for a stranger poetics :: trans-disciplinary practices
Workshops are M/T/Th/F from 9:30 AM –12:00 PM, 9:00 AM for Printshop.
Monday, 6/12
1:00–2:30 Opening Panel: For a Stranger Poetics: Transdisciplinary Practices Panelists: Anne Waldman (chair); Srikanth Reddy; Carolina Ebeid; Janice Lowe; No Land
3:00–4:00 :: MFA Lecture :: Kelly Krumrie
Tuesday, 3/13
1:00–2:00 :: Lecture :: Cedar Sigo
2:30–3:30 :: Oral History :: Kyle Schlesinger on Cuneiform Press
4:00–5:00 :: Lecture :: Amy Catanzano
7:00–9:30 :: Faculty Reading:
Kelly Krumrie; Mairead Case; Amy Catanzano; Cedar Sigo
Wednesday, 6/14
1:00–3:00 :: Afro-futurism :: Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish
Thursday, 6/15
1:00–2:00 :: Artist Talk :: Julie Carr
2:30–3:30 :: Artist Talk :: Caroline Bergvall
4:00–5:30 :: Student Panel
7:00–9:30 :: Faculty Reading:
Lee Ann Brown, Kyle Schlesinger; Carolina Ebeid; Srikanth Reddy
Friday, 6/16
1:00–2:30 :: Artist Talk & Performance :: Lee Ann Brown & Tony Torn :: Poets Theatre Lab
3:00–4:30 :: Colloquium
7:00–9:30 :: Student Reading
Saturday, 6/17
7:00–9:30 :: Faculty Reading: No Land; Janice Lowe; Julie Carr: Caroline Bergvall
Workshop Faculty for Week 1
Working With Site / Working In Situ :: Caroline Bergvall
You will research and explore a site: a building, a patch of ground, a tree, a cafe or other place of your choice, using various methods, including investigation, material analysis, conversation, online research, markings, histories, mappings etc to access the most diverse and rich range of thoughts and stories that might emerge from it and inform it. You will brainstorm findings and will develop initial sketches towards a piece of writing. We will look at the work of poets, musicians, ethnographers, eco-artists and activists and others who work on site and integrate the knowledge of these grounds to their work.
Caroline Bergvall is an award-winning poet and interdisciplinary artist of French-Norwegian origins based in London. She works across media, forms and languages. Her work includes performances, books, installations, soundworks, drawings. Often works collaboratively. The recipient of many international commissions and fellowships Caroline is an exponent of writing and performance methods adapted to contemporary literacies. Noted works: books/projects Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014), sunrise performance Ragadawn (2018-). As a facilitator, she leads projects, runs workshops and provides individual mentoring with a special focus on queer, cross-cultural and multilingual contexts. Currently Global Professor Fellow, Queen Mary University, London.
Exophonics :: Srikanth Reddy
Western poetics in its modern vernacular traditions is broadly predicated on a master/slave dialectic of artful fluency in a national language versus the rudimentary, non-normative, or broken parole of those on the peripheries of colonial or state power. Yet many of the most extraordinary voices throughout literary history belong to authors who write in a non-native language—even Jack Kerouac, who gives his name to this institute of poetic study, mostly spoke French into his teens. In this workshop, we will write from ‘the other side’ of fluency, experimenting with forms of self-translation into and out of unmastered languages to find new expressive forms—unruly, materialist, minimalist, unruled. Readings will include a new generation of exophonic poets including Don Mee Choi, Dunya Mikhail, Mónica de la Torre, Valzhyna Mort, and others.
Srikanth Reddy is the author of Underworld Lit, which was a finalist for the Griffin International Prize. Voyager—named one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by The New Yorker, The Believer, and NPR—and Facts for Visitors, which won the 2005 Asian American Literary Award. He has written on poetry for The New York Timesand The New Republic, and his book of literary criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. The NEA, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have awarded him grants and fellowships, and in Fall 2015, he delivered the Bagley Wright Lectures in Poetry. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, he is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Writing is Motion / Motion is Life :: Julie Carr
How do we sustain the literary imagination or our faith in it? How do we keep our writing alive, especially when the pressures of the world bear down? Is it only by a kind of force of desire or will? Or are there tactics we can use to keep the feeling of the other world, the world of the imagination, alive? If so, what are these tactics? This workshop proposes that one way to keep our writing alive is through movement. Working from this premise, we will explore the body in motion (from the mundane to the extraordinary) as a collaborator to our writing. We will walk and talk, move in partnership and alone, explore shifts in perception, find the gentle and the quiet, and play with the expansive and absurd. Through each day, we will keep returning the page, finding new and surprising ways to move our language in response to the moving body. Come prepared to take risks, but no prior movement experience is required. All abilities welcome.
Julie Carr is the author of ten books of poetry and prose, including Real Life: An Installation (Omindawn 2018), Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta, 2017), and Someone Shot my Book (University of Michigan Press, 2018). Earlier books include 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta, 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and Think Tank (Solid Objects, 2015). She is also the author of the critical study of Victorian poetry, Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2014). With Jeffrey Robinson, she is the coeditor of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press, 2015). Her co-translation of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory was published by Commune Editions in 2018. Her history of populism, eugenics, and spiritualism in the American west entitled Mud, Blood, and Ghosts is forthcoming in the Spring of 2023.
A former NEA fellow, Carr is a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She has collaborated with dance artists K.J. Holmes and Gesel Mason. With Tim Roberts she is the co-founder of Counterpath Press, Counterpath Gallery, and Counterpath Community Garden in Denver.
Video Killed the Radio Star :: Carolina Ebeid
In this multimedia workshop, we will consider the art of the video-poem, how it can expand, deepen, rescue, extend our writing and writing practices. We’ll watch a panoply of poem-films, and video-art to familiarize ourselves with the wide range of aesthetic expression in this genre, and to discern their basic components, principles of composition, and editing techniques. Each morning, you’ll answer a series of writing prompts to get us thinking about the kinetic movements of word, image, and sound. Our conversations will necessarily explore concepts of diaspora and memory, documentary poetics, and theories of the glitch. Before our week begins, I’ll ask you to gather footage and photos from your archives in order to create a digital notebook to which you can add throughout the week; you’ll draw from this miscellaneous notebook using methods of assembly to make a video poem of your own. Please be sure to have access to a video editing app such as: iMovie, Adobe Premiere, Premiere Rush, Stop Motion Studios, DaVinci Resolve, Canva, etc.
Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet. Her first book You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior was published by Noemi Press as part of the Akrilica Series, and selected as one of ten best debuts of 2016 by Poets & Writers. Dauerwunder, a chapbook about finding the voice of ancestors within the digital glitch has just been released by Albion Books.
Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, Bread Loaf, CantoMundo, the NEA, as well as a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. She is on faculty at the Mile-High MFA at Regis University, the bilingual MFA at the University of Texas El Paso, and Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver.
A longtime editor, she currently edits poetry at The Rumpus, as well as the multimedia zine Visible Binary. Carolina grew up in West New York, New Jersey in a Cuban and Palestinian family.
Wild Mind Exhalation :: Janice Lowe & No Land
Janice A. Lowe is a composer-poet who specializes in multi-media collaborations with music and text. She is the author of Leaving CLE poems of Nomadic Dispersal (Miami University Press,) the chapbook SWAM (Belladonna Series) and composer of the album Leaving CLE Songs (Bandcamp.) Her musical, Lil Budda, text and lyrics by Stephanie L. Jones, was presented at the NAMT Festival of New Musicals and the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference. Her song cycle collaboration with librettist Tyehimba Jess – Millie and Christine McKoy Sisters’ Syncopated Sonnets in Song was performed at The Lensic Performing Arts Center. With Tyhimba Jess and Yahdon Israel, she is a Creative Capital Awardee. Lowe was recently awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in Music Composition. Leader of the poetry-music ensemble Namaroon, Lowe has performed/recorded with BRAJAH, w/o a net, Irreversible Entanglements, Digital Diaspora, Heroes Are Gang Leaders, Julie Patton, Anne Waldman, and Marshall Allen’s NYC-AllStars and has appeared with ensembles at Berlin Jazz Fest, The Kennedy Center, Jazz Jäntar, Crossing Border, Roulette, Vision Festival and Bop Stop. Lowe has music directed pieces including The Vicksburg Project (Mabou Mines,) Door of No Return by Nehassaiu DeGannes, Chiron’s Homegurrl Healer Howls by Liza Jessie Peterson (New Black Fest,) 12th and Clairmount (Stage West-Chicago) and Belly by Alva Rogers (New Georges.) She is a resident music director at White Bird Productions-Youth Theater. Lowe teaches Multi-media Composition at Rutgers University and has taught workshops at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program-Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Lowe holds an M.F.A. in Musical Theater Composition from New York University-Tisch School of the Arts.
No Land is a multimedia artist and curator whose practice involves: writing, painting, film, photography; her work continues in the lineage of the downtown NYC avant garde, honoring an intuitive vow towards creation. Her art evokes reverence for mystery in the forms of her paintings, drawings, photojournalistic works, films, & poet- performances with musicians. She has been guided by spirit encounters with downtown artists, poets, elders and activists, spending formative time amongst Occupy Wall Street’s street-art revolutionaries, Steve Cannon’s Tribes Gallery, and Anne Waldman’s outrider poet worlds.
As a poet & vocalist, she has performed at The Whitney Museum, the William Burroughs Bunker, Jazzfest Berlin, Crossing Borders Festival (the Hague), Enclave Festival (Mexico City), LaMaMa Galleria (NYC), The Kennedy Center (DC), The Poetry Project, Fotografiska NY Museum, & on NYC street corners during the pandemic. She performs her poem-mosaic-ruminations with different formations of musician collaborators: Luke Stewart (Moor Mother), Bentley Anderson, Oliver Ray, Daniel Carter, & others. She has curated performances & gatherings of her artist peers & communities since 2009 in NYC.
In 2018, she released Authentic Artifice, an art-book of poetry and photographs, published by Newest York. Her photojournalistic work has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Disonare, The Village Voice, at Fotografiska Museum, Photo Saint-German (Paris) and in publications by Bill Moyers and Levy Gorvy Gallery. Her cinema work has premiered at The Poetry Project (NYC), Harvard University, Zebra Poetry Film Festival (2020), the John Giorno Foundation, & elsewhere. Her art was recently commissioned for the cover of Anne Waldman’s Bard, Kinetic book (Coffee House Press, 2023). Her forthcoming book publications include: The Velvet Wire with Anne Waldman (Granary Books) & Putting On Minds, a book of poems and artworks. She has taught previously at Rutgers University, University of New Haven, in prisons, NYC public schools & at No Land’s art school for young artists. www.maepoe.com
Poets Theater Lab :: Lee Ann Brown + Tony Torn
What is Poets Theater? Is it simply a play with poetic language or something beyond? Together we will play with the possibilities of Poets Theater as a compositional field of imagination, disruption, persona, intertextuality, camp, chorus and collage. Readings and resources include pieces by Stein, O’Hara, Baraka, Adam, Duncan, Harryman, Parks, Raworth, Mayer, McClure, Killian, and others plus an infusion of the sacred Noh theater tradition. If the experience of writing poetry is often a solitary one, the creation of Poets Theater is all about community. Everyone will write and perform for each other as we create an instant poets theater community, a temporary autonomous coterie.
Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She attended Brown University, where she earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees.
She is the author of In the Laurels, Caught (Fence Books, 2013), which won the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series Award, as well as Crowns of Charlotte (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003), and Polyverse (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition, selected by Charles Bernstein.
Brown has held fellowships with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Yaddo, Djerassi, the MacDowell Colony, the International Center for Poetry in Marseille, France, and the Howard Foundation.
In 1989, Brown founded Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women’s poetry. She has taught at Brown University, Naropa University, Bard College, and The New School, among others. She currently divides her time between New York City, where she teaches at St. John’s University, and Marshall, North Carolina, where she directs the French Broad Institute (of Time & the River) and the Children’s Arts in the Mountains Program.
Tony Torn is an actor and director based in New York. His more than 100 stage and screen credits include “Ubu” in Ubu Sings Ubu (also adapted and co-directed), “Paul Swan’ in Paul Swan is Dead and Gone at Torn Page, “Cyclops/Mother” in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus at The Signature Theater, “Rusty Trawler” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Broadway, “Falstaff”, “Panderus” and “Caliban” in Oregon Shakespeare Company’s Play On! series of translated Shakespeare plays at Classic Stage Company. He has performed in multiple shows with legendary experimental theater artists Richard Foreman and Reza Abdoh. He recently appeared as “The Toymaster” on NBC’s hit series The Blacklist, “Sister Jim” in the Netflix comedy series Teenage Bounty Hunters, and Larry Hughes in Law and Order SVU. He was a founding director of Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping. He manages Torn Page, a salon space and classroom in Chelsea dedicated to the artistic legacy of his parents, Rip Torn and Geraldine Page.
Experimental Letterpress :: Kyle Schlesinger
Harry Smith Print Shop
In this workshop we will explore several experimental approaches to letterpress printing to make unique works of art that incorporate poetry, typography, collage, and mixed media. Feel free to bring some materials with you, such as old books and magazines for collage, oil crayons and charcoal for drawing and writing, or anything else you may wish to incorporate. Emphasis will be on spontaneous poetic composition in relation to visual creation and the conversation that exists between text and image and text as image, with friends working in close collaboration.
Recommended reading: A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, and Publishers ed. Kyle Schlesinger (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021)
Kyle Schlesinger was born in Providence in 1976. He studied poetry and pedagogy at Goddard College, and went on to study poetics with Robert Creeley at the University at Buffalo, where he earned his doctorate in 2005. The author of over twenty books of poetry and criticism, Schlesinger currently lives in Austin, where he runs Cuneiform Press and directs the Graduate Program in Publishing at UHV.
Afro-futurism :: Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish
Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish is a family man deep in the mysteries and magic of marriage and fatherhood. An instructor in Interdisciplinary Studies at Naropa University, he teaches core courses in diversity and social identity, contemplative practice, community engagement, and environmental justice. Ramon is a dedicated student of Melissa Michaels and a leader in the Surfing the Creative International Youth Leadership Camp, a movement-based rite of passage experience. He also serves on the stewardship Council of Youth Passageway which seeks to unite local and international rites of passage practitioners, wilderness guides, and youth mentors to integrate services, create a clearing house for best practices, and help awaken mainstream educators to the elemental language of ritual.
Special Guest :: Cedar Sigo
Cedar Sigo is a poet and member of the Suquamish Tribe. He studied writing and poetics at Naropa University. His most recent books are (poetry) All This Time and (lectures) Guard the Mysteries both published by Wave Books in 2021. He received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artist’s Award in 2022. He is the editor of There You Are: Interviews, Journals & Ephemera by Joanne Kyger. He was an advisory editor with Joy Harjo on When the Light of the World was Subdued Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. He teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program at The Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.
Special Guest :: Amy Catanzano
Recipient of the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry, Amy Catanzano publishes books of poetry and experimental fiction, intergenre poetic theory, and multimodal literary art, including web-expanded poetry and poetry as lived performance. Writing in parallel to cutting-edge physics as well as the literary and artistic subcultures of the avant garde, she forges innovative connections between literature, science, and the arts with a focus on quantum theory. Drawing from invited residencies and funded site visits to major scientific research centers such as CERN in Switzerland and Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile, and as the lead co-founder of The Entanglements Network—an international collective of transdisciplinary writers, scientists, artists, and scholars—Catanzano collaborates with particle physicists and astrophysicists in addition to her independent projects. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she is an associate professor of English and the poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She has been affiliated with the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University since 2006.
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
