Program Information
The Living Thread :: Vision & Vocality
“Always the seer is a sayer,” Emerson writes indicating a crucial (American) interrelation between imagination and action, between the dream of the poet or prophet and its expression. Taking this intersection of vision and vocality as the ground for our collective thought and study, we’ll explore the possibilities of artistic vision as it finds voice and form, we’ll discuss the way in which art and political vision both overlap and diverge. For example, we know that art alone is not revolution, and yet we still home in on its emergent possibilities to incite the unpredictable event; or propel a new feeling in the social body; or transform our understanding of the limits of the world. We’re committed to art precisely for its capacity to be at once “essence, science, and vision,” as Amiri Baraka called it, “our magic weapon to create and recreate the world and our selves as a part of it.”
Knowing that performance and community can provide leadings, we’ll ask some questions of each other: what needs to be in our repertoire of resistance and creation for the here and now. And as we practice bringing voice and vision into being both as lone performers, and as member of collectives & communities, what principles will help us survive the disaster of the Capitalocene/Anthropocene; what will be the insurrectionary visions needed against the violent confusions of this world-system; what voices will chorus against the forms of repression that increasingly define political life. How can writing, performance, theory, music, and critical thought be brought to bear against the forces that seek to control life, to narrow it down to the pure extraction of profit? how can art be a catalyst for abolition?
Week 3 Schedule
All events will be held in the Performing Arts Center on Naropa University’s Arapahoe Campus, unless otherwise noted.
Schedule is subject to change.
Monday, 6/23
1:00–2:30 PM :: Opening Panel:
Panelists: Anne Waldman (chair);
3:00–4:00 PM :: MFA Lecture ::
Tuesday, 6/24
1:00–2:00 PM :: Lecture ::
2:30–3:30 PM :: Lecture ::
4:00–5:30 PM :: Artist Talk ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Wednesday, 6/25
1:00–3:00 PM :: Dharma Arts :: Aikido w/ Jude Blitz
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Thursday, 6/26
1:00–2:30 PM :: Panel :
Panelists: TBD(chair);
3:00–4:00 PM :: Lecture ::
4:30–5:30 PM :: Student Panel
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Friday, 6/27
1:00–2:30 PM :: Lecture ::
3:00–4:00 PM :: Colloquium
7:00–9:30 PM :: Student Reading
Saturday, 6/28
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Workshop Faculty for Week 3
THE MAGIC OF COLLABORATION :: Katie Jean Shinkle & Steven Dunn
The act of writing is, in its nature, a solitary endeavor: All of us hunched over our desks, toiling over sentences, lines, and language in isolation. Ever find yourself wondering what it would be like to collaborate in your writing? This generative workshop invites you to participate in collaborative writing strategies. You will engage in guided discussion about collaboration and the role of collaboration in your lives, generate new ideas and new writing, and collaborate with others in the room in real time. You will be guided by Steven Dunn and Katie Jean Shinkle, seasoned collaborators with each other and with others. Their collaborative novel, Tannery Bay, was published by Fiction Collective Two (FC2)/University of Alabama Press in 2024. All writers working in all genres are welcome to attend this workshop.
Katie Jean Shinkle‘s books include Tannery Bay (FC2/University of Alabama Press, coauthored with Steven Dunn, forthcoming). Other work can be found in or is forthcoming from Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books), The Nation, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, and she serves as co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM.
&
Steven Dunn (a.k.a Pothole, cuz he’s deep in these streets) is a Whiting Award winner who was shortlisted for Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists. He’s the author of three novels: Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky, 2016), water & power (Tarpaulin Sky, 2018), and Tannery Bay (FC2/University of Alabama Press, 2024), which is co-authored with his homie Katie Jean Shinkle. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan.
LET UNITY DO THE WORK :: Tongo Eisen Martin
The objective of this workshop is to share strategies for writing and editing poems generated by the idea that your poetry is a part of your one human experience taking place in and revealed by an interconnected reality. The view of craft as component can wall away potential insight and inhibit writing. Writing strategies that flow from the reality that craft does not have to be a metaphysical, separate entity from you strengthens all internal processes of liberation, importantly including your art. From political to unpopulated realities of the world, all continuums of existence can emerge together in a line of poetry within a cooperation to produce insight. You can let the infinite, natural occurring unities of reality do the work for you on the page. We will also pay critical attention, and practice the recitation and performance of our works.
Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker, educator, and poet who has organized around issues of human rights and self-determination for oppressed people throughout the United States. His curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, titled We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as a teaching and organizing tool throughout the country. His poems have been published in Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. His book someone’s dead already was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book of poems Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and won the California Book Award and the American Book Award. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. He was San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.
FORAGING FOR RADICAL INTIMACIES: A POETICS OF POSSIBILITY :: Angel Dominguez
This workshop will focus on embracing a poetics of possibility that emerges when we choose to follow our writing wherever it may lead, honoring the impulse, trusting the gut; working with the language that drips through the page from dreams. How might we approach the radical intimacy of communicating on the level of the nervous system, inviting neurons to spark and transmit entangled experience(s)? We’ll spend the week foraging with our notebooks, navigating the language of our living/memories and surroundings, documenting undocumented histories, experimenting with form and feeling, harvesting the fruiting bodies of energetic nourishment made possible under the unique environmental conditions this week has to offer, including a new moon ripe with possibility. Together, we’ll gather our collective energies / archives / ritual practice(s) / spirits to discuss artists, poets, experiences, and thinkers that will help inform exercises and explorations inviting the spillage of (meaning)making across artistic disciplines, developing a choreography of living writing. Perhaps we’ll find ourselves in collaboration with the sycamore or creek, writing with/thru somnambulisms, trancelations, gesture(s), and maybe even making some memes. How might we nourish the works we’re entangled with or approaching? What talismans of experience might we pull from past lives and lineages? How will we change our lives in writing, together?
Angel Dominguez is a Latiné poet of Yucatec Maya descent born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA, by their immigrant family. They now live amongst the redwoods of Bonny Doon, CA. They’re the author of several books of poetry and prose including Desgraciado (Nightboat Books, 2022) and most recently, the 10 year anniversary edition of their debut work, Black Lavender Milk (Noemi Press, 2024). They were the 2023 Poet in residence with the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson, the 2021 Mazza writer in residence for San Francisco State University, and currently serves as managing editor for Lilac Press. You can find Angel’s work online and in print in various publications including BOMB Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, FENCE, Prolit Magazine, SFMOMA Open Space, and elsewhere. You can find Angel in the redwoods or ocean.
WAR’S LOVE, OR, THE PRE-CHILD :: Valerie Hsiung
This workshop is for those whose faith in language has been shaken and are ready to double down on the necessity for language to guide us through this underworld that is Earth itself.
We will gather to write to and for the dead.
We will see how language can and must companion us through our grief, our loss, our experiences of the most excruciating and violent severances.
We will reimagine our war memorials and create abolitionist forms of collective grieving which seek to make a part of every day life the mythic potential of loss.
We will, above all, dwell for one week in a mystical edge-of-the-earth zone and seek to map a new time with our writing.
A workshop that is founded on the belief that the fight for the rights of children and the disabled is a fight for the world itself.
Guides for this course include Etel Adnan, Merce Rodoreda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fanny Howe, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Agota Kristof, Forough Farrokhzad, Paul Celan, and Simone Weil.
Valerie Hsiung is a poet, performer, and the author of eight collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid writing, including The pedestrian (Nightboat Books, forthcoming 2026), selected for the Nightboat Books Prose Prize, The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath), To love an artist (Essay Press), selected by Renee Gladman for the Essay Press Book Prize, and outside voices, please (CSU), selected for the CSU Open Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in publications (Annulet, BathHouse Journal, The Georgia Review, mercury firs, The Nation, Paperbag, Verse), in performances (Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project), in sound waves (Montez Press Radio, Hyle Greece), and other forms of particulate matter. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, PEN America, Lighthouse Works. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the mountains of Colorado where she makes fragrance & teaches alchemical writing at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
FROM THE PAGE TO THE STAGE :: Lydia Lunch
From the Page to the Stage is about artistic empowerment and motivation. This workshop seeks to bring together a collection of artists in order to explore the relevance of community, collaboration, and creation as an inspirational weapon in the war against divisiveness, division, and death— a space of protection and clarity to listen and share the deep language of the body; the creative impulse; the desire to collaborate and the methods to invoke; the experience of time, space and accomplishment unfettered by the anxieties of funding and recognition. Creators can learn together how to be more adept at their craft; how they can organize and manage their time to move projects forward and in which the hierarchical, dominator paradigm can be further subverted by the vigilant intention to transform our learned ways of relating to ourselves and one another within this powerful action of collaboration/co-creation. Art has the ability to act as salve to the universal wound. It gives voice to the silent scream within us all. It rebels as pleasure in times of trauma. It brings a sense of beauty and joy by rising up in celebration of life, a direct contradiction to the widespread brutality of socio-sadistic bullies who seek to divide and conquer.
Lydia encourages people to bring a text they would like to perform, or she is happy to provide inspiration by choosing a text for them. Participants are given tools to explore the power of their own voices and translate that energy to the stage. She will perform a variety of different types of texts and embolden others to experiment with their own material—encouraging creators to feel confident to read and perform in public, whether their expression is poetry, novels, stories or essays.
Workshop description forthcoming.
Lydia Lunch was voted by Time Out magazine as one of the most influential performers to have emerged from New York City. She has taught workshops in Performance Art at The San Francisco Art Institute, along side Meredith Monk as part of Davis Moss’ Institute of Living Voice in Ghent Belgium. She has presented From the Page to the Stage in Rennes France, Ojai California, Berlin Germany, Malmo and Uppsala Sweden, Manchester England and New York City. She has produced spoken word records, curated performance series in America and Great Britain, worked with dozens of luminaries in film, music and literature. She has written five books translated into seven languages, released over thirty LPS, and continues to be a driving force in art, music and literature and her special forte—performance.
No other artist of the 20th century has fought, forged, punched, and sculpted their own artistic vision in such a uniquely original way. Defying categorization, Lydia Lunch has actively conquered new territories and gained international recognition for the innovative quality of her work.
Through music, books, spoken word performances, film, video, photography, poetry and a multitude of creative endeavors, Lydia Lunch has proven to be one of the most daring artists of the current era. Sexual icon, radical and unclassifiable, Lunch has never ceased to denounce conformism, the exploitation of misery, American politics and violence against women. Her spirit of revolt, her independence, and her prolific collaborations continue to influence new generations of artists.
THE LYRIC IMPULSE :: Julian Talamantez Brolaski
In this generative workshop, we will explore the history and nature of ‘lyric poetry,’ traditionally a song sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, the emotive utterance of a singularly speaking subject. In order to investigate the availability of poetry to music, or to the musical, we will practice putting our finger on the pulse of the universal heartbeat. And where we find this pulse—in the movement of water, in the song of sparrows, in the capillary action of the sycamore—will teach us how to move our pen. We will work at the places where poetry and music cross: song, mantra, meditation, metrical and rhyming forms, where the formal melts into the spiritual. The goal is to become porous, so that everything is available to us, to greet the intelligent spirit of poetry, the divine witnesser.
Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it / xe / them) is a poet and country singer, the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011). Julian is a 2023 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Its poems were recently included in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat 2020). With its band Juan & the Pines, it released an EP Glittering ForestLinks to an external site. in 2019; Julian’s first full-length album It’s Okay HoneyLinks to an external site. came out in August 2023.
Dharma Arts :: Aikido :: Jude Blitz
Jude Blitz, M.A., a co-founder leader of Women in Power, is a psychotherapist and coach in private practice, working with women and men both in person and by phone from her home office in Boulder, Colorado. Her work with people integrates her lifetime of study and application of several methods in which she is certified: Hakomi therapy, Shadow Work® group facilitation, Systemic Constellation work, and her decades of dream analysis, moon lodge and ceremonial weavership. Jude’s approach to healing evokes embodied wisdom and strengths, ancestral and archetypal insights and support, to generate courageous action from our deep soulful natures.
With her husband, Tom Daly, Jude co-facilitates groups in Systemic Constellation work, Dynamic Dialogue® and 4 Gateways Coaching programs. With Shadow Work® colleagues Cliff Barry and Mary Ellen Whalen, Jude and Tom co-created the Inner Sovereign Leadership Training. These programs are inspired by the unique contributions of Shadow Work®.
Jude is a practicing 6th degree black belt in Aikido, which she has taught at Naropa University for approx. 30 years.
MFA Lecture :: Leah Nieboer
Leah Nieboer is a poet, Deep Listener, graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and current PhD candidate in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver. Her first collection of poetry, SOFT APOCALYPSE, was selected by Andrew Zawacki for the 2021 Georgia Poetry Prize (UGA Press, 2023) and named a top ten debut collection of 2023 by Poets & Writers Magazine. The winner of the 2022 Mountain West Writers’ Contest in Poetry, she is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts at Mt. San Angelo and at the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. She lives in Denver and co-hosts The Ritter, a new podcast on literature and culture.
Web: www.leahnieboer.com
Special Guest :: Will Alexander
Will Alexander works in multiple genres. In addition to being a poet, he is also a novelist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist. His influences range from poetic practitioners, such as Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to the encompassing paradigm of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, and the Egyptian worldview as understood by Cheikh Anta Diop and R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. The latter is central to Alexander’s expanding inner range, which has allowed him access to levels of mind beyond the three-dimensional as boundary. He thereby explores the full dimensionality of each word. For him, each word has access to not only the median level of three-dimensional experience, but also partakes of experience on both the supra and subconscious planes. His praxis of language is not unlike the Mayan numerical world, where each letter of the alphabet spontaneously engages in non-limit. Thus, all fields of experience are open for exploration: art, physics, botany, history, astronomy, architecture, and poetics. Alexander’s books include Asia and Haiti, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, Compression and Purity, Sunrise In Armageddon, Diary As Sin, Inside the Earthquake Palace, Towards The Primeval Lightning Field, and Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents. He lives in The City of Angels.
Harry Smith Recording Studio
Summer Writing Program participants (in select workshops each week) may have the opportunity to work in Naropa University’s Recording Studio. Sometimes the projects entail setting their work to music, or recording spoken word poetry, or recording their own poetic songs; oftentimes the recording studio projects are group collaborations, collective sound installations, and other experiments withthe phonotext. Over the year Fast Speaking Music has produced several audio anthologies of student and guest faculty’s recorded work; the Harry’s House cd compilations; here is the link to Volume III: https://spoti.fi/3v19mQP
Ambrose Bye is a musician, engineer, and producer living in Mexico City, and is the co-founder of Fast Speaking Music with Anne Waldman. He has produced over 20 albums and frequently collaborates with poets. Recent productions include “Among the Poetry Stricken” (Clark Coolidge and Thurston Moore) and “Artificial Happiness Button” (Heroes are Gang Leaders). He has worked and performed at Masnaa and the Ecole de la Literature in Casablanca, Le Maison de Poesie in Paris, the fieEstival Maelstrom in Brussels, the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Pathway to Paris at Montreal POP 2015, and Casa Del Lago in Mexico City. He has also been involved in the recording studio and workshops at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University since 2009.
Fast Speaking Music
