Other Kind of Mission, Ring of Fire, Black Dog Songs, and Night Scenes. Her biography of Robert Duncan is forthcoming in 2010.

Workshop: Investigative Poetry!

In this course, we will attempt to recreate the 1977 Investigative Poetry Group, led by Ed Sanders. Students will choose a topic of local interest out of the Ecosphere and collaboratively carry out poetical investigations culminating in a publication for the benefit of the community.

Read Lisa's Blog.

Raymond Federman at the SWP 2008

2010-01-30T15:21:00.000-07:00

We miss you!

Week 2 Faculty - Brenda Hillman

2010-01-29T08:17:00.000-07:00

Brenda Hillman has published three chapbooks and eight collections of poetry, including Pieces of Air in the Epic and Practical Water. She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood. Hillman is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California. She is involved in non-violent activism as a member of Code Pink,
a women-initiated social justice group working to end war.

Workshop: Our ecopoetics, her inner life, its vocabulary, your-my-and-their activisms

Our ecopoetics shimmer in a multifaceted way. Using models from San Francisco Renaissance poets and others, we will initiate and continue conversations having to do with land, the elements, and the material word. How do locale and mental life intersect? How do you access the vocabulary that transitions between inner and outer nature? We will consider poetics of social conscience and activism. Participants will write during the week and will bring new work every day.

Check out Brenda's website at http://galileo.stmarys-ca.edu/bhillman/