Week Two Workshops and Faculty

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4

Ed Bowes | Reed Bye | Amy Catanzano | Maxine Chernoff | Laura Elrick | Kass Fleisher | Akilah Oliver | LeRoy Moore | Elizabeth Robinson | Jerome Rothenberg | Selah Saterstrom | Eleni Sikelianos | Wesley Tanner | Cecilia Vicuña | Anne Waldman

Week Two: June 22–28
Contemplative Poethics: Endangered Species and Imagination

How do we, as writers, not only engage with the urgent issues of the environment but also with the chaos and dystopia of our own minds? As languages and species (d)evolve, how do we protect the webs of language and culture? As global citizens, how do we responsibly interact with language, science and the arts? How do we unplug from the corporate media and hungry-ghost capitalist greed meltdown, and cultivate deeper interconnections? As artists, we naturally investigate our own minds, and bring this awareness to other modalities and nonhuman temporalities. We will look into meditative practices that cultivate generosity and empathy. We might also be inspired to get involved with the political process and contribute to the seismic shift offered by more humanistic USA governance.

Noncredit Course #: WRI 052, tuition: $475 per week
BA Course #: WRI 452, tuition: TBA
MFA Course #: WRI 752, tuition: TBA

Reed Bye Polyvocal Verse (Who said that?)

What is the effect of including different types/tones of voice in reading and writing? Would you like to introduce or highlight vocal exchange as a rhythmic element in your poems? We will look at aspects of the dialogic in poems, and write with them in mind. This will lead to the possibility of a poetic play in which dramatic exchange can occur primarily between linguistic rather than personal “characters.” Example texts by Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Robert Creeley, Norma Cole.

Reed Bye is a poet and songwriter. His most recent book is Join the Planets: New and Selected Poems (United Artists Books, 2005). Other published works include Passing Freaks and Graces, Gaspar Still in His Cage, and Some Magic at the Dump. A CD of original songs, Long Way Around was released in 2005 by Farfalla/ McMillan and Parrish. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, The Angel Hair Anthology, Sleeping on the Wing and Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Colorado, and teaches poetry writing workshops and courses in classic and contemporary literary studies and contemplative poetics at Naropa University.

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Amy Catanzano Quantum Poetics and New Narratives: Writing the Speed of Light

CERN’s particle accelerator is testing aspects of theoretical physics by recreating the universe during the Big Bang. How do principles in string theory, quantum mechanics and relativity apply to poetry and prose? Writing at the event horizon of genre, participants will track the “spacetime” of poems, investigate higher dimensions and point of view, and experiment outside fourth-person narration. We will provoke new forms for our writing—exploring l’informe: the unformed—at molecular and astronomical scales.

Amy Catanzano is the author of two books: iEpiphany, published by Anne Waldman's Erudite Fangs imprint, and Multiversal, selected by Michael Palmer for the Poets Out Loud Prize with Fordham University Press. Her writing appears in journals such as Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, and Volt and in the Best of Fence anthology. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She works and teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.

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Maxine Chernoff Loss and Recovery—Language, History, Landscape

As languages are lost, histories erased and landscapes damaged and obliterated, the writer has an obligation to discover, interrogate, interpret and "recover" them. In this cross-genre workshop, we will read poetry, nonfiction and brief fiction by writers including Sappho, Maria Sabina, Denise Levertov, Lorine Niedecker, Mike Davis, Rachel Solnit, Michael Ondaatje and Eudora Welty, among others. We will discuss and practice writing that recovers and recreates languages, histories and landscapes, both personally and impersonally.

Maxine Chernoff is chair of creative writing at SFSU and editor of the long-running journal New American Writing. She is the author of six books of fiction including American Heaven and Some of her Friends that Year and ten books of poetry, most recently Among the Names and The Turning (Apogee Press). With Paul Hoover, she has translated the Selected Poetry Of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn Press).

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Laura Elrick The Speculative Act and Poetic Practice

In this workshop, we will examine the increasing syncopation of thought, act, text, body and socius. How might an exploratory spatial-poetic act lead to new kinds of texts? How might we stretch poetry toward moments of embodied risk? What might both of the above do to "us"? We may look at work by Katherine Hayles, The Situationists, Carolee Schneemann, Claude Cahun, Juliana Spahr, A Media Art, Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff, among others. Come ready to write and think; be open to experiments on and off the page.

Laura Elrick's Stalk is a video-text created for the 2008 Positions Colloquium in Vancouver that documents an experimental urban poetic act. Some audio work can be heard on textsound.org. She has also written two books of poetry—sKincerity (Krupskaya, 2003) and Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School, 2005). The essay "Poetry, Ecology, and the Production of Lived Space" is forthcoming in the anthology Eco Poetics Reader (Yo-Yo Labs, 2009). Born in Boulder, Laura now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Kass Fleisher Poethical Essay: "Truth" and Reconciliation

Joan Retallack has defined the poethical form as one that "makes the intricate complexity of...our world known to us through the sensitive and imaginative enactment of complex forms." Few things in our world are more complex than the "truth," even in an age when the phrase "a true story" makes a written artifact more compelling. In fact, our culture's preference for "truth" claims has made the phrase "experimental nonfiction" (i.e., complex forms of nonfiction) an oxymoron (i.e., an aesthetic impossibility). This course will ask students to gather "truths" (they may be personal or social) and find
forms of expression that fully enact the complexity of those truths, and strive for the kinds of reconciliation that may in fact be possible if we would only adjust our cultural "understanding" of truth.

Kass Fleisher authored Talking Out of School: Memoir of an Educated Woman (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008); The Adventurous (experimental prose; Factory School, 2007); Accidental Species: A Reproduction (experimental prose; Chax Press, 2005); and The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History (nonfiction; SUNY Press, 2004). Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, Mandorla, Notre Dame Review, Postmodern Culture, and Z Magazine, and she writes screenplays with her partner, Joe Amato.

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Akilah Oliver To Enter the Day

What does it mean to enter the day? In this class, we will borrow from Fanny Howe’s sense of “bewilderment” and “spirit,” thinking of an “outrider” poetics that embodies one form, also another, “both/both,” and perhaps is never the same thing twice, a poetics that is itself an active witness
to the world as it breaks and reappears in language, memory and the unspeakable. Let’s write a long poem.

Suggested Reading:
Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress (University of California Press)
Fanny Howe, Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown (Nightboat Books)

Akilah Oliver is the author of the she said dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof/Erudite Fangs, 1999), winner of the PEN Beyond Margins Award, a book of experimental prose-poetry. Her chapbooks include: a(A)ugust (Yo-yo Labs, 2007), The Putterer’s Notebook (Belladona, 2006) and An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet, which was published by Farfalla Press (2005) in a text-and performance CD edition. She currently makes her home in Brooklyn, NY. Oliver has a new book, A Toast in the House of Friends, from Coffee House Press (Nov. 2008).

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Elizabeth Robinson Studies in Silence

This class will look at the ways silence enters our writings. Through the receptive silence of listening, through field of the page, through fractures in language and the lacunae of translation, even through clutter and overload, we will enter the space that silence makes and see what we can make of it. Each day the class will practice working noiselessly, but in so doing, we will be measuring the different possible textures of silence and how this experience can be variously molded.

Required Reading:
Lissa Wolsak, Pen Chants (Roof Books)

Suggested Reading:
Paul Celan, Breathturn (Green Integer)
bp nichol, The Martyrology (Coach House)
Sappho (trans Anne Carson), If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage)

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently The Orphan & Its Relations (Fence). She has received grants from the Fund for Poetry and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and has been a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Fence Modern Poets Prize. A co-editor of Instance Press and EtherDome chapbooks, she lives in Boulder, CO, and often teaches at Naropa.

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Jerome Rothenberg Anthologies & Assemblages

The instructor will draw from his years of experience to lead a workshop in the making of anthologies/assemblages of old and new poetry, along with instruction in translation (and related techniques) as a form of appropriation and composition. Within the short time frame, workshop participants will make selections from one or two target poets or target cultures and will convey these with commentaries (objective and/or subjective, in prose and/or verse) to create a portrait of said targets in-a-nutshell. We will also try as much as possible to have each piece function as a kind of poem-manifesto.

Suggested Reading:
Jerome Rothenberg,Technicians of the Sacred (Univ of CA Press)
Jerome Rothenberg, Poems for the Millennium (Univ of CA Press)

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known poet, polemicist, translator and anthologist with over eighty books of poetry and ten assemblages of traditional and contemporary poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium. Triptych, his thirteenth book of poems from New Directions, appeared in 2007, and a nineteenth-century prequel to Poems for the Millennium, co-edited with Jeffrey Robinson, was published in January 2009.

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Selah Saterstrom Dreaming Language: From the Margins & Across the Borders

How is writing a mode of dreaming, and how does a dreaming language become a transgressive, political act? Looking toward narrative traditions, which exist in the margins of culture, what strategies are revealed concerning capitalism and survival? How does one “divine” the dissonance within war-torn or otherwise “ruined” landscapes? Using the question as a path of inquiry (and allowing the logic of divination to inform our experiments), we will engage with such concerns as well as produce a series of short, hybrid texts.

Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Meat and Spirit Plan and The Pink Institution (both Coffee House Press). She is an editor at Trickhouse and co-curates SLAB PROJECTS, an artist/writer-curator initiative concerned with exploring the gaps between decay and reconstruction in ruined or abandoned landscapes. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Denver.

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Eleni Sikelianos Call & Response: Conversations with land and life shapes

What is this curve of the hill saying to me? What about this rock? We will play among forms around us, using a wide range of shapes (radiolarian to human) as starting place. We might engage in some Land Art, we might make line drawings; we might create characters all in the name of conversation.

Eleni Sikelianos’s most recent book is Body Clock (Coffee House Press). Other titles include The Book of Jon (City Lights) and The California Poem (Coffee House Press). She is a graduate and devotee of the Jack Kerouac School.

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Wesley Tanner Structures of the Book Manifested

What can contemporary poets learn from the strategies of the artist’s book? How can the text been approached and appended, bifurcated or occupied, and finally intensified to produce works of distinct visual unity? Students will experiment with text and image, mark-making, letterpress printing, bricolage and the figure/ground relationship. Binding structures will be discussed and tested, models will be built. Come to play, leave energized.

Wesley B. Tanner has been a printer since 1962. He currently lives in Ann Arbor where he publishes books under the imprint of Passim Editions. He has had numerous one-person shows at universities, as well as the Minnesota Center for the Book. His latest show was at the King Library at the University of Kentucky in 2008. He teaches digital studies and printmaking at the University of Michigan, and well as having a thriving book design practice.

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Cecilia Vicuña ConTemplation

In conTemplation we simultaneously enter the inner temple and the temple of action. This double movement is the model for poethical behaviour in ancient indigenous cultures where awareness sustained the world and its rich diversity. Their art and poetry were aligned with this purpose. Cecilia will share her experiences with indigenous communities as a way to open discussion on how to integrate our own poetical work with the goal of global sustainability.

A poet and artist born in Chile, she performs and exhibits her work widely in Europe, Latin America and the US. The author of 16 books, among them: QUIPOem, Wesleyan University Press, l997, and V, Trpode, Lima 2008. Spit Temple, Selected Oral Performances is forthcoming by Factory School Press, 2009. She co-edited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, Oxford University Press, 2009. Lives in New York and Chile.

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Anne Waldman Endangered/Engendered: What’s hidden? What’s revealed?

What are some possible nonhuman temporalities we might cue into, through investigation, collaboration, performance, activism and dream? And how might this awaken sensitivity to our own endangered “difference”—cultural, sexual, etc? Pick a species, a hemisphere, a climate change, a flood, a crisis, a skeletal nuance on a mountain. Something that impacts your language and imagination. We will meditate, write, walk, talk. Daily assignments will draw on texts stretching from Darwin to Lorine Niedecker to Kamau Braithwaite and A.W.’s list of “experiments of attention.”

Required Reading:
Anne Waldman, Manatee/Humanity (Penguin)

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Special Guests

Ed Bowes

Ed Bowes’s new movie “….entanglement” (2009) is an entanglement – of people, ideas, expression, and desire, which once come together, can’t well be separated. Step sisters and brothers. The movie was shot in Colorado with the poet Eleni Sikelianos, Oona Fraser performer and therapist, Angie Yeowel choreographer, and Michael jones, poet. All are persons and performers in the Naropa lineage. For more information, visit www.edbowes.org

Bowes will premier his film “....entanglement” on Friday, June 26 at Atlas Auditorium, C.U. Boulder Campus (Atlas 100) at 7pm, with a second showing at 8:30pm.

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LeRoy Moore

A former academic, writer, devotee of nonviolence, and founder of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, LeRoy Moore is a leading opponent of all things nuclear. With others he worked successfully to shut down the nearby Rocky Flats nuclear bomb factory, then less successfully to get a responsible cleanup of the plant's highly contaminated site. He now seeks reversal of the decision to open most of the Rocky Flats site for public recreation.

Moore will offer a Rocky Flats presentation on Friday. June 26.

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