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.

Mega Jam Finale with Anne Waldman, Ambrose Bye, and Thurston Moore

The Jam will be introduced by a set of readings and music by the great poet Anne Waldman (USA), Ambrose Bye (USA) synth and great guitarist, Thurston Moore (USA), co-founder of Sonic Group Youth!

Read more about the fiEstival here.

Going Vocal workshop with Anne Waldman & Ambrose Bye

The aim  in the workshop is to experiment with ways our writing guides us to orality – to performative ideas in recorded composition. How do we want to hear ourselves and our writing? We will start with vocalization of selected texts of others in an ensemble experiment, and then create our own pieces  (bi or multi-lingual a possibility) through a series of “experiments of attention” (dream, cut-up, travel, memory). We will invite collaboration with one another as writers, as voices,  and as musicians. We will consider writing as score or libretto, work with spechstimme, and create a 4th dimension wall of sound.  Ambrose Bye will be available to accompany us musically as well as record and edit/shape the work. And in-house performance at the last session.

Espace Darja
113 Avenue Mers Sultan, 6ème étage, Casablanca

April 30 & May 1, 2014

Going Vocal workshop with Anne Waldman & Ambrose Bye

The aim  in the workshop is to experiment with ways our writing guides us to orality – to performative ideas in recorded composition. How do we want to hear ourselves and our writing? We will start with vocalization of selected texts of others in an ensemble experiment, and then create our own pieces  (bi or multi-lingual a possibility) through a series of “experiments of attention” (dream, cut-up, travel, memory). We will invite collaboration with one another as writers, as voices,  and as musicians. We will consider writing as score or libretto, work with spechstimme, and create a 4th dimension wall of sound.  Ambrose Bye will be available to accompany us musically as well as record and edit/shape the work. And in-house performance at the last session.

Espace Darja
113 Avenue Mers Sultan, 6ème étage, Casablanca

April 30 & May 1, 2014

Featured Speaker at the Transitions and Transactions II: Literature and Creative Writing Pedagogies in Community Colleges Conference

Borough of Manhattan Community College in Tribeca, New York

The conference focus is to cultivate a community of teachers interested in improving their practice by sharing pedagogical questions, concerns, successes, theories, research and intellectual curiosities about the ways in which teaching and learning happens and does not happen in the community college literature and creative writing classroom.

Poets House presents A Painter and His Poets: The Art of George Schneeman.

On view April 22 through September 20, this exhibition is the first major retrospective of the painter’s collaborative works with prominent poets of the second-generation New York School, among them Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Larry Fagin, Maureen Owen, and Michael Brownstein. A full-color brochure will accompany the exhibition, featuring new essays by Bill Berkson and Peter Schjeldahl as well as an excerpt from Alice Notley’s 1978 interview with the artist.

Curated by Bill Berkson and Ron Padgett, two of Schneeman’s close friends and collaborators, the exhibition gathers life-size portraits of poets on canvas, some of them nudes; collaborations using magazine clippings, handwritten poems, and a wide range of art materials; fresco portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Waldman, John Godfrey, and others; book covers; and other treasures from the artist’s estate.

Exhibition Events:

Tuesday, April 22:
• 6:00-8:00 p.m.: Opening Reception

Saturday, April 26:
• 3:00-4:30 p.m.: Poetry reading with Michael Brownstein, Larry Fagin, Alice Notley, Maureen Owen, Harris Schiff, Anne Waldman, and Lewis Warsh, introduced by Bill Berkson.
• 5:00-6:00 p.m.: Panel discussion with Bill Berkson, Larry Fagin, Alice Notley, Maureen Owen, Peter Schjeldahl, and Anne Waldman, moderated by Ron Padgett.

Publication:
A Painter and His Poets: The Art of George Schneeman
• Exhibition catalogue: 16 pages, full color
• Edited by Ron Padgett and Bill Berkson
• New texts by Bill Berkson and Peter Schjeldahl, with an excerpt from an interview with the artist by Alice Notley

William S. Burroughs Centennial Conference

CUNY Graduate Center: 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 9206-7, New York, NY

Oliver Harris
John M. Bennett
Jed Birmingham
Ann Douglas
Jan Herman
Barry Miles
Charles Plymell
Geoffrey D. Smith
Anne Waldman
Regina Weinreich

Held in honor of William S. Burroughs’s centennial, and the WSB@100 Festival in New York City scheduled for the entirety of the month of April, 2014, this conference will explore the life and myth of one of the most innovative and influential twentieth-century American writers and artists. Join us for a series of talks and roundtables by editors, artists, and scholars on a range of issues from the problem of gender in Burroughs’ work to his role in postwar-America little magazines, his still unpublished archive materials, cut-up experiments and novels, and his photography.

SCHEDULE, APRIL 25, 2014:

10 AM – Editing Burroughs
John Bennett
Geoffrey Smith

11: 00 AM – Burroughs and Literary Magazines
Jed Birmingham
Charles Plymell
Jan Herman

12:30 PM – Lunch

2:00 PM – Biography and Photography
Oliver Harris conversation with Barry Miles

3:30 PM – Gender Trouble
Anne Waldman
Regina Weinreich
Anne Douglas

5:30 PM – Keynote: On the Cut Ups
Oliver Harris

Cosponsored by the English Students Association, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, the PhD Program in English, and the WSB@100 Festival.