Week One Courses

As investigative writers and poets we will consider the literal and virtual “walls” in our body politic and in our own communities. We will draw on comparisons with historical walls: the 4,000 mile Great Wall of China; the Berlin Wall, iconic symbol of the Cold War; the recent “security barriers” referred to by many as the “Apartheid Wall” going up in Israel/Palestine, and the fence being constructed on the US/Mexican border at the cost of $1 million per mile, to stem the tide of “illegal aliens.” We will examine how we think about these issues and how they accentuate divides in our own experience, perpetuate war, and fuel our creativity and opposition. We strive toward the notion of “breaking it down: the aesthetics of common ground” and a writing that struggles with a politics of denial, isolationism, and exclusion.

Noncredit Course #: WRI 051, tuition: $450 per week
BA Course #: WRI 451, tuition: $1,071 per week
MFA Course #: WRI 751, tuition: $1,452 per week

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Samuel R. Delany Cultural Encounters

In this workshop we'll examine what happens when we try to write beyond what we usually observe around us. What happens when we turn up the lens of observation? With in-class exercises in both poetry and prose, as well as more formal assignments that will grow out of our discussions of what we want to do with our writing, we'll try to learn about our inner world by looking more carefully at how we see both the natural one and the cultural one around us.

Samuel R. Delany is a novelist and critic who lives in New York City and teaches English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. His novels include Nova, Dhalgren, Trouble on Triton, Hogg, The Mad Man, Phallos, and most recently Dark Reflections. His short fiction has been collected in books such as Aye, and Gomorrah: And Other Stories and Atlantis: Three Tales. His nonfiction has been collected in volumes such as Silent Interviews, Longer Views, Shorter Views, and About Writing, and he his the author of a best-selling study, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

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Marcella Durand Other Sources: Poetry and Science

Much of what’s happening in science right now is going uncharted by culture. What happens when a poet turns to these mysterious scientific goings-on as source material? How can investigations of the ecosphere, the nanosphere, and the macrosphere impact the structures of poetry, and after that, language? We’ll experiment with scientific language and concepts and read work by poet-researchers Tina Darragh, Shanxing Wang, Will Alexander, Eleni Sikelianos, and Jack Collom. Bring your lab coat!

Marcella Durand’s newest collections are Area (Belladonna Books) and Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem Books), both published in 2008. Her previous books include Anatomy of Oil, Western Capital Rhapsodies, and City of Ports. She is the author of several essays on the intersections of ecology and poetry, and was a recent writer-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

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Laird Hunt Erasures: A Workshop in Disobedient Prose

In this workshop we will look to examples of writings that rewire received notions of form/content to inspire our own efforts at constructing civilly or uncivilly disobedient fictions. Texts consulted will include Percival Everett's Erasure, Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex, Selah Saterstrom's The Pink Institution, and Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette. Participants should come prepared to write.

Laird Hunt is a graduate of the Kerouac School and currently teaches in the University of Denver's creative writing PhD program. His novels include Indiana, Indiana and The Exquisite.

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Brenda Iijima How does it feel to be a verb? Where’s action?

How does the action of a poem occur? Is lingual action literal action? How is a poem being? We’ll probe the myriad possibilities of acting in, on and about and the implications this has for the social-body-mind-biome in terms of race, class, economics, gender, and imagination. All forms of hybridized poems and prose are encouraged.

Brenda Iijima is the author of Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus Press) and Around Sea (O Books). If Not Metamorphic was runner up for the Sawtooth Prize and will be published by Ahsahta Press. Also forthcoming is revv. you’ll—ution which will be published by Displace Press. She is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Together with Evelyn Reilly she is editing a collection of essays by poets concerning poetry and ecological ethics titled, )((eco (lang)(uage(reader)). She is the Art Editor for Boog City as well as a visual artist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she designs and constructs homeopathic gardens.

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Bhanu Kapil "Untitled": Ana Mendieta and the Art of the Imprint

In Iowa, Ana Mendieta, a Cuban immigrant, created imprints of her body on a riverbank. Excavating these “siluetas,” she then re-filled them with something new: red flowers, mud, tempera powder, fire. Using her work as a radiant lens, we'll investigate our own “emigrant idioms.” We will build and film siluetas. Writing, we'll generate bodies at “a kind of boundary between biology and society, between drives and discourse.” Linking our bodies to a landscape, we'll also consider the question of homage.

Bhanu Kapil is the author of three full-length collections: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works) and Humanimal: a project for future children (Kelsey Street Press). She teaches writing at Naropa University.

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Miranda Mellis Magic & Politics

In this story workshop we will take up parody, appropriation, spell casting, and the open score as narrative methods of illumination and social change. Materials to guide us along the way include re-vamped fairy tales of Angela Carter, Aimé Césaire’s re-cast A Tempest, the indeterminacy machines of John Cage, and Bong Joon-Ho’s anti-imperialist comedy of terrors, The Host.

Miranda Mellis is the author of The Revisionist (Calamari Press) and an editor at The Encyclopedia Project. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Tin House, Harper’s, The Believer, and Post Road. She teaches at the California College of the Arts.

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Akilah Oliver Memoir and Anti/Memoir: The Self as A Narrative of Resistance

Can writing within mutable frames and hybrid forms be a writing of resistance? Do we need narratives that are a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric? What do you desire in creating a memoir/anti-memoir? In this workshop, we will explore self-narratives as rupture, resistance, consumption, nostalgia, possibility, aporia, slippage, fact, useful fictions, and discard. Students should come prepared to bring in excerpts of one ‘text’ (written, visual, oral, musical, hybrid, etc.) that they would embed as a kind of sound texture in their self narrative, and a second ‘philosophical or theoretical’ text that may serve as a companion.

Akilah Oliver is the author of the she said dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof/Erudite Fangs), a book of experimental prose poetry. She is on faculty at Naropa University and has previously taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She joins the faculty of the Creative Writing Department at Long Island University in Spring, 2008 as a guest lecturer. Her chapbooks include a(A)ugust (Yo-Yo Labs), The Putterer’s Notebook (Belladonna), An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla Press). Her next book is expected in 2009 from Coffee House Press. She currently lives in Brooklyn where she teaches and curates the Monday Night Reading Series for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.

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Maureen Owen Poet as Caveat

Throughout history writers have taken on the responsibility of questioning the accepted mores of their society and of speaking witness to that behavior that threatens the natural harmony. This class will use observation and investigative methods to disrupt standard responses and instead engage in fresh confrontation of race, class, and gender issues. We'll employ various poetic forms including the ritual poem, chant, senryu, satire, macaronic verse, the epistle, and collaboration to expand lyrical address of these issues. Utilizing a wall-less classroom we'll look at how poets historically and today have insightfully been caveat to culture.

Maureen Owen is the author of ten poetry titles, most recently Erosion's Pull (Coffee House Press), a finalist for both the Balcones Poetry Prize and for the Colorado Book Award. American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize; AE: Amelia Earhart was a recipient of the Before Columbus American Book Award. Other books include Imaginary Income, Zombie Notes, a brass choir approaches the burial ground, and The No Travels Journal. Her awards include grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Fund for Poetry and a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Margaret Randall Memory and Voice: Writing against the Clock

In this workshop writing students, in whatever genre, will look at how power structures use language today to erase memory, co-opt Self, and use words to further their interests rather than our own. Discussion will touch on political and religious discourse, media consolidation, cyberspace, commercial advertising, and community-speak. We will discuss these issues, and look at how we can use our creativity and authentic voice to resist and heal—in our work and in our lives.

Margaret Randall was born in New York City (1936) and has lived in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua (1961-84). She came home to the United States in 1984 only to be ordered deported because of opinions expressed in 7 of her books. After fighting 5 years for reinstatement of citizenship, she won her case in 1989. Among her more than 80 books: Stones Witness, Into another Time, Hungers Table, Where they Left You for Dead (poetry); Narrative of Power (essays); When I Look into the Mirror and See You, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited (oral history); and This is About Incest (poems & photos).

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Max Regan Paper the House

In this workshop we will investigate the intersections between intentional language, propaganda, disinformation, agitation, and littering. What lies beyond the borders of our own agendas, opinions and morals? What motives do we as writers bring to our work? How willing are we to assume the stance, perspective or opinion of the “other”? Together we will we examine the role that language plays in the shaping of both personal texts and political movements. Through in-class writing exercises and experiments we will collide the skill of the writer with the agenda of the pamphleteer, examining brief samples from Thomas Paine to Diane di Prima, Martin Luther King Jr. to Kristen Prevallet. We will collaborate to write and rewrite political slogans, anthems, charters, manifestos and speeches. We will also reclaim the byline of Anonymous, in a way that demands personal accountability, instead of escaping it. Bring to class: curiosity, passion and an open mind.

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 cities around the world. Max sponsors writing guilds in Boulder, Baltimore and Houston, and he teaches and lectures at the University of Colorado, Colorado State University and at Naropa University. His work has been translated into Czech, Spanish, French, German and Japanese. Max served for twelve years as the director of the Naropa Summer Writing Program, and is the faculty advisor and founder of Naropa's Study Abroad Semester in Prague.

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Joe Richey Muckraker Poetics

This workshop offers tips and guidance for public interest muckrakers: information gathering, cultivating and protecting sources, cracking firewalls, breaking ice, ways to follow-the-money, limits to free speech, and the importance of disclosing public secrets. Students will test-drive a few vehicles, and play with drills and hacksaws from the instructor's toolbox in an effort to add new facts early to their current investigative projects. No helmets or steel-toed shoes required.

Joe Richey is a poet, journalist, and researcher. He has produced reports for alternative media from Maine to Argentina. With support from The Nation Investigative Fund, he has covered the murky world of homeland security contracting, including the virtual fence between the US and Mexico, and the proliferation of immigrant detention centers. He is currently compiling a second edition of a biographical dictionary of American environmental leaders for Grey House Publishers.

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Julia Seko Words by Hand, Words in Hand: Letterpress Printing

Printing presents words in concrete form, something to be held, felt, seen, an intimate communication from the writer and printer to the reader.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 is a letterpress printer, book artist, and proprietor of PS Press.Trained in letterpress printing at the Women's Graphic Center in Los Angeles, she teaches at Naropa University, where she helped set up the letterpress studio. She is also active in the Book Arts League, a nonprofit community arts organization. Her work is in university and private collections has been exhibited in the United States and abroad.

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K. Silem Mohammad The Poetic Hypogram

"Hypogram" was Saussure's term for a seed word or phrase that saturates a poetic text in different permutations. One way this concept manifests itself is through anagrammatic structure: the rearrangement of an existing string of signifiers in some new configuration. The aim of this session is to encourage intensified attention to language at the level of the letter, with the objective of exploring the total significatory and expressive power of the poem.

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of Breathalyzer (Edge Books), A Thousand Devils (Combo Book), and Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises). His poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Fence, The Poker, Best American Poetry 2004, and Bay Poetics. He is an associate professor at Southern Oregon University in Ashland.

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Roberto Tejada The Dialogic Lyric

A commitment to poetry and intellectual life engages history and its material objects, including those we differentiate as art. In a beholder’s dialogic relation to lyric possibility, poems can restage personal and social struggles materialized in art works whose present time is manifestly out of place with the moment of a prior making; in this sense, aesthetic reflection can wager claims about action and language in relation to history.

Roberto Tejada has been widely published in the United States and Latin America, including Vuelta (Octavio Paz, publisher), The Best American Poetry 1996 (Adrienne Rich, editor), and 99 Poets | 1999: An International Poetics Symposium (boundary 2, Charles Bernstein, editor). He teaches Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego, where he is faculty in the Visual Arts Department. His book, Mirrors for Gold, appeared in 2006 from Krupskaya Books.

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Special Guests

Carol Moldaw was born in Oakland, California, lives outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and teaches in The University of Southern Maine’s low-residency M.F.A. program, Stonecoast. Her lyric novel, The Widening is forthcoming from Etruscan Press. She is the author of four books of poetry, The Lightning Field, which won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize,Through the Window, Chalkmarks on Stone, and Taken from the River. Through the Window was also translated into Turkish and published in a bi-lingual edition in Istanbul. Her work has been translated into Chinese, and anthologized in many venues, including Western Wind, fifth edition. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize.

Moldaw will be reading on Tuesday, June 17.

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Sue Salinger is committed to writing social justice into our future history, by any means necessary, across all available media platforms. Currently, she researchs, writes, shoots, edits, produces marginalia—documenting those whose dreams of America have turned nightmarish, whose stories are allowed neither front page nor center stage placement. She has taken up a defensive position in the War Against the Imagination after many years working in mainstream media. Salinger has an MA in Media Philosophy (and soon will have a PhD), also an MFA from Naropa. She teaches writing and production for social change.

Salinger will take part in a political “Think-tank” forum on Tuesday, June 17.

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Rani Singh is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Contemporary Programs and Research at the Getty Research Institute and Director of the Harry Smith Archives. She was Harry Smith’s assistant from 1989 until his death in 1991, when she then started a nonprofit organization dedicated to the location, preservation and presentation of his work. She has also worked in various capacities with Allen Ginsberg, Francesco Clemente, Marianne Faithfull, filmmaker Mark Pellington, and producer Hal Willner. The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music sprung from all of these experiences as well as a series of concerts and symposia held in London, New York and Los Angeles.

Singh will be introducing her film on Friday, June 20.

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Arthur Sze is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Ginkgo Light (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press), Quipu, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, and The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese. He is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an American Book Award, among others. He is a corresponding editor for Manoa and is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Sze will be a panelist on Monday, June 16 and reading on Tuesday, June 17.

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