Collections

Writing and Poetics Collection

The Naropa University Archives continues work on its nationally recognized Writing and Poetics Collections. Digital reformatting and access activities continue on the Audio Collection, called “one of the three most important literary audio collections in America” by the New York Times. Work is also progressing to expand the archival programs to include film and photo collections.

Since its founding in 1974, by poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which includes the Department of Writing and Poetics and the Summer Writing Program, has recorded approximately six thousand hours of audio tapes documenting classes, performances, workshops and seminars conducted at Naropa by many of the leading figures of the U.S. literary avant-garde. The collection represents several generations of artists who have contributed to aesthetic and cultural change in the postmodern era.

Archives staff have currently digitized two thousand hours of audio recordings from activities at the Kerouac School. Access to over five hundred hours of the collection is available online, via the generous support of the Internet Archive, at http://www.archive.org/details/naropa, and MARC21 catalog records are available on OCLC WorldCat.

Among the recordings are historic lectures and performances addressing peace activism, gender issues, environmentalism, spirituality, freedom of speech and other social issues, as well as discussions on literatures ancient and modern, and the craft of writing. You'll hear Allen Ginsberg’s series of classes on Expansive Poetics, Anne Waldman lecturing on Poetics and Female Writers, Samuel Charters on Jack Kerouac and jazz, Amiri Baraka on Revolution and Art, Peter Lamborn Wilson discussing The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Bernadette Mayer teaching experimental writing techniques, Lorenzo Thomas on Racial Identity and Its Literary Representation, Peter Warshall on Biosphere and Noospher, Joy Harjo on Native American Women Writers, and many others.

The Archives received three significant visual collections in 2005 and work is now progressing on those. The Bobbie Louise Hawkins Home Movie Collection is a visual record of Hawkins’s life with Robert Creeley and their activities with many prominent writers from the period 1959-1972. The preservation of this collection is being funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation. The Steve Miles Photo Collection contains visual documentation of Naropa events from the period 1974-1997, with a special emphasis on the activities of Allen Ginsberg, a close friend of Miles. Preservation and access to this collection is funded by the Collaborative Digitization Program. The Carol Pearlman Photo Collection contains a visual record of the 1982 Jack Kerouac Conference.

See Also:
Artist Bios and Photos
Audio Collection
Hawkins Collection
Miles Collection