Literature Curriculum Project Syllabi

WRI680e: Creative Reading and Writing: Mind Moving
Suggested Level for teaching students:  MFA
Naropa University

Course Description
The Mind Moving will investigate Philip Zenshin Whalen and Gary Snyder’s early processes of artistic synthesis and fusion along with their Buddhist appropriations and assimilations. Whalen and Snyder’s books and the Naropa Archive Project holdings will be our primary sources. These two Zen Buddhists’ books, mentoring and teaching helped promote nationally Engaged Buddhism and environmental activism for three decades.  Their influence informed Naropa’s artistic, contemplative and spiritual practices. Mind Moving will also offer instruction in contemplative meditation and will cover relevant American Buddhist history connected to Whalen and Snyder’s practices.

Course Requirements
Students will be required to turn in creative writing and short critical response assignments. The creative writing assignments will be based on particular works by Snyder, Whalen and Kerouac.  The critical response assignments will be based on various aspects of Snyder, Whalen and Kerouac’s practices, including Buddhist contemplative procedures. Twenty minutes of meditation will be required before each workshop. 

You may send in creative work at any time and ask for us to read it and discuss it.  For longer works of prose or poetry 20-30  pages  maximum, give your classmates a week to read it.  Starts, fragments, dialogue, monologues all are okay.

Method
When looking at a work of fiction or poetry the basic questions for teaching a class, writing a review, rewriting your own prose/poetry, and/or leading a class discussion are, in this order:

•  what was the author trying to do? (Objectivity reigns here) 
•  did the author do it? 
•  was it worth doing? 
•  how could the author do it differently or better?

Editorial and Critical Reactions as Positive Reading

Solutions
When discussing another student’s work, if you have a comment about the need for improvement in the writing, please give a solution after you locate the passage.

Feelings
If there is a part in the student’s writing which you feel is going awry, but you do not have a solution or suggestion: then clearly state this is only a feeling you have.  The writer then may use your feelings or not.  This class will give you technical terms for poetical or fictional situations. These are intended to be used during the class and used to help revision of your text. 

Text
David Suiter, Poets on the Peaks
Jack Kerouac The Dharma Bums
Gary Snyder The Gary Snyder Reader
Gary Snyder Myths and Texts
Gary Snyder The Back Country
Philip Whalen Overtime Selected Poems
Mind Moving Source Book. Required Listening: Whalen Naropa Audio Archive files. 

Course Outline

Week 1. Poets on the Peaks. Biographical background of Snyder, Whalen and Kerouac  (see David Suitor’s Poets on the Peaks) and Buddhism in the 1950s (Source book Rick Fields When The Swans Came To America).   Why isolation, underdog outsiders, and spiritual independence were the goals for these three writers.  The history of Hui Neng, his Platform Sutra, his appointment and subsequent persecution as Sixth Patriarch and how this history inspired these three writers.  

Click Here to Stream Audio: Hoover and 1930’s Depression
Click Here to Download Audio: Hoover and 1930’s Depression

Click Here to Stream Audio: Shakespeare Teachers
Click Here to Download Audio: Shakespeare Teachers

Click Here to Stream Audio: Whalen’s Biography
Click Here to Download Audio: Whalen’s Biography

Week 2. Cold Mountain Poems.  Snyder’s early translations from the Chinese Buddhist poet Han Shan provide both substance and stylist solutions for his own poetry in English.  This imaginative metamorphosis by Snyder also reflected an American anarchist point of view merging with the Chinese Hermit Poet tradition.  Whalen’s Chinese influenced poetry included a cinematic and psychedelic technique.

Click Here to Stream Audio: Kerouac Biography
Click Here to Download Audio: Kerouac Biography

Week 3. Like I Say and Memoirs of an Interglacial Age.  Whalen’s early lyric poems seen blend of poetry as a blend of word jazz and stand-up comedy and how Whalen combines their Reed College influence of the 18th XX British tradition of wit and social commentator. The following audio files are required listening.  

Click Here to Stream Audio: Program To Look For Reality Outside
Click Here to Download Audio: Program To Look For Reality Outside

Click Here to StreamAudio: Meditation
Click Here to Download Audio: Meditation

Click Here to Stream Audio: Engineered Despair
Click Here to Download Audio: Engineered Despair

Week 4. Riprap.  Snyder’s Chinese aesthetics and Western poetics blend within a distinctly Whitmanesque tradition of the writer as working-class outsider. A Buddhist metaphysic from Han Shan emerges inside Snyder’s stance.    

Week 5. On Bear’s Head.  Whalen’s longer early poems examined as collages and montages.  The influence of physics and relativity theory combine with Zen Buddhist patterns.  The technical methods of Whalen versus those of Snyder: strengths and weaknesses.

Click Here to Stream Audio: Importance of Speech
Click Here to Download Audio: Importance of Speech

Click Here to Stream Audio: Poultry Dept Berkeley Bio
Click Here to Download Audio: Poultry Dept Berkeley Bio

Weeks 6 and 7. The Dharma Bums Kerouac’s influence as an autodidactic working writer and as an informed, enthusiastic and inventive Buddhist showed the way for Whalen and Snyder to open up their writing and Buddhist practices for improvisation with their American speech and roots.  His novel also made them internationally famous, a curse and a blessing. 

Click Here to Stream Audio: Bruce Conner Artist
Click Here to Download Audio: Bruce Conner Artist

Click Here to Stream Audio: Influence of Wars on Art & Artists
Click Here to Download Audio: Influence of Wars on Art & Artists

Week 8.  Review of course to date and critiques of student writing. 

Week 9. Earth House Hold.  Snyder’s early journals and prose cover his years in Japan and first Buddhist training before his ordination as a Lay Buddhist monk in the Rinzai lineage. His articles during this period display his intellectual training and his first notions about environmentalism and Engaged Buddhism.

Click Here to Stream Audio: Walt Whitman
Click Here to Download Audio: Walt Whitman

Click Here to Stream Audio: Hart Crane & poete maudit Routine
Click Here to Download Audio: Hart Crane & poete maudit Routine

Click Here to Stream Audio: Real Estate Slavery, N. Americans
Click Here to Download Audio: Real Estate Slavery, N. Americans

Week 10.  Myths and Texts.  This long collage poem combines Snyder’s fusion of American Indian, Buddhist and IWW anarchist points of view.  Issues of appropriation and assimilation will be scrutinized re the criticism by others of these issues and of Snyder. 

Click Here to Stream Audio: Eliot Influence on H. Crane
Click Here to Download Audio: Eliot Influence on H. Crane

Click Here to Stream Audio: Class Warfare
Click Here to Download Audio: Class Warfare

Click Here to Stream Audio: Social Mobility
Click Here to Download Audio: Social Mobility

Click Here to Stream Audio: Available Avant-Garde
Click Here to Download Audio: Available Avant-Garde

Click Here to Stream Audio: Apollinaire Steals by Crane
Click Here to Download Audio: Apollinaire Steals by Crane

Week 11. Heavy Breathing. How Whalen’s practice as a Zen monk affects his longer works from the 60s and 70s.   The collage technique as a contemplative framework for creating “a graph of a mind moving”—Whalen’s definition of poetry.  That slogan’s relationship to Zen aesthetics of brush calligraphy.  

Click Here to Stream Audio: Hart Crane’s Broken Tower
Click Here to Download Audio: Hart Crane’s Broken Tower

Click Here to Stream Audio: Crane’s Technique (re PW’s)
Click Here to Download Audio: Crane’s Technique (re PW’s)

Week 12. from The Real Work and Off The Wall.  These interviews chart over a decade Snyder’s changes of concerns, attitudes and perspectives on East West cultural and artistic issues and also graph Whalen’s ongoing concerns on art, writing, and Buddhism.  

Click Here to Stream Audio: Bauhaus Influence
Click Here to Download Audio: Bauhaus Influence

Click Here to Stream Audio: Language and Experience
Click Here to Download Audio: Language and Experience

Click Here to Stream Audio: Whalen’s Novel Writing
Click Here to Download Audio: Whalen’s Novel Writing

Weeks 13 and 14. from The Back Country.  In this poetry Snyder achieves a refinement and expansion of poetic tools for combining Buddhist, Eco-lit and Western lyric subjects.

Week 15.  Wrap up of workshop and student critiques and evaluations.

Course outline credited to Keith Abbott
Naropa University