Insurgent Dreams/Radical Lineages
We know that art alone is not revolution, that art alone is not the answer to the questions of how life be otherwise; and yet we still dream through art’s emergent possibilities and insurgent edges precisely because art is at once “essence, science, and vision.” How can we extend this radical lineage of thinking, writing, and performance in which art is “our magic weapon,” as Amiri Baraka called it, “to create and recreate the world and our selves as a part of it. How can art become the unpredictable event, the insurgent dream that disrupts, ruptures and transforms the on-going regimes of consciousness and control. How can art lead us into, or catalyze the ungovernable, transdisciplinary forms of practice and urgency needed to meet our contemporaneity, its many emergencies.
Seeking enlivened forms of collectivity, and how to extend them over time & space, which is to say how to sustain a radical lineage, “a living thread,” we’ll dream and study anew as a temporary community, troupe, band, cell, reading group, and assembly. We’ll test the open question that writing always is through experiments with the line, the sentence, the song, the bodies that articulate them all in lived social critique; we’ll listen and abide with one another in conversation and debate, always staying open to the happy accident of collective work, the shock of recognition in the new friend, that is the ground and pleasure of collaboration. And through it all––and continuing–––we’ll take the abolitionist urgency of Jackson Mac Low’s “Social Project 2” as our signal energy, desire, and dream:
“FIND A WAY TO END WAR // MAKE IT WORK”
Workshop Faculty for Week 3
:: Eleni Sikelianos
Eleni Sikelianos, a graduate of the Kerouac School, is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Your Kingdom and What I Knew (and two hybrid memoirs: The Book of Jon, and You Animal Machine, which has recently been adapted into performance by the Nostalgia Theatre Company in Athens Greece.
Working in ecopoetics for decades, her writings are deeply influenced by family as well as animal and planetary lineages, and have been much anthologized and translated. Dedicated to the many ways poetry manifests in communities, she has taught workshops in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons, and collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists, among them Philip Glass and Ed Bowes.
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 is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.
Memory's Imagination :: Laird Hunt
Taking inspiration from the autobiographical writing of recently minted Nobel Laureate, Annie Ernaux, we will examine and produce works of fiction, creative narrative non-fiction and hybrid texts that cleave, in the double-sense, to personal experience and/or personal passions (which may be intertwined with the lives and experiences of people around us). Excerpts from works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Hisham Matar, Michael Ondaatje, Lucia Berlin, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, John Keene, Eileen Myles, Liao Yiwu and Svetlana Alexievich will be on the menu to inform and inspire. Participants will be invited to generate work that delves into their own experiences and, always proceeding with care, those of others.
Born in Singapore in 1968 to American parents, Laird Hunt is the author of eight novels, including the 2021 National Book Award finalist Zorrie. He is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, the Bridge Prize and a finalist for both the Pen/Faulkner and the Prix Femina Étranger.
Hunt’s reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Los Angeles Times, and his fiction and translations have appeared in many literary journals, including Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, Bomb and Zoetrope, in the United States and abroad. A former United Nations press officer who was raised in rural Indiana, he now lives in Providence where he teaches in Brown University’s Literary Arts Program and spends his days with his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, their daughter, Eva, and two cats.
Decolonizing the Archive :: Lisa Jarnot
An Insurgent Dream: let’s jump into the chaos world with Martinique poet Édouard Glissant and Jamaican Novelist Sylvia Wynter. The question at hand is how to turn away from the pressurized dreams of the West, and enter the flow of new genres of the human and non-human.
Lisa Jarnot was born in Buffalo, NY, and educated at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of the Bagley Lecture Series book, Four Lectures, and several collections of poetry, including Some Other Kind of Mission; Ring of Fire; Black Dog Songs; Night Scenes; Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 and A Princess Magic Presto Spell . She co-edited An Anthology of New (American) Poets, and her biography of San Francisco poet Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, was published by the University of California Press in 2012.
She has been a visiting professor at Naropa University, Brooklyn College, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, holds a Masters of Divinity degree from New York Theological Seminary, is a PhD student in theology at Drew University, and is a minister at Safe Haven United Church of Christ.
Take Me To Your Poets :: Thurston Moore
This class will focus on the 50th year anniversary of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics by deep diving into the archives of the school’s library of ephemera; its recordings, documents, and publications researching a timeline journey through the enlightened exchanges offered by its founders Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman.
The class will present a history of the galaxies through the history of teachers, including (to name but a few) Chögyam Trungpa, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Gregory Corso, Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch, Diane Di Prima, John Cage, Akilah Oliver, William Burroughs, Ann Lauterbach, Joanne Kyger, Clark Coolidge, Philip Whalen, Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Duncan, Hal Willner, Brenda Coultas, Ed Dorn, Kathy Acker, Robert Creeley, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Bernadette Mayer, Lewis Warsh, Anselm Hollo, Jack Collom, Hettie Jones, Kevin Killian, Simone Forti, Michael McClure, Caroline Bergvall, Renee Gladman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Margaret Randall, Steve Lacy, Rebecca Brown, Reed Bye, David Henderson, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Notley, Amiri Baraka, Cecilia Vicuña, Norma Cole, Jim Carroll, Joy Harjo, Eileen Myles, Janine Pommy Vega, Lorenzo Thomas, Rae Armantrout, Bill Berkson, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Maureen Owen, Quincy Troupe, Carolee Schneeman, Judith Malina, Tracie Morris, Vincent Katz, Harryette Mullen, Hoa Nguyen, Monica de la Torre, Tuli Kupferberg, Bruce Andrews, Wanda Coleman, Edwin Torres, Pierre Joris, Johanna Drucker, Edmund Berrigan, Kristen Prevallet, Cecil Taylor, Ron Silliman, Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge, John Giorno, Ron Padgett, Peter Orlovsky, Meredith Monk, Helen Adam, Andy Clausen, Michael Brownstein, Leslie Scalapino, Nathaniel Mackey, Carla Harryman, Rikki Ducornet, Marjorie Perloff, Wang Ping, Dodie Bellamy, Barbara Guest, Fanny Howe and so many, many others.
“Where are the poets? Take me to your poets!”
– Chögyam Trungpa, upon his arrival to North America.
Allen Ginsberg, on JKS: “…would be a way of teaching meditators about the golden mouth and educating poets about the golden mind.”
“…we had no buildings, no desks, no blackboards, no filing cabinets, no grades, no money … only our mental commitment, our voices, our scholarship, our practice. So, in the beginning, the school was truly disembodied!”
– Anne Waldman on the first years of JKS.
Thurston Moore moved to NYC at 18 in 1976 to play punk. He started Sonic Youth in1980. He edited the music and literary fanzines KILLER, Sonic Death, and Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal and started the Ecstatic Peace records + tapes label. He has worked collaboratively with Yoko Ono, Merce Cunningham, Cecil Taylor, Rhys Chatham, Lydia Lunch, John Zorn, Takehisa Kosugi, Glenn Branca and Mary Jane Leach. He has composed music for films by Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, and Allison Anders. He presently records and tours both solo, with various ensembles and with his own band who’s most recent recording is Rock n Roll Consciousness. He is senior editor of Ecstatic Peace Library, the poetry imprint Flowers & Cream and has edited books at Rizzoli and Abrams. His own writings have been published through various imprints. Since 2011 Thurston Moore has been on faculty at the Naropa University summer writing program. He resides in London.
:: Sara Riggs & Rajiv Mohabir
Sarah Riggs is a writer and artist, born in New York where she is now based, after having spent over a decade in Paris. Before directing Six Lives: A Cinepoem, she produced The Tangier 8 at the Cinémathèque de Tanger in Morocco, which was screened at the Berlin Film Festival and the Tate Modern Museum among other international venues. She is the author of seven books of poetry in English: Waterwork (Chax, 2007), Chain of Minuscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling (Reality Street, 2007), 60 Textos (Ugly Duckling, 2010), Autobiography of Envelopes (Burning Deck, 2012), Pomme & Granite (1913 Press, 2015) which won a 1913 poetry prize, Eavesdrop (Chax, 2020) and The Nerve Epistle, fall 2021. She is the author of the book of essays Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop, & O’Hara (Routledge, 2002), and has translated and co-translated six books of contemporary French poetry into English, including most recently Etel Adnan’s TIME which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020. She is the director of the international arts organization Tamaas which focuses on earth arts justice, film, and an annual poetry translation seminar. She is also a member of the bilingual poetry association Double Change. Sarah Riggs has taught in recent years at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn after years of teaching at the NYU and Columbia programs in Paris, and before that at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she got her Ph.D. in literature. Inspired by filming the dance of Stéphane Bouquet, choreographed by Mathilde Monnier for the Essaouira section of Six Lives, she is making a film about four NY dancer choreographers.
Rajiv Mohabir was born in London, England to Guyanese parents. He grew up in New York City and in the Greater Orlando Area in Florida. Mojabir holds a BA from the University of Florida in religious studies, an MSEd in TESOL from Long Island University, Brooklyn, and an MFA in poetry from Queens College, CUNY. While in New York working as a public school teacher, he also produced the nationally broadcast radio show KAVIhouse on JusPunjabi (2012-2013). He received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai’i and is an assistant professor of poetry in the Department of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of many award winning books and chapbooks. Read more about him.
Dharma Arts :: TBA
MFA Lecture :: TBA
Special Guest :: Margaret Rarndall
Poet, independent scholar, photographer, translator, and social activist Margaret Randall was born in New York City and grew up in New Mexico. Taking active part in the Mexican student movement of 1968 and then living in Cuba for eleven years and Sandinista Nicaragua for four, Randall returned to the United States in 1984, only to face deportation when the government declared her writings “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” With the support of many, she won her case in 1989. Randall is the author of more than two hundred books, including Che on My Mind (2014), Time’s Language: Selected Poems 1959-2018, and I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary (2020). Her most recent titles include Artists in My Life, Luck, and Home. She has received the Poet of Two Hemispheres award from Poesía en Paralelo Cero, Quito, Ecuador, AWP’s George Garrett Award, Albuquerque’s Creative Bravo Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of New Mexico, among other recognitions.
Special Guest :: Andrew Schelling
Andrew Schelling is a poet, translator from the poetry of India, essay writer, and editor of anthologies. Before arriving at Naropa University he was active in the Bay Area with a community of experimental writers, Zen practitioners, and wilderness advocates. He came to the Jack Kerouac School in 1990, and began teaching Sanskrit language for the Department of Religious Studies shortly after, as well as in the Jack Kerouac School. He has been active in land use & ecological issues in the American West, is a student of natural history, and has taught for many years at Deer Park Institute in India. Among his twenty-five published titles are, most recently, a poetry collection The Facts at Dog Tank Spring; a folkloric volume regarding language, bohemian poets, and wilderness, Tracks Along the Left Coast; and three volumes of translated poetry from Shambhala Publications. His anthologies include Love and the Turning Seasons: India’s Poetry of Spiritual & Erotic Longing.
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
