Born in Tokyo, Japan, Michelle Naka Pierce is the current director of the Writing & Poetics Department here at the Jack Kerouac School. She is the author of the collaborative text TRI/VIA, Beloved Integer, She, A Blueprint, and Continious Frieze, Bordering [Red]. Her work has been anthologized in For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals and Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. As well as Naropa, she has taught at Bard College and University of New Mexico. Her teaching interests include writing pedagogy, avant-garde poetry, and gender/women’s studies. Excerpts from her manuscript She, A Blueprint for InterSurface, with art by Sue Hammond West, have been published in American Letters & Commentary, Trickhouse, Mandorla, Upstairs at Duroc (France), and elsewhere.

Michelle’s Response:

Hejinian’s My Life and “Rejection of Closure”
The Poethical Wager by Joan Retallack–esp the Experimental Feminine
Donald Allen’s The Poetics of the New American Poetry
Frank O’Hara’s Personism
O’Hara’s Lunch Poems and Meditations on an Emergency
O’hara’s poem “Why I am Not a Painter”
Talking Poetry edited by Lee Bartlett–esp Michael Palmer’s interview
Lee Bartlett’s The Greenhouse Effect
Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons
Stein’s Composition as Explanation
Stein Stein Stein
Picasso
Cezanne’s notion: “paint be paint”
Harryette Mullen: S*PeRM**K*T and Trimmings
Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle
Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Pink Guitar
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge: Empathy
Christian Bok’s Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science
Raymond Queneau: Exercises in Style
Kristen Prevallet’s I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson
Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red
Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands
Woolf’s Orlando
Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love and War
Li-Young Lee’s Rose and The City in Which I Love You
Neruda
ee cummings
The Beatles
Moving Borders: three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women edited by Sloan
Some Thing Black by Jacques Roubaud
The Language Book edited by Bernstein and Andrews
Perloff, Foucault, Barthes
OuLiPo
Rothko
Gordon Matta-Clark
bell hooks
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Hitchcock’s Rear Window
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Hirokazu Koreeda’s After Life and Nobody Knows
The Pillow Book
The Tale of Genji
Chris Pusateri
Michiko Masuda Pierce Sensei
Naropa students
The Clinamen