When the Walls of the City Shake: Changing the Frequency through Collaboration, Music and Oral Sound….

This week, we honor the Kerouac School’s commitment to cross-arts fertilization and community. How do we – as artists- awaken the world to itself? By raising the decibels, composing a lullaby, or choralizing our language with multi-tracks? How may our vocalizations suggest a new timbre for the imagination? We examine the power of our texts and our solo “vox” -the sounds made by the human mouth – which can also be augmented by others in collaboration, and by the music and the magic of the recording studio. We might compose libretti for the future. We sing and dance back our negativity in the Anthropocene.

Week 4 guests include:
Caroline Bergvall
Edmund Berrigan
Mary Burger
Ambrose Bye & Max Davies
Douglas Dunn
Erica Hunt & Marty Ehrlich
Thurston Moore
Brad O’Sullivan
Steven Taylor
Edwin Torres
Anne Waldman

Read more here…

Naropa Summer Writing Program faculty reading

Anne Waldman & Ambrose Bye
Caroline Bergvall
Erica Hunt & Marty Ehrlich
Thurston Moore

Naropa University
Performing Arts Center
2130 Arapahoe Ave
Boulder, CO

CU Film Event showing:

Fried Diamonds, Cooked Shoes
The Poetry Deal: On Diane DiPrima
Outrider: Anne Waldman

Free and open to the public

University of Colorado
ATLAS BUILDING ROOM 102
Boulder, CO

Amiri Baraka Memorial Reading

Marty Ehrlich & Erica Hunt
Jennifer Dorn
Reed Bye
Anne Waldman
Steven Taylor
David Henderson
Tracie Morris

Naropa University Summer Writing Program
Performing Arts Center
2130 Arapahoe Ave.
Boulder, CO

Laughing Goat Poetry Series: “So, You’re a Poet”

Anne Waldman
Clark Coolidge
Thurston Moore
Ambrose Bye
with special musical guests
Max Davies
Toni Oswalt
& Devin Waldman

Laughing Goat Coffee Shop
1709 Pearl St
Boulder, CO 80302

Free

Lineages, Histories, Archives and Beyond: Roots, Elders, Maps

The Kerouac School is celebrating its 40th year, and this week will focus on some of the dynamic histories of persons and poetic literary movements of the past decades that have inspired and been held by the pedagogy at Naropa’s Poetics. The New American Poetry and Black Arts were triggers for a greater range of open form, “non-closure” poetries, cut-ups, sundry hybrid forms, OuLiPo considerations, Language strategies, activist poetics, collaboration, translation, visual arts and jazz input. We will engage a scholarly look at some of the “scene” of the last decades.

Week 3 guests include:
Clark Coolidge
Renee Gladman
Jen Hofer
Jade Lascelles
Tracie Morris
Laura Mullen
Hoa Nguyen
Khadijah Queen
Stacy Szymaszek
Lewis Warsh
Matvei Yankelevich

Read more here…

Dharma Poetics and Other Contemplative Practices

The Kerouac School’s heritage is linked to contemplative practice. The Buddhist yogin, Naropa whose name graces our university was pundit of the 11th century, was both a yogin and a university administrator at the famed Nalanda University. The poet-saint Milarapa wrote famous dohas. Zen practice, contemplative mind, and devotion has produced some of the greatest poems in the world, from Tu Fu to Mirabai to Rumi to John Donne.. Dharma references “things as they are” and the practice encourages “notice what you notice” (Allen Ginsberg) without clinging or doubt. Keats “negative capability” – being able to hold disparate thoughts in the mind without any irritable reach after fact or reason – resonates with the ideas here. The founders of the Kerouac School (Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Diane di Prima) were all meditation students. The Kerouac School is founded on an ethos of mutual support, strength in community, non-competitive education, and “wild mind” tolerance. Trusting our imagination and one’s own consciousness and tender heart is a practice. Cutting through pretension and cliché. Naropa also honors other spiritual traditions in the arts and philosophy. And present will be writers in the mystical Christian, and Native American spiritual traditions, as well as creative writers who work with Somatics and other healing practices. Part of this week will include a half day of silent meditation.

Week 2 guests include:
Reed Bye
CAConrad
Bhanu Kapil & Melissa Buzzeo
Joanne Kyger
Layli Long Soldier
Sawako Nakayasu
M. NourbeSe Philip
Michelle Naka Pierce & Sue Hammond West
Margaret Randall
Julia Seko

Read more here…

Documentary Poetics Interface Between Writing & Research

Documentary Poetics is not owned or claimed by any particular poetry “school.” It looks to the past and the future, not being a product of conceptual poet-modern consciousness. One might do research on the latest computer or find gems in dusty libraries and used bookstores; there are annals in the strange offices and sub-basements and attics of the mind. Investigation, scholarship, sousveillance, dream, nightmare, endangered species/cultures/languages that need reclamation. Family histories, lineage trees, the possibilities are exciting and myriad. What needs our attention and a writer’s hand as we hunker down with our various and sundry projects?

Week 1 guests include:
Charles Alexander & Cynthia Miller
Dodie Bellamy
Lee Ann Brown
Rebecca Brown
Julie Carr
Kevin Killian & Norma Cole
Thomas Sayers Ellis
Kyoo Lee
Dawn Lundy Martin
Farid Matuk & Susan Briante
Ariana Reines

Read more here…

Imagining the Real: Protest Art and Rocky Flats – Performance and Conversation

Moderator: Bryan Taylor, Professor, Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder
Anne Waldman, Poet; Co-Founder, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
Kristen Iversen, Author, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
Tom Mayer, Author, Rocky Flats: A Nuclear Musical
Barbara Donachy, Ceramic artist and peace activist
Eric Wright, Song writer and peace activist
Carole Gallagher, Nuclear photographer
John Craig Freeman, New media professor and augmented reality artist
Patrick Malone, Poet and peace activist

Free and open to the public

The extraordinary June 6, 1989 FBI and EPA raid on the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant was the beginning of the end for that large, nationally important factory just northwest of Arvada, Colo.  The raid preceded the plant’s plutonium production shutdown six months later – an action with local, national, and global impacts.  It symbolized a change in U.S. national priorities that began balancing national security policy with environmental protection at a time when the Cold War nuclear arms race had slowed considerably.  The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the same month Rocky Flats was shut down.

On June 6, 7, and 8, 2014 the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities will host a multifaceted art and humanities event commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the raid.  It will feature an art and history exhibit (including photographs and artifacts from the Rocky Flats plant) and panel discussions focusing on the raid and its consequences, including a grand jury investigation and subsequent disputed settlement of charges involving environmental crimes. Speakers will include former Colorado Governor Roy Romer, former U.S. Representative David Skaggs, former FBI agent Jon Lipsky, and several plant workers, neighbors, activists, and experts.

The major goals of this event are to educate the public and promote respectful dialogue about a vital, often controversial subject with strong links to the Arvada community. Rocky Flats Then and Now: 25 Years After the Raid has been organized by the Arvada Center in partnership with the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Rocky Flats Institute and Museum (formerly the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum). Rocky Flats Then and Now: 25 Years after the Raid is sponsored in part by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and John and Carol Balkcom.

See more here…

Summer Writing Program

Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

Welcome to the Anthropocene!

June 2nd-28th, 2014

Poetry – Fiction – Translation – Letterpress Printing

Naropa University’s SWP 2014 will feature the overall theme of “Anthropocene”- the world Age where everything is woefully affected and conditioned by Man. Anthropocene is being advocated as a designation to replace Holocene, our current geological epoch. Anthropocene marks the massive and destructive global impact human behavior has had on ecosystems, land-use, biodiversity. Here we wish to invoke its use as conscientious   – “awake” – planet citizens, poets, writers, activists, to imagine a greater, more radical change in the frequency of our homo sapiens sapiens domination and intention, and press for a creative vision of  halting further harm to all animate and inanimate worlds.

Weekly themes: Documentary Poetics, the Interface between Writing and Research; Dharma Imagination; Roots, Elders, Archives, Topologies; and Performance: When the Walls of the City Shake.

The Summer Writing Program is a four-week-long convocation of students, poets, fiction writers, scholars, translators, performance artists, activists, Buddhist teachers, musicians, printers, editors and others working in small press publishing. Programming includes workshops, lectures, panels, readings, special events, and more.

In dialogue with renowned practitioners, students engage in the composition of poetry, prose fiction, cross-genre possibilities, inter-arts, translation and writing for performance. Participants work in daily contact with some of the most accomplished and notoriously provocative writers of our time, meeting individually and in small groups, so that both beginning and experienced writers find equal challenge in the program.

All four weeks (or any combination of weeks) are open to any interested participant for noncredit. Students from other institutions or degree programs may also elect to attend for undergraduate or graduate credit.