Anne Waldman’s performance with Ambrose Bye and Thurston Moore.

Laughing Goat Coffeehouse
1709 Pearl St
Boulder, CO 80302

Naropa Summer Writing Program, Boulder, CO

WEEK 4: July 22 – July 28, 2013

Third Mind: A Poetics of Performance, Cooperation and Affinity

The Kerouac School’s final SWP week is a concatenation of many voices, seeing that poetry, and storytelling, and cut up, and vocal play in its many guises are not closed systems.  Rather we delight in the possibilities of an applied poetics, applied in this case to working with others, be it the recording studio, the letterpress print shop, the meditation hall, the hallways, byways and hiking trails of our “experiment” in collaboration. The term “third mind” comes from the collaborations and cut-up and erasure experiments of William Burroughs (former teacher at the KSDP) and Brion Gysin, writer and visual artist. We will create libretti, music, oral duets, movies, multifaceted narrations, and innovations with montage, and see what emerges “dreaming as one.”

For more information on Week 4, click here.

Naropa Summer Writing Program, Boulder, CO

WEEK 3: July 15 – July 21, 2013

History, Kulchur Connections and Beyond

This week we are reaching out to poets and writers whose work has been strategic in addressing other kulchurs through translation, educational projects, investigative poetics, and cross-cultural collaboration of all kinds with forays into Morocco, the UK, India, and pockets of our own continent. We are asking our guests to bring us the news from other zones of creative and generative activity.  How are we suited to create our own schools and cultural programs, and raise support for artist-run enterprises that might be sustainable into the future?  How can we be progressive entrepreneurs of a new cross-cultural dynamism?  How can we better understand and enlarge our awareness through forums, archives, libraries, international online magazines, study centers, and residencies that promote exchange through study and scholarship of languages and cultures? The projects to consider might reach back centuries, or exist in the interstices of a new hybrid diaspora.

For more information on Week 3, click here.

Naropa Summer Writing Program, Boulder, CO

WEEK 2: July 8 – July 14, 2013

Hellfire, Drought, and Brimstone: A New Eco-Poetics

Alarm! Human driven modification to the planet’s ecosystems contributes to rising atmosphere greenhouse gas levels causing extreme fluctuations in weather, altered species distribution, and increase in extinction rates. Whole cultures and languages are going out of existence as well, affected by basic human struggle for survival under increasing duress.  As we experience, our planet is undergoing unprecedented instances of climate change, with water clearly emerging as the inestimable element in the balance of our “oikos” (root of the word “ecology” meaning house). Fire, floods, and drought have been causing havoc, as well as strange denial in the will or the polis around issues of gun control in a culture run wild with violence. The connections between man-made plunder, from frakking to war, have been established in terms of how we eschew guardianship of our planet and our own communities. Can poets and artists envision an alternative to this dystopia? How do we address violence, amnesia, death- wish, and the extreme- almost biblical conditions- of an altered world? How are we adapting?

For more information on Week 2, read here.

Naropa Summer Writing Program, Boulder, CO

WEEK 1: July 1-July 7 2013

History, Race and Polis, and “Karma” of the Modernists

The Kerouac School at Naropa University, founded in 1974 of its own volition and not as an extension or offshoot of an English Department, has roots in the most innovative aspects of the New American Poetry, and has extended itself over decades to include new praxis and world poetics, reveling in diversity and hybrid form. It seems important given the sorry divisive and tormented nature of US of A political adversity, including gender, class and racial divides, to review and examine “where we have been.” What is the legacy of Williams, Stevens, Pound and Stein, and their post-modern inheritors? How did they set the bar, what were their prejudices and why do we still feed off their work? What is the continuing narrative? Where has the gaze gone since, beyond Euro-centrism? This week we will look at our own modes of attitude, and the dark shadows of influence under newer world “orders.” The Kerouac School has always looked to collaboration amongst artists and art forms and the philosophies and orality of Asian and indigenous art forms. Poet/art thinker Bill Berskon will present a lecture on Gertrude Stein and her family art legacy, and Jerome Rothenberg will carry us forward to investigate the continuing shamanic powers of poetry.

For more information on Week 1, read here.

Convocation

A formal welcome for all 2013 Summer Writing Program students. Meet faculty and your fellow writers and learn important information on your responsibilities as a SWP student.

SYMBIOSIS is our rallying anthem for the summer of 2013 as poets and writers and thinkers and printers and translators and performers make their art with an awareness of the interconnected sym-together, biosis-living of different biological species. By extending the metaphor, we look at the mutualistic relationship of our own imaginations.

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.

Click here to read more about the SWP.

June 20 – 22, 2013

Schule fur Dichtung, Vienna Poetry School

Workshop and performance

June 20 – 22, 2013

Schule fur Dichtung, Vienna Poetry School

Workshop and performance