History

Summer Writing Progam 2005
Week Two: July 11 —July 17

Course #: Non-credit: WRI 052, tuition: $375 per week
Course #: BA: WRI 352, undergraduate tuition: $900 per week
Course #: MFA: WRI 652, graduate tuition: $1,230 per week

Lineages of the Impossible American Dream and Beyond

The New American Poetry is an historic tag for the writers and schools that developed outside the literary and academic mainstream of the 50's and 60's and were gathered together in Donald Allen's groundbreaking Grove Press anthology of that same title. This book published in 1960 included radical writings from writers of the New York School, the Black Arts Movement, the Beats, Black Mountain College and the San Francisco Renaissance, Olson's Projective Verse, Frank O'Hara's Personism, the confluence of jazz, politics, dharma, and mind-altering substances that informed Beats and generated the rucksack revolution. There was a passionate struggle against the dead language fifties-doldrums of the post-war Eisenhower years with its promise of an impossible American Dream. This anthology inspired further hybrids and flourishing. It lead to the dynamics of second generation writers which included proponents of Language writing and the communities of the St Mark's Poetry Project and The Jack Kerouac School with its singular outrider position. We will examine some of the roots of our lineage this week, pay homage to Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest and others.

What Is This Thing Called "Prose"?
Mary Burger
Among the progeny of new American poetry is the emergent genre of writing that uses elements of narrative-time, place, event, subject, sentence, story-while breaking with the conventions of fiction; that preserves the poet's attention to language-tonal sensitivity, semantic multiplicity, rhythmic pattern, superrational shifts in consciousness-while adhering to the forms of prose. What's going on here? What possibilities does this writing hold for us as readers? As writers? We'll look at the anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, and works by writers (such as Renee Gladman, Rob Halpern, Brenda Coultas, Bhanu Kapil, and others) to start investigating this cross-fertilized world.

Roots & Beyond: Susan Howe
Norma Cole
"I hope that I am working in an eccentric twentieth century American tradition that embraces among others Duncan, Olson, Williams, Stevens, H.D., and Hart Crane," writes Susan Howe. And Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, "among others." We will start by tracking these poets, their work in and around Howe's writing, in order to begin constellating another dynamic.

Unauthorized Verses
Mark DuCharme
What is this thing called intent? Is it writing's source or center? We'll look to other sources to energize our practice, seeing how the written instensifies as intensions loosen. Relevant examples might include Niedecker, Berrigan, Spicer, Weiner, Prevallet, Mohammad &...... The goal will be to get beyond "lineage" as received, but rather something one actively engages (alters). While this is a poetics workshop, cross-genre prose writers are also encouraged. Participants are asked to bring a willingness to write beyond habit, plus a "typical" page of their own, to be damaged at our first encounter.

A Curriculum of the Soul
Albert Glover
In 1968 Charles Olson composed "A Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul," subsequently published in The Magazine of Further Studies. After Olson's death in 1970, John Clarke (then director of IFS) assigned topics from Olson's plan to twenty-eight poets associated with Olson in some way. Since 1971, Albert Glover has been publishing the resultant fascicles. The purpose of this course will be to explore the project.

Assorted Prosotics
Bobbie Louise Hawkins
In each session of this class we will focus on examples from different prose writers. Through our close examination of their work, we will attempt to create prose texts of our own, using the style of each of those authors.

The Arcanes - The Now and The Future
Jack Hirschman
How, in this contemporary moment of wars, demonstrations and global discontent, do we extend the act of poetic creation into a revolutionary action? While immersing ourselves in the writings of Heidegger, Charles Olson Marx and Engels, and my long poem The Arcanes, we will lift ourselves from the U.S. political paradigm and explore this question. With recent events such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the demonstrations against the WTO, the deaths of Bob Kaufman, Pasolini and others, we will seek inspiration for our own work as revolutionary poets.

Journey to Black Mountain
Vincent Katz
This course will use my personal involvement with Black Mountain College as a springboard to examine what made the arts at Black Mountain - visual, musical, dance, literary - so significant as experimentation of its period. We will examine fruitful interactions between artists, in particular collaborations between visual artists and writers, and look at the importance of publishing as exemplified by the Black Mountain Review and other BMC publications.

Poethics and Politics
Jena Osman
Simultaneous with the production of the poets affiliated with the New American Poetry were a group of artists questioning the ethical and political dimensions of their aesthetic forms. This course will take its starting point from the musical and poetic creations of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, as well as the visual "founds" of the notably eccentric poet and physicist Bern Porter. Poet Joan Retallack (who has been extremely influenced by Cage) has described the "poethical" art form as "a form of life in which we would, in our most enlightened moments, want to live." Our workshop will address the question of how to write poems that speak to our historical moment-to the politics of our time-while at the same time existing poethically. How can our poems make peace rather than war?

Poetry as Transcendent Experience: The Work of Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, and David Meltzer
Michael Rothenberg
This course will explore the journal as poem, source of poem, practice and process, the everyday in a moment flash, "mind graph," "mind breath," "nerve movie," mystery in the visible, social critique and challenging belief, poetry as transcendent experience, how you live your life and what text really means.

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
Julia Seko
Printing presents words through a visual filter that can enhance and contribute to the transmission of ideas expressed. In this hands-on introduction to letterpress, we'll explore the relationship between the text and the visual/tactile design of the printed page through a collaborative project.

Beyond American Poetries
Juliana Spahr
Formalism in the United States has tended to act as if the forms of Europe are the only ones around. This course will study poetic forms from the rest of the world. Possibilities include the haibun, renga, ghazal, lament, chant; balah, zamil, qasidah, and ghinnawa. We will also spend some time discussing the politics of cultural appropriation and borrowing. We'll look at some examples and attempt to write some poems.

Fiction and Memory
Lewis Warsh
This workshop will focus on the way autobiography overlaps with fiction and how the past is fictionalized as a way of keeping it alive. The premise is that the source of most fiction is fading memories, whether we're aware of it or not. Though Jack Kerouac is the most obvious exponent of this method, we'll look at other writers of the last century--Marguerite Duras, Peter Handke, Lydia Davis, in particular--who struggle to cross the borders between fiction and life story. Our writing project will include working with secrets, memories, observations, opinions, overheard conversations--fragments of everything.

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Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2006
2005
2004
2003