History

Summer Writing Progam 2005
Week Three: July 18—July 24

Course #: Non-credit: WRI 053, tuition: $375 per week
Course #: BA: WRI 353, undergraduate tuition: $900 per week
Course #: MFA: WRI 653, graduate tuition: $1,230 per week

Language/Translation/Editing/New Pedagogies

The Kerouac School has encouraged Arthur Rimbaud's view of "Je est un autre" (I is another) and Walt Whitman's view "I contain multitudes" to manifest ways of being a writer in the world extending beyond the myopia of an ego-centered master narrative. This view supports study and translations from other cultures and languages. It supports the view of writer-as-editor, publisher, printer, taking the product into his or her own hands, and examines new ways of keeping the practice and scholarship of writing vital and energetic with investigative poetics, cultural activism, and "experiments of attention" that work across genres. Many of the guests this week are anthologists, translators, thinkers and writers who have moved outside the safe box of predictable careerism.

The Book: Another Language
Charles Alexander
As we learn aspects of book making, we will consider the translation/relationship of text to the space of the book, and how the physical book is a manifestation, in and of itself, of meaning, as well as how it collaborates with verbal and visual content to construct a multidimensional literature of physicality.

Sentient Verse
Junior Burke
In this course we will infuse contemporary issues and sensibilities into classical forms from the expanse of world poetry: Proposed forms include: Sapphic (Greek), Pantoum (Malayan), Qasida (Arabic), Choka & Katuata (Japanese), Villanelle & Sestina (French), Madrigal & Rispetto (Italian), plus the English Ode & Sonnet. As a starting point, bring two to four selections of your own work (no formal structure necessary) to be read aloud.

Haiku, Ghazals and All That Jazz
Marilyn Chin
The class will be half reading salon and half workshop. We will have writing assignments every day, including an array of international forms and conventions: from haiku to ghazals, from ancient to modern. I shall provide a sampling of poems and examples. We shall read together, contemplate what we've read and come up with our own brilliant versions.

Thinking Cultural Poetics
Michael Davidson
How does poetry intersect with a public world? How do poems envision, debate, and enlist constituencies beyond them, even when they address the most intimate of experiences? How can poetry intervene in (and contest) global realities? This workshop will engage poetry's relationship with public arenas, from the workshop itself (peer collaboration, writing through) to larger, more anonymous social entities (appropriation, idiolect, code-switching).

Reading and Writing Across Subcultures
Samuel R. Delany
In our workshop, this week, we'll read some short fiction: Annotations, by John Keene, Jr., Eunoia, by Christian Bok, and Souls by Joanna Russ-three different kinds of experiments. What experiments do they prompt you to try? (Texts will be supplied as class course-packets.)

State of the Union
Linh Dinh
In this workshop, we'll examine American writers who attempt to depict the state of our union, at variance with the official one. Writers covered will include K. Silem Mohammad and David Foster Wallace, among others. Inspired by them, we'll come up with our own state of the union in poetry or prose.

The Morphing Texts: Translation, Transformation
Anselm Hollo
An introduction to the history, practice, and *idea* of translation. A look at existing translations of familiar and unfamiliar poems, and attempts to create our own. No "foreign language" skills required (this one's quite foreign enough!).

Not I
Mónica de la Torre
This workshop will focus on poetic practices in which the lyrical I is put aside in order to access worlds beyond the poet's comfort zone. Readings will include Brazilian Modernists Oswald de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto, Spanish-American poets César Vallejo and Octavio Paz, and poets currently writing in Mexico's indigenous languages.

Language and Cultures
Semezdin Mehmedinovic and Ammiel Alcalay
The influence of American writers (Whitman, Pound, Olson, Spicer) translated by excellent writers from the Balkans (Ujevic, Demirovic, and others). The notion of the world as one literature space, where language is not a boundary. The arrival of Beat influence through German poets (Brinkman, Delius). Goethe's idea of "world literature," adopted by the Beats. In dialogue, we will explore the deeper personal and political impact of cross-cultural transmission, writing as a source and a commodity, and how readers and writers can protect themselves in a world of unanchored signs.

So is Art Queer, Then? Art, Museums, & Other Dangerous Things
Donald Preziosi
What art creates is no second world alongside the everyday world in which we live, but rather what art creates is the world in which we live. It has the paradoxical potential to create, destroy, and problematize the realities commonly taken as natural or given. Art, in other words, may be dangerous to institutional, social, and political power in that it queers (contests, controverts, or relativizes) the seeming naturalness of a given status quo. It does so by foregrounding the artifice and provisionality of all forms of ideology and hegemony. This class explores the social, political, aesthetic, and religious consequences of this paradox.

In Plain Sight: Translation as a Form of Recognition
Claudia Rankine
This course will consider works of art that are both intimate and historical. What formal approaches allow this to occur? How does intimacy co-exist within an investigative poetics? We will consider the work of Jena Osman, William Kentridge, Charles Bernstein, Paul Pfeiffer, Harryette Mullen, Lyn Hejinian, Sabrina Mark, and Juliana Spahr, among others.

As Architects, etc.
Lisa Robertson
Perhaps the author is dead. More likely, the author has become something like an architect, to sidestep the cultural authority of the textual. Or perhaps the architect is a novelist, and the text is a film. In this workshop we'll read texts and practises that leap across entire traditions and rhetorics-- Rem Koolhaas, Fiona Banner, Agnes Varda, Kenneth Goldsmith, Janet Cardiff-- to observe and test how new poetry might pertain to unknown canons, methods and vocabularies. Participants will become something other than writers.

Re-Opening a Poetics of Re-Openings
Rodrigo Toscano
How can "experiment" ever be experiment without first being a socio-political experiment on "experimentation?" In this class we will explore the creative volatility of the spaces between text & audience. Through live/oral readings of contemporary poets (including our own works) we will examine how (through what specific cultural-aesthetic methods / openings) poems become trans-personal social interfaces. We will examine this not from a speculative distance, but as "naked strategic partners" working to chip away at the power structures that would have us simply fold.

Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2006
2005
2004
2003