Week Three Courses

We are obviously an interconnected universe, immensely co-dependent and star-crossed. A strike of a computer key may take down a rainforest in South America. Fire, flood, famine, extinction of whole species and cultures and languages occur daily. Our lack of attention to these issues may be dangerous and breed further strife as people struggle (and kill each other) over oil, water and other basic necessities. The extremities of global warming are being registered everywhere on the planet with serious and painful consequences. What is our poethics on these matters? And what is the nature of our activism? How do people “have the power”? What does science teach us? What are the implications for the haves and have-nots? Who speaks for the polar bear, the manatee, the tortured, the oppressed, and the endangered of all ilks? Who speaks for the rights of gays, lesbians, and transgender folk? How does our writing reflect those changes of frequency? Is this even the writer's job? On July 4 the Naropa poetics community will be holding its own political convention for the Poets Party. Guest artist Richard Tuttle will be lecturing on “violence.”

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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Amiri Baraka The Gestalt of Environment

This course will examine environment as the total context of being. We will explore definitions and the means for identification as well as origins and location within the physical, political, social, psychological, ideological and moral realms. Readings and bibliographies will examine Art as an expression of place and context, whether international, national or local.

Amiri Baraka is “The last Poet Laureate of New Jersey.” His recent books include The Book of Monk (poetry, essay, short story on Thelonious Monk), Tales of the Out & the Gone (short stories, 70s to 2003) and Digging: The Afro American Be/at American Classical Music (essays).

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Lee Ann Brown Praise Songs & Invective Verses

Get personal and political in public poetry. We will begin by surveying ways poets and singers have both lodged complaints against specific people, issues and cultural forces, as well as poems that elevate, praise and promote new ways of being. We will read works by Shakespeare, Keats, C.D Wright, Frank Stanford, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Opal Whitely, Nina Simone, Catullus, Bernadette Mayer, Bob Holman, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg and others. Then we will become Superheros of the poem, respond to issues of our time, and strengthen our powers as what Shelley defined as “unacknowledged legislators of the world” and Oppen, alternately, “legislators of the unacknowledged world.”

Lee Ann Brown is the author of Polyverse (Sun & Moon) and The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan University Press), and has co-authored collaborations, The 3:15 Experiment and Nascent Toolbox (both by Owl Press). Her poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies, most recently: Not for Mothers Only, and 19 Lines. She has received fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Artists residencies indulged in include The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Djerassi, The Rocky Mountain Women's Institute, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and The Fondation Royaumont near Paris. She is the editor of Tender Buttons Press, and teaches poetry writing at St. John's University in New York City. She and her husband Tony Torn have collaborated on poet’s plays such as The Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time and Sop Doll! A Jack Tale Noh, and are founding a new space for multidisciplinary performance in Marshall, NC.

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Junior Burke and Bobbie Louise Hawkins Beginnings/Middles/Ends

Through exercises and discussion, we will ultimately focus on one piece of narrative writing. We will determine exactly where the most effective point is to commence the story. We will identify and address elements through which to develop it, then arrive at a gratifying conclusion. Besides exploration of each of these points, we will leave the workshop with a strong draft of narrative writing in hand.

Junior Burke is a lyricist, novelist and dramatist. Examples are: While You Were Gone (CD of original songs), Something Gorgeous (novel), Soft Trumpet, Slow Guitar: The Ballad of Sonny Liston (musical play). He is chair of Naropa’s residence Writing & Poetics Department and director of the low-residence MFA Creative Writing Program. He is also founder and co-editor of the electronic journal not enough night and co-founder (with Lisa Birman) of The Poets Party.

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Bobbie Louise Hawkins is the founder of the prose fiction concentration at Naropa’s Kerouac School where she still teaches. She has sixteen books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and performance monologues to her credit. 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.

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Thulani Davis Taking a Solo: Prose & Interdependent Consciousness

This course will address the development of the solo writer's voice in prose work and the development of awareness of the writer's voice in the larger, interdependent landscape of roots, community, history and Thich Nhat Hahn's concept of "interbeing." Taking a solo in the context of listening to the "band" laying the groundwork for your sound. Readings will include texts of first-person narratives showing "how people have the power," scholarly accounts of "how people have the power" at points in history, memoir and some foundational texts on "interbeing."

Thulani Davis is a journalist, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. Her newest book is My Confederate Kinfolk and other works include novels, 1959 and Maker of Saints, several plays, and scripts for the forthcoming films Paid in Full and Maker of Saints. She has also written several award-winning PBS documentaries and was the first woman to win a Grammy Award in the liner notes category. Davis is an ordained Buddhist priest and teaches at NYU in the Department of Dramatic Writing.

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George Evans War and Its Politics

War constantly changes the world, and responding to it (which we must) infuses writing with energy, historical context and realities specific to a writer’s time and culture, but how to avoid being simply rhetorical or clichéd is a challenge. We’ll explore methods of responding to war and its politics by reading passages (ancient to recent, poetry and prose) from the US, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Open to all genres.

George Evans is the author of five books of poetry, including The New World (Curbstone) and Sudden Dreams (Coffee House). He also translated Daisy Zamora’s collection The Violent Foam, co-translated The Time Tree by Vietnamese poet Huu Thinh, and edited Charles Olson & Cid Corman: Complete Correspondence. An antiwar activist veteran of the Viet Nam-American War, his literary awards include fellowships from the NEA, Lannan Foundation, California Arts Council, and a Monbusho Fellowship from the Japanese government for the study of Japanese literature and culture.

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Lewis MacAdams Social Sculpture 101

Joseph Beuys was the great mid-twentieth century German artist who co-founded the Green Party and the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research. His concept of "social sculpture," which proposes to employ the social, spiritual and natural realms as a palette for shaping a democratic and sustainable future, has directly influenced the creation and evolution of Friends of the Los Angeles River, a forty-year art work to bring the L.A. River back to life. Social Sculpture 101 will examine a particular issue, the battle over the production of a series of free-style, spray-paint murals in the River channel, as a way of seeing how some poets—Byron, Shelley, Yeats, Pound, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger, Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka— have helped create the world.

Lewis MacAdams' most recent releases are the on-going Blue Press publication, The River: Books 1,2,& 3; the pamphlet D-Town Visions: Building A City The River Can Be Proud Of (Natural Resources Defense Council); and the CD Dear Oxygen with music by The Dark Bob. He's the author of Birth of the Cool (a history of the idea of 'cool') from Free Press. He is a regular contributor to the NPR show Day to Day. A former director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State, he co-produced and co-directed the documentary, What Happened To Kerouac? and the Lannan Literary Series, 26 one-hour shows about great poets from around the globe. He is writing a biography of Rolling Stone founder, Jann Wenner. He co-founded and is chairman of the Board of Friends of the Los Angeles River.

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Tracie Morris Performance Poetry & the Page

In this course, we will look at how page and performance intersect. We will emphasize writing during the workshop, but will consider how the text can be illuminated through performance including sound and gesture. The workshop will conclude with a short public reading either collaboratively or individually, depending on the preference of the participants.

Tracie Morris is an interdisciplinary poet who has worked extensively as a sound artist, writer and multimedia performer. Her installations have been presented at the Whitney Biennial and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. She holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and a PhD in performance studies from New York University. Dr. Morris is currently the CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Eileen Myles Natural Technology

I'm thinking that any idea about poetry that maintains that one style or another came “first” or “before” is really old hat. Ever since Madonna was on MTV in the '80s and downtown style went global the idea of an advance coterie seems well, slow. Let's use the most mundane film theory that every kid knows, and the notion that recording originates from the technology of the heart in order to muscle an obvious poetic style onto the page and into the day. I'm not talking truth, but true.

Eileen Myles is both a virtuosic performer of her own writing and a prolific author. Sorry, Tree (poems, Wave Books) is the latest of more than twenty collections of poetry and fiction (including Chelsea Girls and Not Me), libretti (Hell), performances and plays. She has been artistic director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, and she conducted a write in candidate for president in 1992. From 2002 to 2007 she directed the writing program at UCSD.

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Kristin Prevallet Investigative Poetics: Public Mourning, Private Grief

Poetry may be no more than a gesture that extends to fill the gap left by the multi-thousands who have been killed and displaced by the dehumanizing culture of sovereign capitalism, the ideological genocide of the present. When poets speak at all it is to each other – but is there something lurking in our silent screaming? In this workshop we will work through our own personal losses in order to transform them into a form; we will work through an articulation that reaches into the gap. Using the methods of investigative poetics, we will use writing, responding and performance in tandem to navigate the space between private grief and public mourning. Artists and writers we will engage include Karen Finley, Carolee Schneemann, Anne Waldman, Jalal Toufic and caraballo-farman.

Kristin Prevallet’s most recent book (the one most relevant to the workshop) is I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time. Other books include Shadow Evidence Intelligence (Factory School) and Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-text Projects (Skanky Possum). A Helen Adam Reader, with notes and an introduction by Kristin Prevallet has been published by The National Poetry Foundation. She is the recipient of a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry, and a 2004 PEN translation fund award.

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Karen Randall Letterpress: A Love Supreme

The history of printing is the history of disseminating new and radical ideas, giving voice to the previously unheard, and establishing new communities of alternative thinking: both poetic and political. Entering into typography is like stepping into a foreign, yet familiar room; working with language in its most material form (as metal type, as inked impressions into paper) allows us to see it anew.

Karen Randall is an artist who works in the media of words, digital collage (sound & visual), oil painting as well as letterpress printing. She is the proprietor of Propolis Press and the author of The Extruded Gilgamesh, an intertwingled text that blends the ancient Sumerian Epic with contemporary writings on genetics, computer science, philosophies of language, etc.

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Selah Saterstrom Dreaming Language: From the Margins & Across the Borders

How is writing a mode of dreaming, and how does a dreaming language become a transgressive, political act? Looking toward narrative traditions which exist in the margins of culture, what strategies are revealed concerning capitalism and survival? How does one “divine” the dissonance within war-torn or otherwise “ruined” landscapes? Using the question as a path of inquiry (and allowing the logic of divination to inform our experiments), we will engage with such concerns as well as produce a series of short, hybrid texts.

Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Meat and Spirit Plan and The Pink Institution (both published by Coffee House Press). She co-curates SLAB PROJECTS, an artist/writer-curator initiative concerned with exploring the gaps between decay and reconstruction in ruined or abandoned landscapes. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Denver.

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Stacy Szymaszek A Language that is Ever Green

This class will proclaim that poets are activists and will explore poem writing as a form of engagement with the world and reclaiming of space that is threatening and disruptive to a society founded on unjust accessions. We’ll look at the poet’s place in society (Rexroth), human languages as part of the natural world (Snyder), Projective Verse (Olson), bioregionalism (Niedecker & Williams) and architectonics (Ronald Johnson). We’ll also look at postmodern civilization via some contemporary American Indian poets. Expect in-class writing.

Stacy Szymaszek is the artistic director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. She is the author of Emptied of All Ships and Hyperglossia (both Litmus Press). Some chapbooks include: Mutual Aid (Gong press) and Pasolini Poems (Cy Press). She has new projects forthcoming with Faux and OMG. She is the founder and editor of the poetry magazine Gam—always $0.

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Anne Waldman Dream At the End of Time

The “dream at the end of time” is traditionally—in Buddhist psychology—a reference to the bardo state, a time of interstices between one realm of consciousness to the next. It is our daily waking physical life that is seen as the real illusion or nightmare or dream. We will talk about “gap,” trance, ritual, and draw on artistic traditions of other cultures—including Balinese, Javanese, Noh theatre of Japan, Tibetan Buddhist, international agit prop and the “invisible America”—for our writing and performance. And consider, as well, the weird spectacles of history, simulacra, and the “end” of History and Nature as we continue to navigate and protest environmental degradation and the Eternal War Machine.

Anne Waldman, poet, professor, performer, curator and cultural activist, is the author of more than forty books and small press editions of poetry and poetics. She is the co-founder of the Kerouac School. A complete biography can be found here.

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Daisy Zamora Carriers of the Word

In ancient Mesoamerica, poets were trusted “carriers of the word,” the ones who spoke directly to the people, who listened because poetry helped them understand the world. Poetry communicated information about all aspects of existence, guiding people to an understanding of culture, traditions, religion, the role of individuals in society and life itself. In this workshop we’ll read examples from a wide range of Latin American poets, and concentrate on creating new poetry as modern carriers of the word.

Nicaraguan poet Daisy Zamora is the author of five books of poetry in Spanish, and editor of the first anthology of Nicaraguan women writers. She translated a collection of George Evans’ poetry into Spanish with the title Espejo de la Tierra (Earth's Mirror). Collections of her poetry in English translation include The Violent Foam and Riverbed of Memory. During Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution, she was a combatant for the FSLN, voice and program director for clandestine Radio Sandino, and Vice-Minister of Culture for the Sandinista government.

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Special Guests

Mei Mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. Her books include Empathy, The Four Year Old Girl, and Nest. A collaboration with Anne McKeown and Kiki Smith, Concordance, was recently produced by the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, and her selected poems, I Love Artists, was published by the University of California Press. She lives in New Mexico and New York City.

Berssenbrugge will be reading on Thursday, July 3.

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Richard Tuttle has had numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the world over his 35 year career. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Aachen Art Prize, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, the 74th American Exhibition, Art Institute of Chicago Biennial Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and the C. Douglas Dillon Foundation Award.

Tuttle will present a lecture on Thursday, July 3.

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