History

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)

The Continent and Abroad

The Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics sits on the spine of the North American continent and close to the Continental Divide. Bridging both East and West Coast literary energies, it bows toward Asian contemplative traditions that inform the founding of this school. Writers with roots in Canadian, Russian, Chinese, Indian and Native American cultures will be present this week to expand the horizons of our scholarship, our poetics, and our view of "Other" as collaborator and informant. We will investigate the common ground for cultural exchange and translation, as well as the unique histories, differences, and disjuncts in the minute particulars of practice and gnosis. What is the responsibility of writers to "other"? What can we learn from one another in the postmodern Dark Age?

Faculty and Guests include: Samuel R. Delany, Matvei Yankelevich, Zhang Er, Hoa Nyugen, Dale Smith, Quincy Troupe, Meredith Quartermain, Peter Quartermain, Rikki Ducornet, Sawako Nakayasu, Mark McMorris, Anselm Hollo, Indira Ganesan, Bhanu Kapil, James Thomas Stevens, Mary Laird (printshop)

Reading and Writing Across Cultures
Samuel R. Delany
This summer we will try writing about our encounters with other cultures. Many of us have traveled, some of us more than we even think we have. If we have not lived in other cultures, we have met people from other cultures. This summer we will read and write texts about such encounters.

Samuel R. Delany is a critic and novelist, with essays and interviews so far collected in eight volumes. He teaches at Temple University. His most recent work is About Writing.

The Deep Zoo: Beneath the Flag of Rigor and Imagination!
Rikki Ducornet
We will disrupt and subvert dogmatic thinking of all kinds: religious, familial, political and neurotic, in order to write fearlessly, empowered by our own stock of powers—in the form of memories and dreams: our own "Deep Zoo." Our motto (and the words belong to Gaston Bachelard): "It is a poor reverie that invites a nap."

Rikki Ducornet has received both a Lannan Literary Fellowship (1993) and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (2004). She was awarded the Charles Flint Kellogg Medal in Arts and Letters from Bard College, and her novel, The FanMaker's Inquisition, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. Her most recent novel, Gazelle, was published by Knopf in 2003, and by Anchor paperbacks in 2004. She is widely published abroad.

Translation as Art and Metaphor: What Chinese Poetry Offers to World Literature
Zhang Er
We will explore Chinese poetry via translation. Through readings, workshops and class discussions, we will compare versions of translation of primary sources in order to study a range of possible interpretations. Chinese Characters' structure and Chinese poetics will be examined to illustrate how the perception of the world can be foundimentally altered by/through language. Creativity may therefore spring out of "translation" as it opens to a different world view…

Zhang Er, born in Beijing, China, is the author of three collections of poetry in Chinese, most recently Because of Mountain. She has six chapbooks in English translation, among them are Carved Water and Sight Progress. Her selected poems in a bilingual edition, Verses on Bird was published from Zephyr Press. She has read and lectured at international festivals, conferences, reading series and universities. She teaches at the Evergreen State College in Washington.

The Shape of the Story
Indira Ganesan
In crafting short stories, we not only have to pay attention to elemental components of plots, dialogue, point of view, setting, and character, but the shape of the story itself. How do we begin our story? How do we end? In what ways can the narrative unfold? In this workshop, we will examine the shape of the story, with writing exercises and readings.

Indira Ganesan is the author of two novels, The Journey and Inheritance. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and her BA from Vassar College and her writings have appeared in Square One, not enough night, Newsday, Antaeus, Glamour, Seventeen, Half & Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial & Bicultural, among others. She teaches at Naropa's Kerouac School.

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!).

Anselm Hollo, poet and literary translator, is a professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. His most recent book is Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965 – 2000.

Something Glitters on the Border at Night: A Tooth?
Bhanu Kapil
Where one thing ends and another begins, whether that's a country or a time, the question of emergence arises: biological shapes are affected by abrupt alterations in the physical environment. Are they? Writing this, I see them - these forms - as shadowy but with the magical illumination of aquarium back-lighting. In this workshop, I invite you to imagine what you see there, at an evolving border, and make it real in texts like nets. By it I mean a figure with monstrous qualities. Describe your monster. By nets I mean: how can writing function both as transportation and capture?

Bhanu Kapil teaches writing at Naropa University and has an integrative bodywork practice in Loveland, Colorado. Her published collections are Autobiography of a Cyborg, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, and an experimental prose work about monsters forthcoming from Leon Works.

Poets Printing!
Mary Laird
Bear in mind your connect with "Other" as you choose one of your poems to hand-set and print letterpress this week. Recommended length is 15-20 lines or longer if you can make a greater time commitment to the printshop. Hand setting is slow and contemplative. It gives you time to sink into your story, to rewrite as you set, to see the words come alive as they sink into the fabric of the paper. Smell the ink, crank the press, get your hands dirty, return to 500 years ago when this tradition became established in Europe. Be monkish, or if you prefer more modern, say, Virginia Woolfish. Or just plain you.

Mary Laird, MFA printmaking, University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been doing letterpress books since 1969 as Quelquefois Press. She also partnered in Perishable Press Limited for fifteen years. She taught at San Francisco State University and Kala Institute, and is currently teaching at San Francisco Center for the Book. Her work is in many collections across the country. She has three grown children, lives in Berkeley with her husband John Malork, and is a member of the Sufi community.

Fragment & Series = Poetry
Mark McMorris
A fragment is incomplete, a piece broken off, a sign of mutilation. Open rather than closed, it poses a question instead of giving an answer. How can a fragment be accurate? How do fragments make a series and cohere in the play of continuity and discontinuity? Let us read texts from the archive to probe these questions, Sappho, Mallarmé, Pound, Creeley, Grenier, Albiach, Scalapino, Howe, and others. We will read and write poems, and share poems with one another, and try to see what of value the fragment allows, and occludes, for our own writing practices today.

Mark McMorris is a poet and critic whose writing appears in 26, New American Writing, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, Chicago Review, & Traffic. His book The Blaze of the Poui (Georgia) was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for 2004. He is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C.

Everything a Translation, Some of It From Japan
Sawako Nakayasu
There will be tons of writing, in many genres. Springboards for experiments in writing and translation include writing from Japan, both contemporary (manga comics, concrete poetry, experiments in the avant-garde) as well as traditional (the musical and visual process of Japanese calligraphy). We will also work (and play) with the various boundaries of translation. When translating from languages we do not know, what are some alternatives to homophonic translation? No foreign language required.

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and raised bilingually in the US. She writes poetry, prose, and performance text, translates from Japanese to English, and is currently working on an insect-based book. Her books include Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (Quale Press) and So we have been given time Or, (Verse Press). She edits Factorial, which features contemporary Japanese poetry in translation, as well as the Translation section for HOW2.

For more information on Sawako Nakayasu's work go to the following links:

http://www.fauxpress.com/e/nakayasu/
http://www.durationpress.com/bookstore/ebooks/nakayasu/nakayasu.pdf http://www.durationpress.com/bookstore/ebooks/nakayasu/nakayasu.pdf
http://www.nakayasu.blogspot.com/

Everyday writing (beneath your feet)
Hoa Nguyen
In this workshop we are going to write the everyday. Our investigations will include plants, jobs, menus, walks, the body, landscapes, media and popular culture. Participants are invited to bring their daybooks, dream journals and travelogues to sample and fracture. Joanne Kyger, Bernadette Mayer and Eileen Myles, among others, will serve as models and inspiration.

Born near Saigon in 1967, Hoa Nguyen grew up in the D.C. area and studied poetry at New College in San Francisco. She lives in Austin, Texas with the poet Dale Smith; they publish Skanky Possum, a book imprint and journal, and curate a monthly reading series. Her books include Your Ancient See Through (Sub Press) and Red Juice (Effing).

Poetry of Place
Meredith Quartermain
Taking inspiration from such poets as William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Kathleen Fraser, and Gail Scott, we will explore history, naming, description, narrative, and other techniques to create poetry of places. And explore how language itself is a locus. You may wish to bring photographs, place-name history, or other place-related research to the workshop.

Meredith Quartermain’s most recent book is Vancouver Walking (NeWest Press). Other books include Terms of Sale, A Thousand Mornings and Wanders (with Robin Blaser). Her work has appeared in Chain, Sulfur, Tinfish, Prism International, The Capilano Review, West Coast Line, filling Station, Raddle Moon, Canadian Literature and other magazines. With husband Peter Quartermain, she runs Nomados Literary Publishers in Vancouver.

For more information on Meredith Quartermain and for links to her work please visit: http://www.interchange.ubc.ca/quarterm/MeredithQ.htm

Meditations on the Text as Poetic Vehicle
James Thomas Stevens
Inherent in all text, all print culture, is the seed of personal metaphor. Metaphor of the intimate, the historical, the magical. We will explore random texts for the purpose of deep meditation in the very real tradition of seeking, seeking to find the connections that force all things to make sense.. Be prepared to find yourselves meditating upon assigned texts from small-town flea markets to find keys you never knew existed.

James Thomas Stevens is the author of three books of poetry, Tokinish, Combing the Snakes from His Hair, and dis(Orient), and two forthcoming, The Mutual Life (Plan B Press), and Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations (subpress). A member of the Akwesasne Mohawk tribe, he attended the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Kerouac School at Naropa and holds an MFA from Brown University. He is a 2000 Whiting Award recipient and a 2005 National Poetry Series finalist. Stevens lives and writes in Dunkirk, New York, where he is Associate Professor of English and Director of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at Fredonia.

For more information on James Thomas Stevens and for links to his work please visit:
http://www.hanksville.org/storytellers/stevens/
www.palmpress.org

The Architecture of Language
Quincy Troupe
Poetry has always existed at the nexus of visual imagery and music. This workshop will explore the linkage between metaphor and rhythm, how language is structured and how it can be used in a visual, musical manner to energize and give rise to an individual voice that enhances the poem both aurally and figuratively. We'll look into how the American musical forms of jazz and rap, with their emphasis on improvisation and surprise, nourish and enrich the spontaneity of poetry and its idioms, while infusing it with energetic musical language, magic and duende. Poetic craft will not be sacrificed in this endeavor, but enhanced by the possibility of creating new American structures and forms with the infusion of jazz and rap rhythms into the poem.

Quincy Troupe, professor emeritus from the University of California, San Diego, is the author of 15 books. His latest book of poems, Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press) won the 2003 Milt Kessler Poetry Award and was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best books of poetry published in 2002. Houghton Mifflin published his second book for children, Little Stevie, based on the life of musician Stevie Wonder, in April 2005. Troupe is editor-at-large of The Green Magazine and editor of Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, a literary journey of the Institute of Africana Studies at New York University. A new book of poems, The Architecture of Language, and a book of essays are both forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2006.Troupe lives in New York City and Montebello, Guadeloupe, French West Indies, with his wife, Margaret.

The Walk-in Desk Drawer: Writing from Outside In
Matvei Yankelevich
How does one write from outside the prevailing culture? We'll examine writers in isolation (political, cultural, linguistic), writers who wrote for the desk drawer, or in the margins of culture, language, or sanity; writing that sentences itself to infamy or obscurity; and the gestural language of the outsider. Artists discussed or lurking may include: Ivan Blatny, Claude Cahun, Daniil Kharms, Henri Michaux, Boris Poplavsky, Laura Riding, Lev Rubinstein, Alexander Vvedensky.

Matvei Yankelevich is the editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse, where he also co-edits 6x6 magazine. His translations from Russian appear in 3^rd Bed, Circumference, The Germ, Open City, New American Writing, and in books from Northwestern University Press and Green Integer. His own work has appeared in Carve, Fulcrum, Lit, Toilet Paper, and many other little journals. His essays on Russian-American poetry appear on-line in Octopus magazine.

For more on Matvei Yankelevich's work, go to the following links:

www.uglyducklingpresse.org
www.octopusmagazine.com/issue05/essays/matvei_yankelevich.htm
www.turntablebluelight.com/2005/10/matvei_yankelevich.html
www.shampoopoetry.com/ShampooTen/yankelevich.html
www.3ammagazine.com/poetry/2002_nov/matvei.html
www.surgeryofmodernwarfare.com/ archives/september4/september4.html

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Previous Summer Writing Program Information

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