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History
Summer Writing Progam 2003
Week Three: June 30 —July 6
Course #: Non-credit: WRI 054, tuition: $375
Course #: BA: WRI 354, undergraduate tuition: $765 per week
Course #: MFA: WRI 654, graduate tuition: $1,032 per week
Performance, Collaboration and Publishing
"Speech vibrates the body and is sensual, . constellations
of thought open in our heads, caught to a word." - Bobbie Louise
Hawkins
Collaboration, and performance have always been at the heart
of The Kerouac School. The Summer Writing Program traditionally
serves as an interactive and rhizomic meeting ground for prospective
and current students, alumni, core and guest faculty, printers,
visual artists, musicians, cultural activists, scholars, meditators,
and the like. It has also been a seeding place for numerous
small presses, literary magazines, reading series, and collaborative
ventures of all shapes and sizes, from the Gertrude Stein Players
to the "Poetry is News" Coalition. Connections made at this
month-long convocation can last a lifetime. Let's continue the
richness of this Indra's net at The Kerouac School and beyond
as we activate writing for and beyond the page.
Each student will register for one of the following workshops.
Duende: "To kill all the scaffolding off the song"*
or Approaches
to Translation and Poetry
Rosa Alcalá
*Lorca writes, "The duende's arrival always means a radical
change in forms" and "[duende finds greatest range in the arts
that] require a living body to interpret them, being forms that
are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present."
We will examine and enact performative approaches to translation
and poetry in order to understand, in them, the role of the
"living body," Cecilia Vicuña's "Precarious" present, and what
Nathaniel Mackey refers to as the "wooing of another voice."
What's Funny?
Jack Collom
Philosopher Henri Bergson said what's funny is always "something
mechanical encrusted upon the living." Hmm. Tim Dlugos wrote:
"I take incredible / risks with my poems, / which is why they
/ always turn out / so fine." What's it all about? We'll write,
discuss, and study this stuff.
Fearless Fiction
Rikki Ducornet
Inspired by Rigor and Imagination we will take on the enemies
of good writing: dogmatic thinking and received ideas. We will
devote ourselves to small, sudden fictions that function together
in a coherent series. By week's end we will each have the bones
of a book.
Clown Theater/ Clown Poetry
Thalia Field
This intergenre workshop will use every means necessary to make
love, kindness and comedy out of bad attitudes, war, anger,
jealousy, hatred, ambivalence, fear, apathy, ignorance and general
bad humor. Public poetry, prose, installation, clowning and
site-specific pieces will be encouraged. Motto: It's not funny
being funny and it's really funny being real.
Prose Poetry Is Neither
Kass Fleisher
Two roads diverged and a third was sentenced to the land of
nor. Hybrid, schmybrid - what the plot giveth, the line taketh
away. In which we attempt to theorize the presence of a feminist
genre-free zone. Writers smited will include: Rachel Blau Du
Plessis, Erin Mouré, Julia Penelope, and Lyn Hejinian.
No 8.5X11" Paper
Michelle Spencer-Ellsworth
Sometimes written language is handy, sometimes it is awkwardly inaccurate. This workshop will explore alternative media for expression and hybrid art. We will make performance works that use and/or do not use the body, language, the U.S. postal service, photo booths, adhesives, and whatever else we like.
Systems of Response
Jena Osman
In what ways can the act of reading also be an act of writing?
We'll investigate a variety of strategies for responding to
each other's work as well as to cultural documents such as newspapers,
encyclopedias, telephone books, etc. This workshop will see
each text as an opportunity for collaboration, extended conversation,
and rowdy invention.
Bringing Life
Alexs Pate
This workshop will deal with all aspects of story and poem.
From its beginning, to the inflation of love, blood, and energy
which brings it into being, to the act of performance and the
implications and struggles of publishing. In the end, if we
are successful, the work jumps from the page and demands attention.
Poetry as a Spiritual Practice: A Writing Workshop
Sonia Sanchez
In many traditions around the world, poetry is a way of cultivating
and expressing the deepest elements of the human experience.
Developing an artistic practice such as poetry writing can be
a wonderful tool for anyone who wishes to increase his or her
awareness - of self, of community, of connection to the eternal.
Through written exercises, class discussion, and reflection
on her own life as poet, activist, mother, teacher, and seeker,
Sonia Sanchez will guide participants to use writing as a resource
for enhancing awareness of spirituality in daily life.
The Word on the Page
Julie Seko
Print presents words through a visual filter - one that can
enhance or hinder transmission of the ideas expressed. In this
hands-on introduction to letterpress printing, students will
explore the relationship between the text and the visual/tactile
design of the page.
Brainlingo: Writing The Voice Of The Body
Edwin Torres
As artists we create our own communication, how we listen affects
how we speak, how we see our language affects how our voice
is heard. Where the senses meet each other is where poetry can
begin. This workshop will be an active creative laboratory that
will explore how we communicate by exercising the languages
inside us. Exercises will be balanced by critiques. This is
an active writing workshop for poets, performers, and artists
with open minds.
A Playwriting Workshop
Mac Wellman
'Pataphysics: the science of exceptions to rules (Roger Shattuck). This workshop involves a set of linked exercises, beginning with the trifling and simple-minded and culminating in the theater of strangeness and charm; no texts required; as developed at the 'Pataphysics Workshops at the Flea Theater, New York.
"Where the senses meet each other is where poetry can begin."
- Edwin Torres
Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four
Previous Summer Writing Program Information
2006
2005
2004
2003
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