History

Summer Writing Progam 2003
Week One: June 9 —June 15

Course #: Non-credit: WRI 051, tuition: $375
Course #: BA: WRI 351, undergraduate tuition: $765 per week
Course #: MFA: WRI 651, graduate tuition: $1,032 per week

The Outrider Lineage: Elders, Enfants Terribles and Alternative Communities

"Imagination creates parallel community-galaxies to the death-wish New World Order. Don't tarry, don't tarry! There are folk like you out there, same kinds of hearts and minds." - Dechen Chomtso

From the Beats and New York School painters and poets, to the San Francisco and Berkeley Renaissance, to the hybrid New American Poetry strands embellishing The Kerouac School, writers and artists have traditionally formed communities in which to create their art. The Kerouac School was founded and continues to thrive on the generosity of its ever-expanding community. This week we'll look at how various writing utopias have come together to provide infrastructure and support for those in their immediate vicinity and beyond. We'll consider the question of life choices vs. livelihood. Careerism vs. "the poetry tribe." Distinguished elder Robin Blaser will be in residence. Peter Warshall, visionary ecologist, will be on hand to teach us about plant and animal communities.

Each student will register for one of the following workshops.

What Do Poets Do?
Robin Blaser
Proposition: Our poetry is committed - given in trust - inside an ongoing cultural crisis. What to do with the "I" in poetry? Can you just go on talking about your love life? Description remains in charge of the person who saw it. How to write out of political or religious despair? How do you approach that which is other than yourself? Examples from the Troubadours and Dante - where our vernacular task begins - along with selected texts on poetics will be supplied for study. Following these discussions, the group's attention will turn to student work. All members are asked to present a selection of their work, poetry or prose.

Transforming Tales
Rebecca Brown
This course looks at how traditional European fairy tales ( Brothers Grimm, Andersen, etc.) have been recast by 20th Century artists ( Sexton, Carter, Dvorak, etc. ) and us. We will look at motifs and shapes of these tales in order to create our own surreal, disturbing, elegant or funny stories, poems, tales, mini operas, or whatevers.
Required Reading: Anne Sexton's Transformations and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber.

Fiction Workshop
Mary Caponegro
This fiction workshop is open to all: realists, experimentalists and in-betweens, and particularly welcomes those writers interested in stretching the limits of form or style in narrative. Samples of work should be submitted so they can be shared in the first workshop.

Writing Our Relation to the Community
Samuel R. Delany
What communities have your lived in? Family? School? Work group? Religious? What about more geographically or economically bounded social units? What about communities of interest spread about and existing through the telephone, the mails, print culture, theater, film, television, or the internet? How does one differ from some of the others? How does a community you've experienced or even rubbed up against make you who you are - both positively and in reaction to it? Can we write about some of these differences, these formative processes, either in poetry or in prose? Well, we're going to try.

The Ecology of Poetry: Examining the System Within
Marcella Durand
Using the science of ecology as a model, we will take a close look at the fundamental structures of contemporary experimental poetry. We will examine current revolutions in usage of sound, symbol, sentence structure, line length, and metaphor, and how they function together to create a poetic "ecology." Moreover, we will look at how this ecology both mirrors and expands upon the systems of the "outside" world. This will be a real hands-on, investigative class - be ready to dissect live poems! Authors to be read include: Coolidge, Mayer, Ponge, Ashbery, Darragh, and others.

The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common
Brian Evenson
This course will look at eccentric notions of community, such as Levinas' notion of the face of the other, Alphonso Lingis' notion of a community of people with nothing in common and communities of death, and Agamben's idea of the coming community to see if we can't begin to think about social relationships and writing in a different way. Monday and Tuesday will be spent developing notions of community and writing exercises, on Thursday and Friday we'll workshop short fiction and/or intergeneric work by the class.

Poetry/Poetics: Inner and Outer Ecologies of Self, Place, Spirit
Kenneth Irby
Exploration of source and process, country and city, exotic and native, paleo/ur and contemporary, epic and lyric, threat and response hieroglyphics of immediate location and remove. Examining the home, family, community, nation, republic we inherit, create, invent, discover, endure, the mutuality - taking as one conjunction Pound's "trees open, their minds stand before them" and St. Mark's "And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees walking" and H.D.'s "we saw the tree flowering / it was an ordinary tree".

The Performance Book
Kathy Kuehn
In this workshop we will hand set and letterpress print a series of short texts provided by poet Anne Waldman. The texts will then be bound into a variety of book structures emphasizing the performance aspect of reading poetry.

The Post-post Modern Community: Away from Irony and in to Risk
Elizabeth Robinson
Using ideas from Sharon Welch's A Feminist Ethic of Risk, we will explore the possibilities for movement from what she calls cultured malaise toward the poet's version of M.L.King, Jr.'s "beloved community." Be prepared to participate: through your own and other's work, through reading aloud, collaging, anthologizing, organizing.

The Theory and Practice of Investigative Poetry
Edward Sanders
The theory and practice of Investigative Poetry as it pertains to extended verse projects involving research and investigation. Techniques will be explored for facilitating long-range research systems and techniques for writing actual Investigative Poetry. Please bring a project already underway or a well thought-out idea for a writing project involving poetry and investigation.

Organizing the World/s
Eleni Sikelianos
Looking at a variety of texts that implicitly or explicitly posit ways of organizing materials physical, psychic, and civic (i.e. experience) into working systems (from Aristotle's Physics to Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette), our goal will be to create our own orders of the universe or our own orders and disorders of language.

Eco-Poetics, Eco-Prosaics
Peter Warshall
Two or three "field trips" requiring journal writing; writing and talking about how human nature and nature's nature entangle. Animal personas, playing with the scientific, vividness and the eye of the beholder, dealing with the grief of planetary destruction, co-dependent arisings, listening, writing the invisible, and whatever else emerges.

"In the end, if we are successful, the work jumps from the page and demands attention." - Alexs Pate

Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2006
2005
2004
2003