Week Two Courses

Non-credit Course #: WRI 052; tuition: $400 per week
BA Course #: WRI 352; undergraduate tuition (1.5 credits): TBA
MFA Course #: WRI 652; graduate tuition (2 credits): TBA

Since Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Charles Olson’s Projective Verse, Frank

O'Hara's Personism, and the fierce rhythms of the Black Arts Movement first intervened on a placid culture in the 1950’s & 60’s, the “Outrider” tradition has emboldened generations of experimental writing: “Hold back the edges of your gowns,” wrote William Carlos Williams of Howl. This week we will discuss this exciting history and discover how contemporary women writers and other “outlaws” have followed Williams’s poetic edict to move the century forward a few inches. At the week’s end, we will fittingly celebrate the 50 th anniversary of On the Road as a deep bow to our namesake, Jack Kerouac.

Clark Coolidge
Kerouac Entire
A journey through Jack Kerouac’s works in the order of their writing. With the aid of letters, diaries, recordings and the commentary of one whose writing life stems directly from, we’ll aim to achieve Jack Totality! It’s the 50 th anniversary of On the Road’s publication and the Great Rememberer still needs our best attention. A study and a celebration.

Brenda Coultas
Tell Me a Story
During the week we will work on one narrative and take it through as many incarnations as possible, writing and revising to the last possible minute. This will include in class collaborations and experimentation with various methods and models.

Sesshu Foster
The Real Work
Using the poetics and poems of William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder, and others as examples, participants will discuss the practice of poetry as work, and the work itself as intervention in place. We’ll experiment with writing exercises that develop a practice of work/place.

Peter Gizzi
Listening to the Invisible: How Poets Listen
In this course we will investigate the practice of listening through the work of Jack Spicer, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. What is the moment of reception? Who is listening? What role does listening play in the production and reception of the poem? What does it tell us about the poem’s field of relation?

Carla Harryman
Beginning Environs
In this class, we’ll consider decisions made or that one might make in regards to one’s writing and one’s poetics within the circumstances of literary, imaginary, political, social or social geographic, and cultural contexts. If the question where does one begin is asked what happens in our thinking about “where” and “beginning?” What would any of this have to do with what you are thinking about or working on now?

Anselm Hollo
Great Dead Beats
An examination and discussion of a few less-known, less notorious “Beat” poets, including John Wieners, Edward Marshall, Stephen Jonas, and Stuart Perkoff, and their respective “scenes” and publications. Writing assignments may consist of student responses in poetic and/or discursive forms. A look at a time before blogs and web sites, with poets who lived mainly for their art.

Hettie Jones
Outriding the Ring—Prose in Motion
Outrider Prose has come in! This week, inspired by a form from fiction writer Joan Silber, we’ll be writing a Ring of Stories. Fiction or nonfiction, each will connect to the other in a new, nonlinear way. We’ll be reading short pieces by Dagoberto Gilb, Meena Alexander, R. Zamora Linmark, others.

Bernadette Mayer
To Wordplay or Not to Wordplay
An approach to writing poetry that provides endless ideas and circumvents concepts like writer’s block. There will be a special emphasis on women’s writing. We will focus on experiments in poetry, etymological writing, dream writing, structural investigations, including writing at the same time every day and other forms.

Ken Mikolowski
Printing Workshop
Well, since this is a printing workshop I suppose we’ll do some printing. And learn to hand-set some type along the way. We’ll get you in the pressroom and get your hands dirty, always a good idea for writers. Maybe you’ll get to print up some postcards of your very own to send out to all your friends and relatives. Why ever not?

Jennifer Moxley
Wieners and Other Women
Contemplating Williams’: “Hold back the edges of your gowns,” we can imagine John Wieners’s gown as the floor-length gold lamé number he wore to read at Boston College. Fanny Howe was there, and claims to have found poetic salvation in this angelic vision. We’ll start from these two writers and explore the lyric poem as a locus of protean gender-identity, desire, faith, embarrassment, self-pity, and masochism.

Akilah Oliver
Lineages and Lines: Poetry, Contact & Departure
We’ll work with the poem as a point of contact with lineages or aesthetic references, and as a point of departure, always becoming something other than what the poet imagines it to be. We’ll pay close attention to the moment of the line, looking at what possibilities exist within and between lines. We’ll explore the lineages that inform our work.

Rod Smith
Sense, Nonsense, Trance, and the Individual Talent
Is poetry a state of consciousness? We will examine the poetic process as trance state-- the experience of “groundlessness” as the experience of sense/nonsense and the participatory knowledge of these found in poets of the New American lineage. Authors examined will include Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, Tom Raworth, and Opal Whiteley.

Lewis Warsh
Double Lives
We all lead double lives – internal/external, past/present – so part of our exploration as fiction writers will be looking at the ways to articulate the interactions between the two. Memories, secrets, fantasies, observations, dreams, distractions, footnotes are the raw material for the stories we try to tell. We’ll tap into the work of Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Lydia Davis, W.G. Sebold among others.

Marjorie Welish
A Test of Spacing: The poem as notebook
What if we were to contemplate the discursive framework for note taking and notebooks in poems by writers who consider themselves respondents to the Objectivists? This course will examine specific poems-as-notebooks written recently and in comparison with those written by Objectivist poets with the goal of understanding the underlying poetics. Writing assignments will derive from our studies.

Confirmed Special Guests for the Kerouac Festival, June 30 th & July 1 st:

David Amram
Clark Coolidge
Hettie Jones
Merge
Audrey Sprenger

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