Week Four Courses

Week IV is traditionally a time for us to investigate and celebrate our artistic sangha or community. Sangha refers to a group of like-minded individuals who share a spiritual path of aspiration and action. We will also look at how writers engage in performance—on the page (as in “composition by field” or “projective verse”) and on the literary stage. Students and faculty will be encouraged to explore cross-genre collaboration, and participate in our student-faculty performance salon. We will celebrate the small press tradition cultivated by Kerouac School faculty and students over many years, and our own Harry Smith Printshop. We will also pay tribute to Coffee House Press, now in its 25th year of publishing cutting edge, experimental poetry and prose, which has worked closely with a number of Kerouac School writers and scholars.

Noncredit Course #: WRI 054, tuition: $475/week
BA Course #: WRI 454, TBA
MFA Course #: WRI 754, TBA

Michelle Ellsworth Solo Performance

In this workshop we will create original, relevant, and visually engaged solo performances works. We will employ soda, inexperience, history, Fibonacci, plagiarism, idiosyncrasies, performance scores, and anything else we want. Special attention will be paid to the problematic objects in our lives. We will question our assumptions about performance, audience, bodies, and language and try to make something that gives us a wee bit of pleasure.

Michelle Ellsworth’s performance work has been produced at Jacob's Pillow, Dance Theater Workshop, On The Boards, DiverseWorks, and The Telluride Experimental Film Festival. Michelle’s video work has been presented at P.S. 122, the North Hampton Independent Film Festival, the BMOCA and The San Souci Festival. Her cartoons and spreadsheets have been published in CHAIN. Michelle is currently making a 7 inch recording with Sean Meehan and teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Brian Evenson & Joanna Howard Fantastic Fiction: Writing Against Realism

This course will explore fiction that goes beyond realism, plays with boundaries, and borrows from popular genres. How do authors like Marie Redonnet, Robbe-Grillet and Borges make good use of the detective story? How have genres such as New Weird, Neo-Noir, and New Wave Fabulism changed how we think about fiction? How can literature steal from popular forms to revitalize itself? The first two days are reading intensive; the last two focus on student stories.

Brian Evenson is the author of nine works of fiction, most recently Fugue State (Coffee House Press) and Last Days (Underland Press). He directs Brown University's Creative Writing Program.

Joanna Howard is the author of In the Colorless Round (Noemi Press) and On the Winding Stair (Boa Editions). She teaches Creative Writing at Brown University.

Simone Forti Writing from Movement

We all stand, sit, clamber over rocks. Our thoughts move. We will meet at the Performing Arts Center stage to work with scores that will get us moving. Our activities will include Improvisational speaking around a chosen point of departure, while in motion. At times we will catch each other’s words on the fly, jotting them down. Then, with this help, we’ll edit our words into crafted writings.

Suggested Reading
Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion (Contact Quarterly)
Simone Forti, Oh, Tongue (Beyond Baroque)
Simone Forti, Unbuttoned Sleeves (Beyond Baroque)
David Gere & Anne Casper Albright. Eds. Taken By Surprise (Wesleyan)

Simone Forti, dancer and writer, was a seminal influence on the Judson Dance Theater of the 1960s, a time of rich exchange between the arts. Her work spans her early minimalist dance-constructions, animal movement studies and Logomotion News Animations. Her books include Handbook in Motion (Nova Scotia College of Art & Design Press); Oh, Tongue and Unbuttoned Sleeves (Beyond Baroque Books). She is the recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship in dance.

C.S. Giscombe Public Intersections

We’ll explore (in writing and conversation) varieties of voice and intersections of poetry and theatre—how might a poets’ theatre interrupt daily business? How can we take performance back home? My concerns are always with geography—where something takes place—and geography’s overlap with the social, the unexpectedness (to reference Clarence Major) of being the wrong speaker saying things in a specific location. Authors? Fiona Templeton, Ntozake Shange, Michael Ondaatje, Audre Lorde, Basho and/or others.

Suggested Reading:
Amiri Baraka, “Hunting is Not Those Heads on the Wall,” in Home, Social Essays
CS Giscombe, Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive)

C. S. Giscombe was born in Dayton, Ohio. His poetry books include Prairie Style, Giscome Road, and Here; his prose book—about Canada—is Into and Out of Dislocation. He’s won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry and the Canadian Embassy. He teaches poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dan Machlin Poem as Project: Project as Poem

When poets compose as part of a larger artistic or social project, this context impacts both the way they write and we read their work. We’ll look beyond individual poems and discuss poetic projects like Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets and Brenda Coultas’ The Bowery Project. Plus examples of projects from other genres—Robert Smithson’s Earthworks, and Sufjan Stevens’ Fifty States Project. Then we’ll create our own poetic project statements and begin to write poems to populate them.

Required
Brenda Coultas, A Handmade Museum (Coffee House)

Suggested
Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets (Penguin)
Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker (Hard Press)

Dan Machlin is a native NYC poet, performer and publisher. He is the author of Dear Body: (Ugly Duckling Presse), which was awarded a “face out” grant for emerging writers from the Jerome Foundation/CLMP. His work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Crayon, Critiphoria, Cy Pressand Tarpaulin Sky. He also collaborated with Serena Jost on an audio CD, Above Islands (Immanent Audio). Dan is the founder and editor of Futurepoem books.

Max Regan Stealing The Dictionary

There are over 40,000 dictionaries currently in circulation. In this writing workshop each student will excavate a theme from their own history, from which their unique narrative dictionary will be made. Our writing will trespass into invisibility, memoir, confession, witness, presence, absence, performance, hybrid forms and the false geography of language. Sources will include L.Birman, B.L. Hawkins, H. Mullen, R. Brown, C. Milosz, A. Marlowe and others. Students of any genre are welcome.

Max Regan, MFA is a teacher, poet, writer, and the founder of Hollowdeck Press LLC. He teaches poetry, prose, memoir and experimental writing and offers annual writing journeys to the city of Prague in the Czech Republic and other cities around the world. Max sponsors writing guilds in Boulder, Baltimore and Houston, and he has taught and lectured at the University of Colorado, Colorado State University and Naropa University.

Ed Roberson Made Connections

I’d like to host a workshop during which we could study our own and each other’s hand in our connections, those of sequence as well as concept, such as in metaphor. A firm grip, a light touch or a focused throw of the cowries. Even more, I’d like to look into those gaps which connection claims to close, to look for the nature of the missing, of absence. Is there community in absence? What sort of connection is absence, and how do you make it?

EdRoberson has published eight books of poetry. Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Atmosphere Conditions was one of the winners in the National Poetry Series Competition, and was nominated by the Academy of American Poets for the Lenore Marshall Award.City Eclogue was selected by the Atelos series in 2007, and The New Wing of the Labyrinth, published by Singing Horse, will be out early 2009. He has also received the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award in 2008.

Alberto Ruy-Sanchez To Become a Stranger

Is it possible to see yourself and your surroundings from another point of view? To develop a stranger's eye? Could the experience of travel be useful to write and read and love? We will talk about Mexico and other countries in several kinds of writings. An invitation to become uprooted.

Suggested Reading
Amin Malouf, In the Name of Identity (Penguin)
Alan Lightman, Eninstein’s Dreams (Vintage)
Marcel Mauss, The Gift (Norton)

Alberto Ruy-Sanchez is the author of twenty books of fiction and nonfiction. His novel Mogador was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, the most prestigious recognition in Mexico. Two Pine Press will publish The Secret Gardens of Mogador in the spring. He was Visiting Professor at Stanford and Chairman of the Creative Non-Fiction Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. Since 1988, he has been the Chief Editor of Latin America's leading Arts Magazine, Artes de Mexico.

Dale Smith Publishing the Public Word: Networked Tribes, and Resilient Communities

One basic premise informs this class: globalization has hit a wall. With this in mind, I want to talk with students about how poetry is produced and publicized. We will discuss ways to create community, infrastructure, and art in a world facing resource contraction—and the social consequences this will have. Students will contribute to a blog that documents our conversation, and produce a small body of work that addresses some of the issues we discuss.

Suggested Reading
John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Wiley)

Available Online:
John Robb, Global Guerrillas: Networked tribes, systems disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures available
Linh Dinh, Detainees
James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation
Matt Savinar, Life After the Oil Crash

Dale Smith explores topics in poetry, communication, and social and natural resources at Possum Ego. His books, including Black Stone (2007), are available through SPD. A review of Susquehanna (2008) appears in Jacket 35 and an essay about him can be found in On: Contemporary Practice. His work is published in print and online journals, including Best American Poetry 2002, and he writes regularly for Bookslut.com. He recently completed a PhD in rhetoric at UT-Austin.

Mary Tasillo Visual Texts: Collaborative Books

Printmaking and publishing are inherently collaborative processes due to the open nature of the print shop. Come together to create collaborative publications—books and broadsides—from texts both written and found. We will discuss ways that text can become a visual experience, as well as how to use a book’s structure to reinforce and pace a text. Students will learn the basics of setting type, mixing ink, and printing, as well as a trick or two for adding color and texture to a layout, all while exploring modes of collaborative creation.

Mary Tasillo is a print, text, book and paper artist based in Philadelphia, PA. She is also a somewhat itinerant teacher, writer, and independent scholar. Mary is a columnist for the Hand Papermaking Newsletter and holds an MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA.

Steven Taylor Remember the future: Song and the War on Memory

Memory is the object of dominance. The media generation’s memory warriors have learned that popular memory can be rewritten by simple insistence on even the most outlandish propositions. Repetition is the mechanism of this pathological drive to one mind, one truth, and the erasure of difference in a fog of amnesia. Resistance is remembrance through repetition with a difference, which is song. The workshop forms a vocal ensemble that rehearses a set of songs that begins with the peasant rebellions of 14th century. Participants use these pieces as models for their own lyrics. A willingness to sing is the only requirement.

Steven Taylor is a member of the seminal poetry rock group the Fugs. He is author of False Prophet: Fieldnotes from the punk underground.

Wang Ping Where the Waters Gather and the Rivers Meet: Writing with Fragments and Collages

Using rivers as a metaphor that brings all things together, this workshop explores the possibility of transforming the seemingly trivial, personal, fragmented and chaotic into the river of art. We will experiment with taking fragments of mixed genres and turning them into collage poems or collage prose. Works by American and international poets/writers will be read and discussed. Discussion will be focused on how the forms and contents come together and work for each other to make the piece work. Most of our time, however, will be spent on workshopping your work. There’ll be writing assignments for each session (with themes on rivers and streams, or any body of water), and all the writings will be workshopped and revised. The goal is to find the right shape, voice and rhythm for your raw materials.

Suggested Reading
Robert Shapard, Sudden Fiction International:Sixty Short-Short Stories (Norton)
David Lehman, Ed, Great American Prose Poems: Poe to Present. (Scribner)
Alice Oswald, Spacecraft Voyager: New & Selected Poetry (Graywolf Press)
Alice Oswald, Dart (Faber & Faber)

Wang Ping was born in China and came to the US in 1985. Her publications of poetry and prose include American Visa, Foreign Devil, Of Flesh and Spirit, New Generation: Poetry from China Today, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, The Magic Whip, The Dragon Emperor, and The Last Communist Virgin. She won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities and is the recipient of NEA and the Bush Artist Fellowship for poetry. Her photo and video installation, Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three Gorges Dam, is exhibited at Macalester Art Gallery in March, 2007. She is associate professor of English at Macalester College.

Special Guests

Hoa Nguyen

Born near Saigon, Hoa Nguyen grew up in the DC area and studied poetry at New College of California. She currently lives in Austin, Texas, with the poet Dale Smith; together they publish Skanky Possum, a book imprint and journal, and curate a monthly reading series. Her books include Red Juice and Kiss A Bomb Tattoo both by Effing Press. Hot Whiskey Books will be publishing a full-length collection of her poems in 2009.

Nguyen will be conducting a poetry chat and reading on Thursday, July 9.

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4

site map contact faculty and staff employment