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History
Summer Writing Progam 2006
Week Two: June 26—July 2
Course #: Non-credit: WRI 052, tuition: $375 per week
Course #: BA: WRI 452, undergraduate tuition: $945 per week (tentative)
Course #: MFA: WRI 752, graduate tuition: $1,292 per week (tentative)
Critical Edge/Dialectics/A Poetics
of Prose
What history and philosophy and critical theory informs our creative work? How do we subvert ideology, work toward greater emancipation of expression, what is our relation to society, to notions of "identity," "gender," "class"? Dialectic refers to a form of reasoning based on inquiry, and a tension between conflicting forces. The Kerouac School has notoriously broken down some of the boundaries between poetry and prose and invited a cross-genre experimentation into the lively mix. "Poetics" from the Greek adjective poietikos has its root in "maker" and in modern usage includes all literature. Tzvetan Todorov posits a "poetics of prose" beyond the notion of genre specificity, saying "definition" tells us nothing of "meaning." Roman Jakobson refers to the "poetic function" inherent in all communication. We plan to open the field of discourse this week.
Faculty and Guests include: Elizabeth Willis, Rebecca Brown, Anne Waldman,
Laird Hunt, Ron Silliman, Akilah Oliver, Lisa Jarnot, Donald Preziosi,
Thalia Field, Alan Gilbert, Max Regan, Chris Tysh, Shari DeGraw (printshop)
Exploring Haibun
Rebecca Brown
Haibun is an ancient Japanese form of writing that incorporates short passages of poetry with longer, usually autobiographical prose and blurs the distinctions between "fiction" and "non-fiction," between personal and political/community/collaborative writing. We'll investigate ways of incorporating haibun into larger hybrid texts and write our own haibun and other wonderfully uncategorizeable texts. Readings may include Basho, Buson, Lady Sarashina, Kerouac and Ashbery.
Rebecca Brown is the author of ten books including The Last Time I Saw You, Woman in Ill Fitting Wig (a collaboration with painter Nancy Kiefer), Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, The End of You, The Dogs, Annie Oakley's Girl, The Terrible Girls, and The Gifts of the Body. Her play The Toaster premiered last fall, and she wrote the libretto for The Onion Twins, which premiered this January. She is Creative Director of Literature at Centrum and teaches at Goddard College. She lives in Seattle.
For more information on Rebecca Brown and for links to her work, please
visit www.citylights.com and
www.centrum.org
Intro to Letterpress Printing
 Shari DeGraw
We will handset metal type and use a Vandercook printing press to create work in limited editions. We will use composing sticks and work with picas & points, the typographer's traditional system of measuring. We will learn about typefaces, discuss layout and how to incorporate artwork in a project. Students will operate the presses to edition their own work.
Shari DeGraw operates Empyrean Press, a fine press of limited editions featuring contemporary literature and art. She has taught letterpress printing and hand bookbinding at the University of Iowa, the University of Alabama, and the Center for Book Arts in New York City. Her work has been exhibited nationally, and can be found at Brown University, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library.
For more on Shari DeGraw's work go to www.empyreanpress.com.
Nonconceptual Art
Thalia Field
Why is music traditionally considered the only non-conceptual art? This interdisciplinary workshop uses language to get beyond the knots of language. Writing from beyond mind, beyond story. Beyond poetry. Beyond form. What is the best way to write here now, and is that important? We'll look at folks whose writing keeps us beyond theory, and try out some practice-based approaches to not thinking too much. Warning: This course is not for anti-intellectuals.
Thalia Field's collections Point and Line and Incarnate: Story Material represent the confluence of work at the border of poetry, prose, essay and drama. Her next book, Clown Shrapnel, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2007. Upcoming performance/poetry works include Mudra, Zoologic, and an interdisciplinary collaborative project: Inside the Light. Thalia currently teaches in the Literary Arts program at Brown University.
Throw a Bucket of Water at a City on Fire
Alan Gilbert
What constitutes shelter in a contaminated space? Who defines shelter and contamination? Who defines common sense? What strategies might writers use to critically engage the world around them? These questions can only be answered with a multi-genre and multi-disciplinary approach. Along with talking about and sharing our own writing, we will examine strategies of critique in contemporary poetry, prose, visual art, and music.
Alan Gilbert's writings on poetry, art, culture, and politics have appeared in a variety of publications, including Artforum, the Village Voice, and online at Jacket. Recent poems have appeared in the Chicago Review, Shiny, and online at the Poetry Project website. Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight was published this spring by Wesleyan University Press.
For more on Alan Gilbert's work go to www.poetryproject.com/poets&poems/gilbert.html or to access his essay on art, poetry, and politics after 9/11—www.bbk.ac.uk/pores/2/index.htm
Histories
 Laird Hunt
Historical figures like Herodotus, Hannibal, Jesus of Nazareth and Calamity Jane have all served as energy nodes around which writers have built significant works of prose. We'll examine texts like Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, Selah Saterstrom's The Pink Institution and W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn to explore that prose which, if we can kick awake that poor overworked pearl, posits the historical as its grain of sand. Students will produce their own writings for consideration and helpful critique.
Laird Hunt is the author of three novels, The Impossibly, Indiana, Indiana and The Exquisite (forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2006). Writings and translations have appeared in Bomb, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, Grand Street, Fence, Brick, Inculte and Zoum Zoum. A former UN press officer and faculty member of Naropa's Kerouac School, he teaches fiction and literature at the University of Denver.
Case Studies: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Poetics
 Lisa
Jarnot
We'll look at the intersections between classical psychoanalytic writings (Freud's Wolf Man, Foucault's Pierre Riviere) and avant-garde 20th-century poetries (Hannah Weiner's The Fast, Bernadette Mayer's Studying Hunger, John Wieners's "A Poem for Trapped Things," James Schuyler's "A Few Days" and Juliana Spahr's Response). From this matrix we'll develop cross-genre writing projects that delve into poetical self-exploration.
Lisa Jarnot is the author of three full-length collections of poetry including Black Dog Songs. She is currently completing a biography of the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan (University of California Press, 2006). She lives in New York City and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Brooklyn College and with Naropa's Kerouac School's MFA in Creative Writing.
For more information on Lisa Jarnot and for links to her work, please
visit: www.angelfire.com/poetry/lisajarnot
Un/Mapping: The Writer as Cartographer
Akilah Oliver
Where do the interstices of poetry and prose collapse? Consider these collapses as third spaces, spatial imaginaries, where a "new" language hacks across time, memory, genre constraints and the known. We'll look at these third spaces through writing exercises that investigate the liberatory practice of hybridism. Consider all texts as dialogic and vital to a postcolonial poetics of mapping, a practice that in itself destabilizes narrative certainty in a quest to write, sing, breathe a poetics that can sustain us through the future fascistic.
Akilah Oliver is the author of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award-winning, the she said dialogues: flesh memory and the chapbook/CD An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet. She is the founder of the performance group, the Sacred Naked Nature Girls and is adjunct faculty at Naropa University and a lecturer at the University of Colorado.
Against Spirit: Aesthetics, Politics, & Poetics Today
Donald Preziosi
Walter Benjamin attempted to lay the groundwork for a social order liberated from magic, spirituality, fetishism, and superstition in a constellation of writings around his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Epoch of its Technical Reproducibility' and his monumental and unfinished ‘book manuscript' The Arcades Project. We'll explore contemporary implications of Benjamin's challenges to fascism's aestheticization of politics and marxism's politicization of aesthetics. Can any artwork (in Benjamin's words) "allow the past to place the present in a critical condition"? Or must "artistic practice" be radically redefined in the first place, given that what "art" creates is no second world alongside the world in which we live, but in fact the very world itself in which we live?
Donald Preziosi is a faculty member at Oxford University. He received a Ph.D. in art history from Harvard, and has taught at several American universities including Yale, MIT, SUNY, UCLA and Naropa. He is the author of a dozen books, including Rethinking Art History, The Art of Art History, Brain of the Earth's Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity, Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (with Claire Farago), and In the Aftermath of Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics.
Stealing the Dictionary
Max Regan
There are over 40,000 dictionaries currently in circulation. In this writing workshop students will excavate a theme from their own history, from which their unique dictionary will be made. Our writing will trespass into invisibility, memoir, confession, witness, hybrid forms and the false geography of language. Sources will include B.L. Hawkins, H. Mullen, R. Brown, C. Milosz, A. Marlowe and others. Students of any genre are welcome.
Max Regan has taught and lectured at Naropa University, the University of Colorado, Colorado State University, and Rose Medical Center. He is the founder of Hollowdeck LLC. Max's most recent book is Take.
Not This: Dialectical Materialism & Writing Beyond the Self
 Ron Silliman
One of the tenets of Eastern thought is that you are not your thoughts. Who writes, if this should be this case? Who reads? Who speaks? From Blake & Wordsworth to John Cage & Harryette Mullen, poets have explored what Keats called negative capability. Simultaneous to this, philosophers & political thinkers have explored what Marxists once called dialectical materialism. We will explore the intersection of all these impulses as they come together in Charles Olson's great essay "Proprioception" and look at contemporary poets working through this space. We'll look at Olson's "Projective Verse," which focuses poetry on the idea of breath, exploring its relationship to the use of breathing in meditation.
Ron Silliman has written and edited 26 books to date, most recently Under Albany. Between 1979 & 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet. In the 1980s, he was the executive editor of The Socialist Review and he has worked as a political activist in the prison and tenants movements, a lobbyist, a teacher, a college administrator, and market analyst in the computer industry. He writes Silliman's Blog, a weblog on poetics, that has drawn over 500,000 visitors since 2002.
Orphaned Writing
 Chris Tysh
Leaning on the Derridean notions of graft, trace and dissemination, we will focus on writing as site, passage or arcade where language profiles its infinite turns and drifts. Reading and composing away from the consolations of thematic content, the class will concentrate on writing which plays at losing its place and dissolving its habitual securities. In this orphaned state, the lyric opens up to the endless traffic of signs.
Chris Tysh teaches creative writing and women's studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her latest book of poems is Cleavage. Mother, I (fragment of a film script) was released as a pamphlet by Belladonna. Her poems, reviews and essays have appeared in Chicago Review, Hambone, Jacket, Lipstick Eleven, Chain, Metro Times, Mirage, Poetry Flash and How, among others. She is a former editor of mark(s), an online quarterly.
Dakini Poetics
Anne Waldman
In Tibetan Buddhism a dakini – the embodiment of the feminine principle (male or female) engaged with adorning "empty space" – is a type of rigorous messenger or protector. Sharp, tricky and playful, the dakini represents the fertile ground out of which nirvana (imagination) and samsara (depression) arise. We will propose "experiments of attention," perusing questions of "identity" "gender" and designing modes for outrageous performance. What does the mind imagine through original, refreshed language and moving pictures in the charnel ground of the 21st century? Texts include selections from Artaud, Maria Sabina, Jean Luc Godard, and Moving Borders (ed. Mary Margaret Sloan). Students should to be familiar with the work and poetics of their instructor and have their own copy of Moving Borders.
Anne Waldman poet, professor, performer, curator and cultural activist, is the author of over 40 books and small press editions of poetry and poetics. She is the co-founder of the Kerouac School. A complete biography can be found on page 2.
Emergent Forms
 Elizabeth Willis
The prose poem emerged in an atmosphere of political and social upheaval. Its history reveals how seemingly external forces may be intrinsically related to poetic form. How can such pressures on and in art be articulated without being conventionalized? To what other facts of contemporary experience is your writing related? This workshop will focus on writing poetry in the context of contemporary pressures on form and content.
Elizabeth Willis is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Meteoric Flowers and Turneresque. Her critical writing addresses 19th- and 20th-century poetry, painting, and film. Currently she is editing a collection of essays on Lorine Niedecker. She teaches at Wesleyan University.
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