Week One Workshops and Faculty
WEEK I: July 1-July 7 2013
History, Race and Polis, and “Karma" of the Modernists
The Kerouac School at Naropa University, founded in 1974 of its own volition and not as an extension or offshoot of an English Department, has roots in the most innovative aspects of the New American Poetry, and has extended itself over decades to include new praxis and world poetics, reveling in diversity and hybrid form. It seems important given the sorry divisive and tormented nature of US of A political adversity, including gender, class and racial divides, to review and examine “where we have been.” What is the legacy of Williams, Stevens, Pound and Stein, and their post-modern inheritors? How did they set the bar, what were their prejudices and why do we still feed off their work? What is the continuing narrative? Where has the gaze gone since, beyond Euro-centrism? This week we will look at our own modes of attitude, and the dark shadows of influence under newer world “orders.” The Kerouac School has always looked to collaboration amongst artists and art forms and the philosophies and orality of Asian and indigenous art forms. Poet/art thinker Bill Berskon will present a lecture on Gertrude Stein and her family art legacy, and Jerome Rothenberg will carry us forward to investigate the continuing shamanic powers of poetry.
Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali was born in the UK to Muslim parents of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent.
His books include four volumes of poetry, two novels, two collections of essays, as
well as translations by Sohrab Sepehri, Marguerite Duras and Ananda Devi. Recently
he edited the essay collection Jean Valentine: This-World Company. In addition to
being associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin
College and founding editor of Nightboat Books he teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program
and is a certified Jivamukti Yoga instructor.
Cara Benson & Jennifer Karmin
Cara Benson is the author of the poetry collection (made) and a forthcoming book for SUNY Press on the poetry class she teaches in a NY State Prison. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, Best American Poetry and are forthcoming in Fence. Benson has performed poems in the offices of her Congressman to the US House of Representatives and on the streets of Washington DC, among many other esteemed venues.
Jennifer Karmin’s multidisciplinary projects have been presented at festivals, artist-run
spaces, and on city streets across the U.S., Japan, Kenya, and Europe. She is the
author of the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice and her writing is published in the
anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. In Chicago, she works with
immigrants as a community educator at Truman College, teaches in the Creative Writing
program at Columbia College, and curates the Red Rover Series.
Anselm Berrigan
Anselm Berrigan books of poems include Notes from Irrelevance, Free Cell, and Zero
Star Hotel. Skasers, a book written jointly with John Coletti, was recently published
by Flowers & Cream. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, former Artistic
Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, consciously a member of no particular
school of poetry, and Co-Chair of Writing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the
Arts.
Sherwin Bitsui
Sherwin Bitsui is the author of Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press) and Shapeshift (University
of Arizona Press). He Diné is of the Deer Springs Bitter Water People and is born
for the Manygoats People. He is from White Cone, Arizona on the Navajo Reservation.
His honors include the 2011 Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts & Culture Foundation
Fellowship for Literature, a PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award and a Whiting
Writers Award.
Julie Carr
Julie Carr is the author of four books of poetry, including 100 Notes on Violence
and Sarah-Of Fragments and Lines. Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of
Desire in Late Victorian Poetry is out from Dalkey Archive in early 2013. A new book,
RAG, is forthcoming from Omnidawn. She teaches poetry and poetics at the University
of Colorado, Boulder and is the co-editor of Counterpath Press.
Rikki Ducornet
The author of eight novels, three collections of short fiction, a book of essays
and five books of poetry, Rikki Ducornet has been twice honored by the Lannan Foundation.
She has received the Bard College Arts and Letters award and, in 2008, an Academy
Award in Literature. Her work is widely published abroad. Recent exhibitions of her
paintings include the solo show Desirous at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, in 2007, and the group shows: O Reverso Do Olhar in Coimbra, Portugal,
in 2008, and El Umbral Secreto at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in
Santiago, Chile, in 2009. She has illustrated books by Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover,
Forest Gander, Kate Bernheimer, Joanna Howard and Anne Waldman among others.
Jade Lascelles
Jade Lascelles is a poet and letterpress printer based in Boulder, Colorado. A graduate
of the Kerouac School, she now serves as the Harry Smith Print Shop assistant and
the Book Review Editor for Bombay Gin Literary Journal. She is a founding member of
the eco-poetic publishing project Inukshuk Collective and teaches writing and literature
at Naropa University and Front Range Community College. She is also quite fond of
yoga and dance parties.
Rachel Levitsky
Rachel Levitsky is the author of Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003), NEIGHBOR (UDP,
2009) and the novel, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013) and the founder
of the feminist avant-garde network, Belladonna* Collaborative. In 2010 with Christian
Hawkey, she started The Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS.net), a mobile research
unit variously located in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boulder, Brooklyn, Cambridge, NYC and
the Universität Leipzig in Leipzig. She teaches writing at Pratt Institute.
Anna Moschovakis
Anna Moschovakis’s recent books are: You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake and
The Jokers, a translation of La violence et la dérision by Egyptian-French novelist
Albert Cossery. She teaches in the Writing Program at Pratt Institute and at Milton
Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is also a member of Brooklyn-based
publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, for which she heads up the Dossier Series
of investigative texts.
Julie Patton
Julie Ezelle Patton’s recent paper-piper planes bees Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake
(Yo Yo Labs, 2010), forthcoming F (Field Books, 2013), and Writing with Crooked Ink
(Belladonna 2013). Julie is a performance poet, visual artist, and permaculturist
who lives in New York City. Her visualertness can be found in I’ll Drown My Book:
Conceptual writing by Women (Les Figues), ((eco(lang)uage(reader)), and Critiphoria.
Julie’s Building by the Side of the Road (About Place Journal: Rust Belt Tales, 2012),
chronicles a storied land conservation and eco-artist housing project she established
in a povarty city 180 miles from the rock star Detroit. Poet Tree Mitigation Services,
Let it Bee Green, Salon des Refusé, Community Service Berry Jam are some of niches
mined in this rust belt galaxy. Julie vocallaborates with composer/instrumentalists
Daniel Carter, Paul Van Curen, Drew Gardner. Fall 2012 found her wording notes with
Brad Jones at the Stone in New York City, and noting words with Anne Waldman at Poets
House and Lee Ann Brown at a Museum of Moving Images Event dedicated to John Cornell.
Julie been honored with Doan Brook Association 2012 Watershed Hero Award, a 2010 and
2008 Acadia Arts Foundation Award, and a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship
(Poetry). She’s a 2013 is an award-winning educator who has taught in public schools,
museums and universities in the Americas and abroad.
Frances Richard
Frances Richard’s books include Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012), The Phonemes (Les Figues
Press, 2012), See Through (Four Way Books, 2003), and the chapbooks Shaved Code (Portable
Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) and Anarch. (Woodland Editions, 2008). She writes frequently
about contemporary art and is co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, of
Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet Books, 2005). Currently
she teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
- The Phonemes
- I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women
- Poem from Anarch. & statement of poetics
- See Through
- Anne Waldman and Frances Richard in conversation
- Wayne Koestenbaum and Frances Richard in conversation
- Andy Fitch and Frances Richard in conversation
Christopher Stackhouse
Christopher Stackhouse is a writer and artist. Plural (2012) is a volume of his poetry
published by Counterpath Press. Seismosis (2006) is a collaborative book of Stackhouse’s
drawings in dialogue with text by writer John Keene, published by 1913 Press. He is
a recent visiting critic at the Maryland Institute of College Art, Hoffberger School of Painting, and, guest lecturer at Bethel University’s, New York Center for Art & Media Studies.
Steven Taylor
Steven Taylor is a musician and writer based in Brooklyn. For twenty years he was
Allen Ginsberg’s principal musical collaborator. He has been a member of the Fugs
since 1984. His account of touring the European underground rock scene, False Prophet:
Field Notes from the Punk Underground, was published by Wesleyan University Press
in 2003.
Special Guests:
Bill Berkson
Bill Berkson is a poet, critic and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute.
His most recent books include Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems; a collection
of art writings, For the Ordinary Artist; Not an Exit, with drawings by Léonie Guyer;
and another words-and-images collaboration, Repeat After Me, with watercolors by John
Zurier. He is a contributing editor (poetry) for artcritical.com, and a corresponding
editor for Art in America. He was the Paul Mellon Distinguished Fellow at the Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture for 2006 and awarded the Goldie for Literature by
the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2009.
Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known poet with over eighty books of poetry
and several assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians
of the Sacred and, with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey Robinson, Poems for the Millennium,
volumes 1-3. Recent books of poems include Triptych, Gematria Complete, Concealments
& Caprichos, and Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems 1955-2010. He is now working
on a global anthology of “outsider and subterranean poetry” and, with Heriberto Yépez,
Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader for Black Widow Press.
contact
Summer Writing Program
2130 Arapahoe Ave.
Boulder, CO 80302
303-245-4600
swpr@naropa.edu
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