History

Summer Writing Progam 2006
Week One: June 19—June 25

Course #: Non-credit: WRI 051, tuition: $375 per week
Course #: BA: WRI 451, undergraduate tuition: $945 per week
Course #: MFA: WRI 751, graduate tuition: $1,292 per week

Ecology of Mind and Planet / Poethics

What is the writer and artist’s role in a culture in serious “denial” about global warming, about fossil fuel dependence and gluttony, about the ecological and spiritual implications of war, about imperial aggression in the guise of globalization? On the suffering of those below the radar around any natural disaster? We invite discussion and creative solution in the form of investigative and documentary poetics. We recommend a creative mind of engagement and spiritual “poetry ethics,” a zone of “survival dancing” (in Anselm Hollo’s words) in this first week of our program.  What is our own environmental map?  How might imagination “stride the blast”?

Faculty and Guests include: Joan Retallack, Michael McClure, Elizabeth Robinson, Harryette Mullen, Jonathan Skinner, Maureen Owen, Lewis MacAdams, Kass Fleisher, Barbara Henning, Eleni Sikelianos, Tonya Foster, David Henderson, Lila Zemborain, Brad O¹Sullivan (printshop)

Endangered Stories: The Radical Potential of Nonradical Nonfiction
Kass Fleisher
Society’s untold stories together might contribute to a social version of Bateson’s “double bind”: a pathology in which society says it cares about social justice and e.g. Native Americans while suppressing facts about e.g. rapes and murders of natives. Nonfiction might comprise Bateson’s antidote to this poison: “awareness.” Writers will investigate a suppressed story and consider how they might embody a recuperative social justice.

Kass Fleisher is the author of Talking Out of School: Memoir of an Educated Woman (Dalkey Archive), Accidental Species: A Reproduction (conceptual prose, Chax), and The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History (documentary writing, SUNY). With her partner Joe Amato she also writes plays and screenplays. She teaches at Illinois State University.

DisLocations: S/P(l)ace of Poetry
Tonya Foster
How can the lyric challenge what is? Perhaps by “Weaving together the two sides of the road/Joining the two banks, below and above the water.” Reading the poem as a site/sight of encounters between material and conceptual geographies, this workshop will explore poetic and linguistic strategies of witness, resistance, (re)location, and survival in the works of Aime Cesaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Cecilia Vicuña, Chris Abani, Brenda Coultas, Juliana Spahr, and others

Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals from Callaloo to The Hat to Western Humanities Review. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna Press) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art. She is currently completing a cross-genre piece on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance. She teaches at Cooper Union and Bard College.

Poethics and Black Consciousness as Pertaining to All-America
David Henderson
The Black Arts Movement and contemporary Hip Hop, some aspects compared and contrasted via thematic expressions, political realities and poethics. Students will conduct investigative writing projects related to Hip Hop, the Black Arts Movement, the peace movement, the environmental movement, or something specific re: today.

Harryette Mullen
Course description TK

Harryette Mullen's poems, short stories, and essays have been published widely and reprinted in over 40 anthologies. Her poetry is included in the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and has been translated into Spanish, French, Polish, Bulgarian, and Swedish. She is the author of six poetry books, most recently Blues Baby and Sleeping with the Dictionary. The latter was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at UCLA.

Poets & Society: Poethical Lives, Poethical Texts
Joan Retallack
Questions of responsibilities to others, and to the natural and cultural environments are perhaps most responsible as questions if they pose real difficulties for life and art. We'll create an experimental environment in which, as individuals and citizen-poets, we respond to the most urgent questions of our times through essayistic and poetic practices designed to disrupt our own stylistic habits-to swerve us toward reevaluations and new possibilities. We will keep "noticing books" throughout the week to collect observations and source materials from the world at large. Writing/reading practices will be both individual and collaborative, some of the latter involving compositions for "poethical interventions."

Joan Retallack's most recent works include Memnoir (Post-Apollo Press) and The Poethical Wager (The University of California Press). She is also the author of MUSICAGE: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack for which she won the 1996 America Award in Belles-Lettres and Afterrimages (both from Wesleyan University Press), Mongrelisme (Paradigm Press), How To Do Things With Words (Sun & Moon Classics), and Errata 5uite (Edge Books). She is John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

Ecopoetics
Jonathan Skinner
As poets, what are our response-abilities, in the present moment?  Is there an "eco" revolution in poetics?  Let's generate unpredictable responses to the breakdown in cross-species living on "household" earth.  This workshop offers methods for engaging poetry outside and we'll look at Niedecker, Eigner, Johnson, Vicuña, Coultas, Kocik, Sikelianos, Culley, or Patton, and soundscape, walking, and field guide practices, including methods for writing other species, biome saturation jobs, edge studies, and ethnographic translation techniques. 

Jonathan Skinner is a poet, translator and critic, as well as editor of the journal ecopoetics. Skinner recently completed his Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo, with a dissertation on ecology and twentieth-century innovative poetry and poetics.  His first full-length poetry collection, Political Cactus Poems, appeared in 2005 with Palm Press. He currently is a Fellow with the Center for the Humanities at Temple University. 

Self in Place
Barbara Henning
In this fiction workshop, we will work on expanding perceptions of character and place, from and including spirit/mind, body, skin, home, memory, family, land, sky, neighborhood, workplace, city, globe, universe. If the character or narrator is isolated and defined narrowly by a particular conflict or point of view, such as third person realism, does her awareness of the world narrow? What happens to the reader? Do traditional ways of writing fiction emphasize a separation between the individual and the world he lives in? 

Barbara Henning is the author of several books of poetry, including Smoking in the Twilight Bar (United Artists), Love Makes Thinking Dark (UA), and Detective Sentences (Spuyten Duyvil); and two novels, Black Lace, and most recently, You, Me and the Insects (Spuyten Duyvil). She has taught in the creative writing program at Long Island University in Brooklyn, and now lives in Tesuque, New Mexico. 

Nature and Culture Along the Los Angeles River
Lewis MacAdams
The meaning of nature on the Los Angeles River fair boggles the mind. Fifty-two miles long, encased in concrete for more than 80% of its length, fed during the dry season by 100 million gallons of reclaimed sewerage water a day, the Los Angeles is currently a year-round river for the first time since probably the last ice age.  In this class we'll grapple with the meanings of nature and culture, of the river and the city, and of art in the political culture of a great megalopolis. Are there principles of this struggle that are relevant to your own watershed and your own art? Is it possible to go beyond human-centered behavior?

Lewis MacAdams is a poet, journalist, filmmaker, and founder of Friends of the Los Angeles River. He is the author of a dozen books and tapes of poetry, including The Poetry Room, Live At The Church, News From Niman Farm, and Africa and the Marriage of Walt Whitman and Marilyn Monroe. Poem For The Dawn of the Terror Years, The Family Trees, and The River, Books 1,2, & 3 were published recently by Blue Press in Santa Cruz. He is also the author of Birth of The Cool and is currently at work on a biography of Rolling Stone founder, Jann Wenner. His film, "What Happened To Kerouac?" is available on DVD. He is the father of four and lives in downtown Los Angeles.

Word Biology Consciousness
Michael McClure
There will be detailed explication of the exercises at the beginning of classes. One of the exercises was originally invented by Crystal Beatty, a nine-year-old girl. The exercises use, in part, discoveries and language uses by Kerouac, Burroughs, Rimbaud, and there is a touch of Gertrude Stein. Students are encouraged to read Scratching the Beat Surface by Michael McClure (section one) and Rant, a lyric poem by Diane di Prima.

Michael McClure debuted at the legendary Six Gallery event in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read Howl. Since then he has been writing and performing his poetry at festivals, colleges, and clubs across the country. The recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Obie Award for Best Play, an NEA grant, the Alfred Jarry Award, and Rockefeller Grant for playwriting, he now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area hills with the sculptor Amy Evans McClure.

Site of Beauty
Elizabeth Robinson
What is the relation of beauty to place, to ecology?  This class will engage with a series of readings and writing exercises in order to explore the ecology of beauty. We will not view beauty as a universal given, but as partial, as specific, as a necessity, and thus as an ethically dynamic force.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Apostrophe from Apogee Press.  A winner of the National Poetry Series and the Fence Modern Poets Prize, Robinson teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder and is a co-editor of 26 Magazine, EtherDome Chapbooks, and Instance Press.

Land Art
Eleni Sikelianos
In the 1940s, William Carlos Williams embarked upon a poem of place in which a city might be seen to mirror the forms of a man's mind, and the Modernist classic Paterson was born. We will consider the poetics of place: how an artist, particularly a writer, and his or her work, is influenced by and interacts with particular loci, real or imagined. What forms of dialog with the environment are possible? We'll make our own work that interacts with the flora and fauna, layers of history, shifting populations, quotidian rhythms and mythologies of locale. 

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books, most recently The California Poem (Coffee House), and The Book of Jon (City Lights). A Naropa graduate, she has been conferred numerous awards for her poetry, nonfiction and translations. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver.

Escribir en piedra/To Write in Stone
Lila Zemborain
¿Cuáles son las alternativas de escritura cuando tantas complejidades planetarias apuntan a la destrucción? En este taller discutiremos y escribiremos a partir de las propuestas de una selección de poetas latinoamericanos, para que la opción última no sea escribir en piedra. What writing options do we have in the face of a complex planetary condition signaling destruction?  In this workshop we will discuss and write in response to the various approaches to this question offered by Latin American poets, so that writing in stone is not our only alternative. This class is for fluent Spanish speakers, since writing and discussions will be exclusively conducted in Spanish. 

Argentine poet Lila Zemborain has lived in New York since 1985. She is the author of the poetry collections, Abrete sésamo debajo del agua, Usted, Guardianes del secreto, Malvas orquídeas del mar, and Rasgado (forthcoming), and the book-length essay Gabriela Mistral. Una mujer sin rostro. She is the director and editor of the Rebel Road Series, and the curator of the KJCC Poetry Series at New York University, where she teaches Creative Writing in Spanish.

For more on Lila Zemborain's work go to:
http://www.sapiens.ya.com/joan-navarro/alfa/alfa25/zemborain.htm
http://www.hormigaargentina.com.ar/
http://www.poetryproject.com/poets&poems/zemb2.htm
http://www.eud.com/verbigracia/memoria/N119/creacion.htm
http://www.eluniversal.com/verbigracia/memoria/N142/creacion.htm
http://www.letras.s5.com/gabriela280703.htm

RE: verse - Printing Letterpress in a Digital Age
Brad O'Sullivan
As writers, we must be readers. As letterpress printers, we must be typographers, editors, designers. We must be translators. Mechanics. Imaginers. And above all, we must be invisible, directing the reader to the author's writing. We'll investigate and experiment with re-versing printed matter as the raw material for our printing. We'll wrestle with design and intent, with form and ego, with paper, ink, type, and with the printing press. We will seek out material possibilities for our printing. We'll discover the exquisite and transformative pleasures of birthing a text entirely by hand.

Brad O'Sullivan is a writer, teacher, letterpress printer, small press publisher and proprietor of Smokeproof Press, a letterpress printing and graphic design studio in Boulder. He has collaborated with many contemporary writers and artists, and his own work has been published by Rodent Press and several small literary journals. Brad has been teaching at Naropa's Harry Smith Print Shop since 1996.

Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2006
2005
2004
2003