Week Four Courses

Performance (from the French parfornir) is to enact a ritual in front of an audience. “Can you hear me in the back?” Vladimir Mayakovsky inquires in a famous poem. We will work on writing with an ear to project our voices, bodies, and imaginations to the back of the room. Dancers, singers, actors and word workers of many ilks join the mix this week. Collaboration is an effort that turns in many directions in that it takes two or more people to operate a printshop or found a small press in order to send books out into the ozone. How do we keep the spirit going for many decades, as has, for instance, Coffee House Press, whose founder and publisher, Allan Kornblum, joins us this week?

Noncredit Course #: WRI 052, tuition: $475 per week
BA Course #: WRI 452, tuition: $1215 per week
MFA Course #: WRI 752, tuition: $1620 per week
(plus $120 registration fee)

Penny Arcade In search of the Highest Form

Penny Arcade says: 'All art is either self expression or communication. Work that seeks to do both is the highest form.' How do we maintain our authenticity, in both words and movement, when we enter the public sphere of the audience? One's individuality is all one has to contribute to the world. This course will focus on how we create that bridge as well as honing our ability to respect our voice in the process.

Penny Arcade aka Susana Ventura is an internationally respected performance artist, playwright, poet, cultural critic, essayist, and cultural icon. Debuting at 17 in the explosive Playhouse of the Ridiculous, a Warhol Superstar at 19, she was one of a handful of artists that created the performance art movement of the 1980's and 90's. Along with her acclaimed video documentary project Stemming The Tide of Cultural Amnesia: The Lower Eastside Biography Project (with collaborator Steve Zehentner), she continues to define both solo and group Performance.

Photo Credit:
Belladonna

Laynie Browne InFORMal Excursions

Where is the serious playfulness in form? Form is a container, a direction for thought, a frame. Explore various forms including the sonnet, epistle, and tale. How is form: garment, location, dwelling, manner or means of locomotion? We will seek out the edges of form reading the works of Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Lydia Davis, and others. Together we will interpret, re-invent, compile collaborative possibilities, and create. Writers in cross-genre and hybrid forms encouraged.

Laynie Browne is the author of seven collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent publications include The Scented Fox, recipient of the 2007 National Poetry Series Award, and Daily Sonnets. Two collections are forthcoming: The Desires of Letters and Roseate and Points of Gold. She currently teaches at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

Photo Credit:
Nathaniel Tileston

Douglas Dunn Visual/Kinetic Language

Describe the human body in action: literal, metaphorical, gamut between. Describe own inner and outer kinetics, others’ same, both as such and what they’re “saying.” How does texture, pacing, and rhythm of wording complement or distort picture of what is described? Limn what’s out there not ignoring the I that’s seeing. Does paying attention to own actions help see another’s gestures more clearly? Does body in action rise from the page?

Douglas Dunn is a fulltime dancer and sometime writer living in New York City. He began presenting work in 1971 while a member of Merce Cunningham and Dancers and of Grand Union. In 1980 the Autumn Festival and the Paris Opera Ballet commissioned him to set Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. He continues to choreograph and to dance with his company, Douglas Dunn & Dancers, teaches improvisation at New York University, and writes desultorily on dance.

Photo Credit:
Martin Riker

Danielle Dutton Performing the Everyday

According to Viktor Shklovsky we live “as if encased in rubber,” and one of the things art can do is wake us up to the world, “make the stone stony.” In this workshop we’ll look at this particular project of art, and in the process we’ll reengage with the everyday, with activities and objects so familiar as to seem practically invisible. Counter-tops, a highway, beds, walking − ordinary things can lead to anything-but-ordinary writing.

Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life and S P R A W L. She designs books at Dalkey Archive Press and recently launched Dorothy, a publishing project, which will release its first two book in the fall of 2010: Renee Gladman’s The Event Factory and Barbara Comyns’s Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. She has taught prose/literature courses at Naropa since 2006.

Brian Evenson & Joanna Howard Stealing from the Dead: Fiction and Innovation

We'll explore the way that contemporary fiction writers both break with the past and draw on it, looking in particular at writers who borrow and steal from the writers that came before them. How can we transform the material of the literary tradition to get to new places? The first two days will be reading intensive; the last two will be focused on workshopping student fiction.

Brian Evenson is the author of nine works of fiction, most recently Fugue State and Last Days. He directs Brown University’s Creative Writing Program.

Joanna Howard is the author of the story collection On the Winding Stair and the chapbook In the Colorless Round, with artwork by Rikki Ducornet. She teaches at Brown University and lives in Providence, RI.

Colin Frazer Advertising Abstraction

In this workshop we will use hand-set type to create a “specimen sheet” of abstract poetry for public display. Channeling the Dada spirit, our broadsheets will be composed according to the meaning, sound, and visual character of the words. They will then be posted around town as advertisements for the abstract. Our goal will be to achieve a dialogue with the passerby, engaging them in our subtle, subversive performance.

Colin Frazer has been a letterpress printer for nigh on a decade. His work is infused with both a respect for the formalities of composition and color, and a penchant for the abstract. He seeks to spark an enthusiasm for writing and printmaking while engaging directly with the natural world.

Photo Credit:
Linda Koutsky

Allan Kornblum Publishing and Authorship, Past and Present

We will explore key moments in the development of the book, traditions that continue to this day, and new developments in publishing. We will also review the current author/publisher relationship, publishing contracts, and book marketing. Prior to the class students will be required to select from a list of publishing figures and present a five to seven page paper to the class.

Allan Kornblum studied poetry at the St. Marks Poetry Project and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and published poems in a variety of little magazines in the 1970s and early 1980s. As the founder/publisher of the Toothpaste Press in 1970, and since 1984 as founder/publisher at Coffee House Press, he has presented more than 400 books, and won a variety of awards for his work as a designer, editor, and publisher.

Photo Credit:
Daniel Anison or Benjamin Burrill

Rachel Levitsky States of Confinement

As writers engaged but not constrained in textual practice and its containers (book, web, performance, etc) how do we make sense of the intensifying condition of bodily confinement amid the proliferation of prisons/refugee camps, the militarization of cities and the physical alienation of digital life? We’ll read contemporary poetry and prose (Abendroth, Gladman), and essays by poets and theorists (Agamben, Osman) to assist us in our formulations of new textual strategies.

Rachel Levitsky is the author of NEIGHBOR and Under the Sun and several chapbooks, ebooks, online articles and plays. In 1999 she founded Belladonna Series as a feminist avant-garde reading series in NYC. Variously, she teaches college courses at prisons and on college campuses. She is an alumnus of Naropa.

Photo Credit:
Harald Rumpf

Julie Patton Locus Pocus

Weather or not “space is the place” and breath the pace playsays attention to wordsoundsilence as energy work, ecstatic practice per forming daily arts, love crafts in bodied language, human, and non instrumental capacities pro found breath scoring (“other”) wor[l]dy chora-graphs, feels in the blank. thInk small, walk softly, carry a stick, rite, thank on feet, heart on sleeve peace work” as litter-ally gifted matters at hand.

Julie Ezelle Patton’s poet-trees encompass ephemeral books, site-specific projects, drawings, writing, sounded vibes, and what happens when sum of these natures come together. She is the author of Using Blue to Get Black and Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake. Her flying-book installation, A Room for Opal, (Olin Art Museum) comes to light in Jonathan Skinner’s “Listening with Patton” (ON: Contemporary Practice). Julie shape-shifted, in 2009, into a cat-witch for Sop Doll: A Jack Tale Noh and as Desdemona on Uri Caine’s 2009 Grammy nominated Othello Syndrome CD.

Photo Credit:
Amanda Korte

Selah Saterstrom Collaborating with Mystery: Syntax as Performance

What is “syntactical logic” and in what ways does it emanate from the gaps between our words and our processes? How are we in collaboration with silence (not as the opposite of language, but as one of language’s gestures)? Is it possible to reveal the secret by performing it? How does language happen on the nervous system? Taking into account the etymological history of words and the metaphysics of linguistic structures (allowing the logic of divination to inform our experiments), we will engage with such concerns and produce a series of short, hybrid texts.

Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Meat and Spirit Plan and The Pink Institution, and most recently the chapbook Tiger Has a Devil of a Time. She is an editor at Trickhouse and co-curates SLAB PROJECTS. She teaches creative writing at the University of Denver and Goddard College.

Patricia Smith Unveiling Yesterdays

Beginning poets constantly write the self ("I"), a necessary process before they feel rooted enough to move outside of themselves. When they focus on their own lives again, it's with greater willingness to poke around beneath the surface until what is buried is unearthed. We will utilize a simple map to begin the probing, bring longago tragedies, triumphs, vulnerabilities, weaknesses and revelations to the surface. These are the poems that bring fire to the voice.

Patricia Smith is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler and Teahouse of the Almighty. She also authored the ground-breaking history Africans in America and award-winning children's book Janna and the Kings. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and many other journals. She is a Pushcart Prize winner and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. She is a professor at CUNY, Cave Canem, and USM.

Steven Taylor Song Works

We use the Smithsonian Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music to model various song forms and genres. The class then becomes an ensemble where we collaborate on one another’s song writing efforts toward a weekend concert. No previous experience required. All you need is a willingness to sing.

Steven Taylor is a musician and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of False Prophet: Fieldnotes from the Punk Underground and is a member of the Fugs.

Photo Credit:
Nathaniel Siegel

Anne Waldman Performance Evolution

We will work in an ensemble setting geared toward a final performance, using our own writing, docu-poetics snippets, cannibalized texts, natural musicianship, and an ethos of radicalized environmental awareness. Whose map or stage are we on? Whose “closed system”? May we create a fourth dimension with our words and larynx? Performance techniques of sprechstimme, choral chant, call and response, action-image and gesture, will prevail. Assigned readings will include texts by William Blake, Gertrude Stein, Noh plays, and recent eco-writings by contemporary poets associated with the Outrider lineage. Participants should be familiar with Waldman’s book Manatee/Humanity, and collaborations with musician/composer Ambrose Bye.

See Anne Waldman's biography here.

Special Guests

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. His recent book of short stories, Tales of the Out & the Gone, was published in late 2007. Home, his book of social essays, was re-released by Akashic Books in early 2009. Digging: The Afro American Soul of Music was also released in 2009.

Ambrose Bye

Ambrose Bye grew up at the Kerouac School counting Ginsberg and Burroughs as “poetic” godfathers. He graduated from the University of California and studied music/production at the Pyramind Institute. He performed with Anne Waldman and Bob Holman at the Issue Project Room as well as Boulder Theatre’s Music and Poetry for Progressives (headlined by Thurston Moore). CDs include Matching Half, In the Room of Never Grieve, The Eye of the Falcon (with Anne Waldman and Akilah Oliver), and the forthcoming Fossil Fuel.

Michelle Naka Pierce

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of four books and chapbooks, including Beloved Integer and TRI/VIA. Excerpts from her manuscript, She, A Blueprint for InterSurface, have been published in American Letters & Commentary, Trickhouse, Mandorla, Upstairs at Duroc (France), and elsewhere. Michelle spent her recent sabbatical living in London and writing her new manuscript, tentatively titled Continuous Frieze Bordering Red, which explores Rothko’s floating borders in relation to unstable cultural borders.

Martin Riker

Martin Riker is Associate Director of Dalkey Archive Press and an editor for the Press's critical publications The Review of Contemporary Fiction and CONTEXT.

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