History

Summer Writing Progam 2006
Week Four: July 10—July 16

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)

Media & Performance & Collaboration

What enhances the written text in performance?  How are we working with and developing further exploratory strategies? What is our praxis with the Internet, film, video, radio, television?  How can poets and writers change the frequency of the usual dumbed-down commercial fare that seeks to numb rather than activate the senses? What might be the role of music, gesture, dance with text?  How does the painstaking attention required of setting letterpress type inform our writing or, for that matter, the "making" of books.  The Summer Writing Program's final week historically honors the unique gifts of our community – our sangha – a word borrowed from the Buddhist tradition referring to a like-minded group of practitioners.  Amiri Baraka, an eminent guest this week, speaks of and conjures the role of the "djali" – the historian, storyteller, poet, musician whose job it is to "light up the mind, to make the mind shine, to make the mind laugh, to make the mind laugh with understanding, recognition."

Faculty and Guests include: Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Bob Holman, Brian Evenson, Kristin Prevallet, Johanna Drucker, Bobbie Louise Hawkins/Andrew Wille, Miguel Algarin, Karen Finley, Jack Collom, Fiona Templeton, Junior Burke, Lytle Shaw, Julia Seko (printshop)

Poetry: Paper vs. Speech & The Act

Amiri Baraka
What is the understanding of Media, its use, given the real life context of our times?
What is Propaganda? Agit Prop? Commercials? Their value? How should those forces who see fundamental transformation of society as their focus determine to use media? What is the nature of performance as a mass objective?  As social praxis and artistic  projection and their combining projection. What are the values of performance over isolated absorption, reading, &c. United yet divergent. How does one translate & transform... from paper or the silent to the aural.  Written Poetry as score. Oral tradition and Revolutionary use. The Relevance of Rap. The Ancient use of Poetry as History, Theater, Music, Reportage and their meaning in contemporary worlds. Publishing & Cooperation (including Cooperatives) as Key to Socialist Development & Cultural Revolution. The Need for Alternative Superstructure & methods and examples of this direction. The Use of Any & All Means. What Technology & How do we use it? Where are our Revolutionary Venues, Galleries, Theaters, Publishing Houses, Programs, Film Cooperatives, Arts Collectives, Journals? &c

Amiri Baraka is "The Last Poet Laureate of New Jersey." He has three books due out in 2006, The Book of Monk  (Poetry, Essay, Short Story on Thelonius Monk) by Razor Books, Tales of the Out & the Gone (Short Stories, 70s to 2003) by Akashic Books, and Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (Essays) by Agincourt Publishers.

Show Me a Story
Junior Burke
Kerouac, describing his compositional method, said: "Don't think of words … but to see the picture better." We will investigate the challenges of narrative in a visual medium. The possibilities of poetic dialogue. How the element of description can be composed and translated visually. How action defines character. The goal of the workshop will be to complete ten to fifteen pages of material that could be produced in the medium of film.

Junior Burke’s latest novel is Something Gorgeous. Besides writing prose, he is a widely produced lyricist and dramatist. He is Chair of the Department of Writing & Poetics and Director of Naropa's MFA Creative Writing, the low-residency component of the Kerouac School. He is Editorial Director of the online literary magazine not enough night which features some of the boldest voices in American and international letters. He also teaches Screenwriting in the University of Colorado's Film Studies Department.

What's Funny?

Jack Collom
Philosopher Henri Bergson said what's funny is always "something mechanical encrusted upon the living." Hmm. Tim Dlugos wrote: "I take incredible/risks with my poems,/which is why they/always turn out so fine." What's it all about? We'll write, discuss, and study this stuff.

Jack Collom good poet. Silly. Old. Chicago, Colorado. Forestry, birds, Tripoli, ach du lieber. Knows what a dactyl is. Factory. Kids. Divorce. Beer. Divroce. A country intellectual. 2 NEA's. Yodelers Anonymous. Red Car Goes By. Tender, sensitive. Woof.

Visual Dimensions of Poetry: Performance on the Page

Johanna Drucker
Any poem or written work has a graphic dimension, but some call attention to those visual means in a way that explores the potential of typography, calligraphy, or layout to perform on the page. Though sometimes seeming anomalous, they expose how graphical means inflect and embody poetic expression. Experimenting with the ideas of graphic translation, attending to historical styles, gaining a descriptive vocabulary for understanding the visual dimension expands the poetic field. We'll engage with these issues through demonstration, discussion, and experimentation.

Johanna Drucker is a poet and artist known for her books of experimental visual poetry. She is currently on the faculty at the University of Virginia where she teaches English literature and Media Studies.

Collaborating with the Dead

Brian Evenson
This course explores how contemporary writers respond to writers who have come before them.  We'll look at the way writers appropriate earlier traditions – for instance, the way Angela Carter or Robert Coover or Rikki Ducornet respond to fairy tales – and think about how the spirit of collaboration motivates these responses. We'll read contemporary writers who are responding to the past, and write our own responses to things that have come prior to us.

Brian Evenson is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently The Wavering Knife.  He is the Director of the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University.

Assorted Prosotics

Bobbie Louise Hawkins/Andrew Wille
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. This class will be co-taught.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins founded the prose fiction concentration in the Writing and Poetics Department at Naropa where she still teaches. She has 16 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and performance monologues to her credit. Her recording projects include Live At the Great American Music Hall (Rounder Records) and Jaded Love (Bijou Books). Her one-woman shows include Life as We Know It and Take Love for Instance . She is currently working on a film documentary drawing on interviews and texts from the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Project.

The Reemergence of the Oral Tradition in the Digital Age

Bob Holman
There is a microphone in the room. Hiphop, Jeliya, Dada, Futurism, New York School, Rock, Beat, Black Mountain, Slam and other traditions weave through the curriculum. We engage media other than print: video/audio recording, live collaborations, poets theater, the Internet, et al. Texts include Ong, Stanford, Mackey, Mullen, Notley. Arcana includes Cortez, Di Franco, Elmslie, Giorno, Hammad, Harjo, Henderson, LK Johnson, Mike Ladd, Last Poets, Nas, Pietri, Pessoa, Carolee Schneeman, Sia, Patricia Smith, Marc Smith, Trudell, Saul/WC Wiliams…

Bob Holman's new book, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (a collaboration with Chuck Close) will be released by Aperture this fall. He was Coordinator of the St Mark's Poetry Project, originated the Poetry Slam at the Nuyorican Poets Café, and founded the spoken word label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records. He was the creator and producer of the PBS series, The United States of Poetry, is the Curator of the People's Poetry Gathering, Poetry Guide at About.com, Professor of Writing at Columbia University, and Proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club. He was inspired to start a Naropa-style applied poetics program, Study Abroad on the Bowery!, after his last stint at Naropa's Kerouac School.  Something to do when you are in New York.

For more on Bob Holman, visit www.bobholman.com.

Page vs. Stage: Mutual Respect
Kristin Prevallet
Olson vs. Def Jam: is there no between? This workshop will bridge the gap between poems written for the page, and poems written for the stage – what are the parameters for the distinction? What assumptions are built in to how the work is received? How important is tradition, reading, "the scene." When are the dividing lines blurred? We will look at your work as inhabiting both realms, and explore possibilities of voice, narration, fragmentation, and measure in order to consider ways that poetic techniques apply to how a poem is read, felt, heard, and received.  

Kristin Prevallet's conceptual poetics bring together text and form, performance and craft –she is a poet, editor, award-winning translator, and essayist whose recent work has appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, The Seneca Review, and Damn the Caesars. She is the author of Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-text  Projects and On Becoming Ghost: Poetic Forms for Mourning Time. She teaches writing and literature at New York University, and Investigative Poetics for Naropa's Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing. With Bob Holman, Anne Waldman, and Alan Gilbert she co-founded Study Abroad on the Bowery.

For more on Kristin Prevallet's work go to www.kayvallet.com.

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 external. 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.

Sonia Sanchez is a writer, professor, cultural activist and international human rights worker. She has authored over sixteen books, including Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions? and Shake Loose My Skin. Sanchez's poetry celebrates the connection between social justice activism and the strength of human spirit.

The Word Made Flesh

Julia Seko
The idea becomes words, which are transformed into material form on the printed page.  In this introductory letterpress workshop, we will use metal type, paper, ink, and big machines to explore this transformation and the resultant relationship between the text and its visual and tactile manifestation in print.

Julia Seko learned letterpress printing at the Women's Building in Los Angeles. She helped set up Naropa's print shop and has taught at Naropa since 1994. She is proprietor of PS Press; her work is in university and private collections and has been exhibited in the United States and Ireland.

Ambulatory Genres

Lytle Shaw
Taking up a variety of ambulatory genres including the walk, the interpretive tour, and the dérive, we will study their potential for analyzing and unsettling both social and institutional space. We will also address the ambulation between genres that becomes possible within these writing modes— experimenting with how the mobile analysis of sites can generate radically different tonalities, styles, and modes of address.  Precedents will include the Situationists, Robert Smithson, Andrea Fraser, Lisa Robertson and the Center for Land Use Interpretation.   
 
Lytle Shaw's publications include the poetry books Cable Factory 20 and The Lobe, the critical study Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, and recent catalog essays on the Royal Art Lodge for the Drawing Center and on Robert Smithson for the DIA Arts Center.  Since 2000 he has been collaborating with Jimbo Blachly on Specific, a work of experimental urbanism. Former co-editor of Shark and curator of the Line Reading Series, Shaw lives in New York City where he teaches American literature at New York University.

Writing From Speaking

Fiona Templeton
What is the relationship between writing and speaking? In performance, speaking usually occurs after writing or without it.  We will practice more complex forms of this relationship, writing derived from speaking in a range of ways, from improvisation to eavesdropping to deep contemplation, in groups and as individuals. How then are the forms and layers and silences in which speech occurs translated to the page (or other written place)? Writing as a form of hearing, hearing as a form of meaning.

Fiona Templeton works in the interstices of poetry, theatre and installation, in particular the relationship between performer and audience.  Her current epic The Medead embodies a history of theatre in its journey. YOU-The City, a seminal work, was an intimate Manhattanwide play for an audience of one. Her books include YOU & Cells Of Release, London, Hi Cowboy, oops the join, Elements of Performance Art, Shattered Anatomies. 

For more on Fiona Templeton's work go to http://www.fionatempleton.org and follow "work online."

Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2006
2005
2004
2003