Week Four Courses

Week IV is traditionally a time to consider further manifestations of the work we do as writers. Translation, formulating alternative critical poetics theory “in community,” spoken word performance and poets’ theatre, collaboration with musicians and other artists, small presses, print and online publishing as well as other “infrastructures” of poetics’ zones are all explorations beyond the call of “official verse culture” and what the Kerouac School is known for. We will have active translators in residence this week, including Sawako Nakayasu who works with the important Factorial press here and in Japan, Pierre Joris who lived in Algeria, translating from the Maghreb, and worked with the concept of “nomadic poetics.” Novelist Brian Evenson, one of the editors of Conjunctions, and playwright Kevin Killian will also be on the premises. A discussion of how to continue to work with other writers around the globe in innovative ways will no doubt ensue and we'll create a collaborative “mission statement” concerning policies of the USA in the larger world.

Noncredit Course #: WRI 054, tuition: $450/week
BA Course #: WRI 451, $1,071 cost/week
MFA Course #: WRI 751, $1,452 cost/week

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Dodie Bellamy Translating the Body

This course will explore strategies for translating bodily states into writing and will consider the politics and challenges of writing about the body. While sex will be an important topic, we will also consider other body experiences, such as ingestion, expulsion, illness, sensory stimulation. We’ll discuss texts provided in the class reader, as well as texts generated by workshop members through writing assignments.

Dodie Bellamy’s collection, Academonia, was published by Krupskaya in 2006. Other books include Pink Steam and The Letters of Mina Harker. Her book Cunt-Ups won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. In January, 2006, she curated an installation of Kathy Acker's clothing for White Columns, New York's oldest alternative art space. She teaches creative writing at San Francisco State and California College of the Arts.

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Rikki Ducornet Fiction as subversion and deep dreaming

There are a multitude of vehicles available to dramatically extend works of fiction, not only the cinema, theater, comic strip and hypertext, but virtual reality and soon, theaters that will fit in the palm of the hand. Great fiction is always a magic act because it is all about revelation; the vehicle itself dissolves. Our time together will be open to aesthetic practice and inquiry: how do we, as artists and deep dreamers engage the new territories and subvert or extend our own ideas of what a work of fiction should be?

Rikki Ducornet is the author of seven novels including The Fan-Maker's Inquisition, an L.A. Times Book of the Year, The Jade Cabinet, runner up for The National Book Critics' Circle Award and Gazelle, winner of the Prix Guerlain. In 2004 she received the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Her recent paintings were exhibited at The Pierre Menard Gallery in the Spring of 2007. Her newest collection of short fictions to be published in the Fall will be illustrated by the cartoon artist Tom Motley.

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Brian Evenson The Twists and Turns of Narrative

We’ll look at stories that raise unusual narrative problems and look as well at what narrative theory can say about them. What makes a story “work”? Why might some writers opt for non-standard narratives and what is to be gained from them. What can be learned from manipulations of genres we think we know? The second half of the course will focus on workshopping student writing.

Brian Evenson is the author of eight books of fiction, most recently The Open Curtain (Coffee House). His other publications include Altmann’s Tongue, Contagion, Dark Property, and The Wavering Knife, among others. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island with writer Joanna Howard and directs the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.

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Raymond Federman Creative Writing: Experimental Fiction

In this workshop we will explore innovative modes of narration with an emphasis on typographical experimentation. Creative writing, especially experimental fiction, always takes risk. As an experimental writer, I do not teach anything because experimental fiction does not try to say anything; it tries to be something. To be rather than to say, experimental fiction always talks about itself, it exhibits itself, it is always self-reflexive, that is to say, it tells what it is doing while doing it. Students will be required to write a piece of fiction for each meeting of the class and a more substantial piece of fiction at the end.

Born in France, Raymond Federman writes both in English and French. He has published over 40 books, many of which have been translated into some 15 languages. His novel, Double or Nothing, won both the Frances Steloff Fiction Prize and the Panache Experimental Prize. Amer Eldorado, written in French, was nominated for Le Prix Medicis in 1974, and Retour au Fumier was nominated for Le Prix Grandgousier. Federman retired from SUNY–Buffalo in 1999 as the Melodia E. Jones distinguished Professor.

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Forrest Gander Translucination

A translation workshop exploring the art and politics of translation, innovative transliterations, collaborative and multiple language translocations, and Spicerian transmissions. Fluency in another language not necessary. Specific writing assignments & exercises that apply to the students’ own writing as well as to the art of translation.

Forrest Gander’s translations include No Shelter: Selected Poems of Pura Lopez-Colome, and (with Kent Johnson) two books of poetry by visionary Bolivian genius, Jaime Saenz, most recently The Night (just out from Princeton University Press). Gander’s translation of Coral Bracho’s selected poems, Firefly Under the Tongue, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2008.

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Bob Holman Poetry Power Peace: Propaganda Performance Pizzazz

Bob Holman’s class last fall at NYU, “Poetry and the Public Sphere,” resulted in a NY Times article about the plight of street artist Jim “Mosaic Man” Power, helped him find a living situation and created a program to complete The Mosaic Trail of the Lower East Side. PPP: PPP is meant to answer questions: Who needs my poetry? We’ll find out. Does anyone need poetry? We’ll ask the questions. We will sweat out answers, too, on campus, on Boulder’s mean streets, maybe even up in the mountains. Read Rakosi, Baraka, Harjo, Trudell, Last Poets, Giorno, DiFranco, Notley, Cortez, LKJohnson, Mullen, Waldman.

Bob Holman’s latest collection of poems, a collaboration with Chuck Close, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, was exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum during the Venice Biennale and published by Aperture in 2006; his new CD is The Awesome Whatever (Bowery Books). His PBS TV series, The United States of Poetry, won the INPUT, International Public Television Award, in 1996; he founded Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, the first-ever major spoken word label, in 1995; and ran the infamous poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café from 1988-1996. He is currently Visiting Professor of Writing at Columbia School of the Arts as well as at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, the Founder/Proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, a poetry performance space in New York City, and working on a documentary on the poetries of endangered languages.

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Pierre Joris Poetry as Nomadic Translation

Language is translation in and of itself, and thus every poem as language construct is always already a translation. There is no “original”—there are only nomadic lines of flight along which a “poem” will concrete at a given moment into a given shape and realization, before moving on, becoming other again. This is the realization from which we will start to look at, work with, and on the materials that make a poem a translation.

Pierre Joris' recent books of poems include Aljibar I & II (poems, a bilingual edition with French translation by Eric Sarner). Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006, will come out in late 2008. His 2007 publications include the CD Routes, not Roots from Ta’wil Productions; Aljibar I and Meditations on the Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj 1-21(Anchorite Press, Albany). Recent translations include Paul Celan: Selections, and forthcoming books by Habib Tengour (Algeria) and Abdallah Zrika (Morocco). With Jerome Rothenberg, he edited Poems for the Millennium and Pablo Picasso: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems. Joris often performs with Nicole Peyrafitte (see her website) and other musicians.

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Ilya Kaminsky Writing With Contemporary Poetry from Around The World

We will look at various poems from around the world and consider their structures, forms, and tones. What can we borrow from these writers to improve our own work? This course will provide line-by-line readings of poems from other cultures. We will focus especially on what you can learn from these poems to improve your own writing. What is it that the rest of the world knows all too well but your contemporaries in the United States seem quite unaware of?

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, formerly in the USSR, and arrived in the United States when his family received asylum from the American government. His book, Dancing In Odessa, won the Whiting Writers' Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and was named Best Poetry Book of 2004 by the ForeWord Magazine. It was translated into several languages. He currently teaches in San Diego State University.

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Kevin Killian Poets Theater

In class we will talk about the origins and subsequent development of poets theater; we will write, cast, produce, direct and act out little plays based on our own poems. This class will be an intense writing lab with a practical goal, to see our work on the stage, and a less practical one, to expand the possibilities of the written page by blowing it aside like a pesky mosquito. By Saturday, we will produce a full-length play and all of you will be in it.

Kevin Killian is a poet, novelist, critic, art writer, editor and playwright. His books include Bedrooms Have Windows, Shy, Little Men, Arctic Summer and Argento Series. With Lewis Ellingham he has written Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan), the first biography of the important US poet. With Peter Gizzi he has edited a volume of Spicer’s poetry for a forthcoming edition of Spicer’s Complete Works (again for Wesleyan).

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Anna Moschovakis Necessary Failure(s): Translating the untranslatable, saying the unsayable

What possibilities—poetic, political, ethical—arise when we commit to an "impossible" task? For translators, failure of a kind is a given. For many writers, failure is inscribed in the act of writing (Beckett says "fail better," but how? Why?). We'll look at texts that court, challenge, theorize, celebrate, or enact failure; Agamben, Benjamin, Riding, Blanchot, Levinas, Blatny, Wittgenstein, Beckett, and others will accompany us as we perform our own necessary failures.

Anna Moschovakis is the author of I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone and several chapbooks. She has translated works by Henri Michaux, Claude Cahun, Théophile Gauthier, Pierre Alféri, Blaise Cendrars, Georges Simenon and others. She holds an MFA from Bard and is working toward her PhD at CUNY. After teaching Comparative Literature at Queens College, she now teaches Creative Writing at Pratt Institute. She is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.

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Sawako Nakayasu Poemers & Writers

We will be writing into and out of: translingual and transcreative writing, and the acquisition, evolution, distortion of “correctness” in language and literature. While considering: translation as a continuum, performance as omni-directional, and community as conceived of in ancient and contemporary times. Some sources include: Japanese traditions in oral literature & art (sekkyo-bushi, kabuki, benshi), along with communal acts of literature (uta-garuta, kukai, renga) in their original and re-imagined incarnations.

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan, raised bilingually in the US, and in the last few years has been living in Tokyo, Shanghai, and various parts of the US. Her translations from Japanese to English include For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide (New Directions), and forthcoming books of poetry include a collection of love poems, Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck), and Texture Notes (Letter Machine).

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Anne Tardos Light on Who Is Listening

Creating an atmosphere in which to create new work. Considering the flexibility of subjectivities. Listening to oneself. Observing the expanding parameters of artistic discourse.

Anne Tardos is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of several books of poetry and the multimedia performance work and radio play Among Men. A selection of her readings and performances (many with Jackson Mac Low) can be heard on the University of Pennsylvania’s web site PennSound and her own site is www.annetardos.com Among her books still available: The Dik-dik's Solitude: New & Selected Works. (Granary Books); and Uxudo [polylingual poems with digitally modified video-stills] (O Books / Tuumba Press). Forthcoming from Salt Publishing in 2008: I Am You (a collection of works written between 2005 and 2007).

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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 (Wesleyan University Press).

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Peter and Donna Thomas The Word made Flesh (well Paper)!

In this workshop we will make two portfolios of letterpress printed broadsides. We will play with color and type styles to interpret the meaning of the words. One portfolio will contain a series of broadsides with text gathered from the poets and writers in residence, the other will feature our own words. Students will learn letterpress basics as we print the text, and learn bookbinding skills as we make the portfolio bindings.

Peter and Donna Thomas are book artists, and authors of More Making Books by Hand (Quarry Books). Peter learned letterpress printing as an apprentice with beat poet/printer William Everson. Peter and Donna work collaboratively, making paper, printing and binding. Their use of alternative structures in the artists' book is internationally recognized. In 2006 they walked from San Francisco to Yosemite following John Muir's footsteps, but they reside in Santa Cruz, California.

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Special Guests

Joanna Howard is the author of Ghosts and Lovers, a collection of short prose forthcoming from Boa Editions. Her work has appeared in Conjunction, Chicago Review, Unsaid, Quarterly West, American Letters and Commentary, Fourteen Hills, Western Humanities Review, Salt Hill, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. A chapbook, In the Colorless Round, with artwork by novelist and artist Rikki Ducornet, is available from Noemi Press. She lives in Providence, where she teaches at Brown University.

Howard will be a panelist and reading on Tuesday, July 8.

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