Welcome to the fall 2010 issue of not enough night. This should prove to be an exciting year for this publication and for the MFA Creative
Writing Program at Naropa. When the students and guest faculty come this summer for
the residency part of the low-residency degree, the Kerouac School is planning a very
special Film/Poetics conference. This will be in tandem with the University of Colorado’s
Stan Brakhage Center, and made possible by a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement
Award granted to Tom Gunning, head of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at
the University of Chicago. Anne Waldman, Lisa Birman, and I have been working hard
with Tom Gunning, as well as with CU’s Daniel Boord and Don Yannacito, in planning
what promises to be an event of national and international significance.
Somewhat related, this will come on the heels of the release of two films that are
pertinent to the lineage of the Kerouac School: Howl, a narrative account of the obscenity trial surrounding Ginsberg’s barrier/breaking
work, and William Burroughs: the Man Within, a documentary. The regional premieres of these works were held at the Boulder Theatre
and the Denver Film Center, respectively. The Howl evening was hosted by the Kerouac School and introduced by Writing & Poetics Chair
Reed Bye, SWP Director Lisa Birman, Kerouac School alum Jim Cohn and myself. The Burroughs
doc was held a month later, and introduced by me, on my own. Organized by Naropa’s
marketing/maven Barbara Schmid, both events were strongly attended, with lively Q
and A afterwards.
One of our designs for the future is to expand not enough night even further into other realms of media and expression. In the twenty-first century,
the marriage of word and image, film and poetry, is one of the most vital and promising
frontiers. I consider Naropa already to be at the forefront of that evolution, and
this publication is a way to reflect that. We hope you will enjoy this issue and look
forward to sharing more of what’s unfolding here at the Kerouac School.
