Week One Courses

“The assassin is the one who bombards the existing people with molecular populars that are forever closing all of the assemblages, hurling them into an even wider and deeper black hole. The poet is one who lets loose molecular populations in hopes that this will sow the seeds of, or even engender the people to come − open a cosmos” (Deleuze & Guattari). Paul Virilio also posits the question: “To live as poet or assassin?” This week, our writers will consider personal ethos, including their current projects and “roles” in the world as scholars, activists, and educators. Where do cultures within cultures reside? To whom are we beholden?

Noncredit Course #: WRI 052, tuition: $475 per week
BA Course #: WRI 452, tuition: $1215 per week
MFA Course #: WRI 752, tuition: $1620 per week
(plus $120 registration fee)

Charles Alexander The printed word strikes with FORCE!

I spell it large because we need large, targeted, full-on shouting. Therefore and forthwith, the broadside, sharp as the serif in Garamond, quick as the step forward to print the Vandercook page, forceful as its namesake (the cannon fire from the side of a ship). We will print 3 broadsides together and post them around Naropa, and possibly around Boulder, as manifestos, proclamations, and/or poetic outbursts of inspiration. In doing so, we will learn the basics of letterpress printing and press management, along with some essentials about paper, ink, and more. We shall be poets and assassins of the printshop!

Charles Alexander is founder/director of Chax Press, publisher of innovative poetry and book arts editions. His books of poetry includeHopeful Buildings, Arc of Light / Dark Matter, Near or Random Acts, andCertain Slants, as well as several chapbooks. His honors include the Arizona Arts Award and two Fund for Poetry Awards.

Junior Burke & Bobbie Louise Hawkins Delivering Performance Text

We will examine what elements go into the effective performance of a monologue. How words on the page can become dynamic Spoken Word. How a narrative piece is naturally infused with rhythm and dynamics. How a writer/performer learns to trust the material. By the end of the week, each writer will have a piece that could be delivered for performance.

Junior Burke is a novelist (Something Gorgeous), dramatist (Soft Trumpet, Slow Guitar) and lyricist (While You Were Gone). Chair of Naropa’s Department of Writing & Poetics, he is also Director of the Low Res MFA in Creative Writing. He is the founder and (with Maureen Owen) editor of the online literary magazine not enough night.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins founded the prose fiction concentration in the Writing and Poetics Department at Naropa where she still teaches. She was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and has sixteen books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and performance monologues to her credit. Her one-woman shows include Life as We Know It and Take Love, for Instance.

Julie Carr Writing and Violence: Invoking, Avoiding, Inviting

We will read 19th, 20th, and 21st century poetry and prose (especially poetry) in which violence is a major theme. We will notice how authors invoke violence through formal devices, how they address it through direct description, and how and why they invite themselves further into this territory. Using these texts as models for our own explorations, we will move toward greater emotional and formal range in our work. Some theoretical texts will be included.

Julie Carr is the author of four books of poetry: Mead: An Epithalamion, Equivocal, 100 Notes on Violence, and the forthcoming Sarah − Of Fragments and Lines. She is the recipient of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Prize, the Sawtooth Award, and a National Poetry Series Award. She teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, lives in Denver, and is the co-publisher, with Tim Roberts, of Counterpath Press.

Photo Credit:
Don Usner

Linh Dinh Streetwise

In this prose-writing workshop, we will examine how the tasks and strategies of the creative writer overlap with those of the reporter, the spy and the street photographer – how one must learn to infiltrate, and be open to, the myriad social situations that will feed and inspire one’s writing. Authors to be examined include Robert Walser and William T. Vollman, among others.

Linh Dinh is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House and Blood and Soap; five of poems, All Around What Empties Out, American Tatts, Borderless Bodies, Jam Alerts, and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy; and a novel, Love Like Hate. His work has been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic, and Finnish, and he has also published widely in Vietnamese.

Thalia Field Logic Defiled: Essays in Practice

A workshop in how writing argues within itself, debates truth, debunks discourse, and puts forward illogical positions which can be potent forms of truth. We will look particularly at new media and old, and beyond genre.

Field’s books include: Bird Lovers, Backyard, A Prank of Georges, Incarnate: Story Material, Point and Line.

Photo Credit:
Crystal Williams

Ross Gay Mastery or Mystery?

While mastery seems to be the thing that so many of us are after (in our writing and in our lives), it seems that perhaps the overriding fact of our lives is mystery, the fact that “a great arsenic lobster” might crush us at any moment, to quote Lorca. How, then, do we negotiate our desire (and need?) for mastery while acknowledging, or feeding, the mystery? We will ask these questions and play play play.

Ross Gay’s book of poetry is Against Which. He is also the author, along with Kim Thomas, of several artists’ books, which are being represented by Vamp and Tramp Booksellers. Ross has read his work and taught workshops around the country. He teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington and in the Low-residency MFA program at Drew University.

Photo Credit:
Eleni Sikelianos

Laird Hunt Histories

Historical figures like Herodotus, Hannibal, Jesus of Nazareth, and Calamity Jane have all served as energy nodes around which writers have built significant works of prose. We’ll examine texts like Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Selah Saterstrom’s The Pink Institution, and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn to explore that prose which, if we can kick awake that poor overworked pearl, posits the historical as its grain of sand. Students will produce their own writings for consideration and helpful critique.

Laird Hunt is the author of four novels, The Impossibly, Indiana, Indiana, The Exquisite, and Ray of the Star. Writings and translations have appeared in Bomb, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, Grand Street, Fence, Brick, Inculte, and Zoum Zoum. A former UN press officer and faculty member of Naropa’s Kerouac School, he teaches fiction and literature at the University of Denver.

Photo Credit:
Dixie Knight

Stephen Graham Jones Stories That Shouldn't Work

Each day we'll have two or three stories to discuss, each of which would seem to be broken just at the level of conception. Yet, somehow, they work. How? Why? And of course discussion and workshop won't be at all limited to these stories. Rather, these stories will be our excuse to talk about and work on all things story, from titles and hook lines to issues of tense and voice and scope, all with the twin, surely-related goals of improving our own writing and getting that writing published.

Stephen Graham Jones has six novels and one collection on the shelves, and another collection out soon. He teaches in the MFA program at CU Boulder.

Bhanu Kapil Writing Sentences That Attract:

:like animals, in their display, coloration, and ritual/erratic movement. We will work on a philosophy of the sentence as species trait, the site of mutation, coupling (of all kinds), and predation. Writing, we will develop sentences that mimic, reproduce, and absorb animal behaviors at environmental rims. Do these sentences attract? Or do they collapse, opening themselves to a different kind of touch - across species (genre) domains?

Bhanu Kapil teaches year-round at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She is the author of three prose/poetry collections: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Incubation: a space for monsters, and humanimal [a project for future children].

Photo Credit:
Verónica Márquez

Jaime Manrique Dreams, "Voices," Visions, Riffs, Meditations, Rants

We will read and discuss examples of dreams, visions, “voices,” meditations, riffs and rants in the works of fiction writers and poets such as Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Roberto Bolaño, Walt Whitman, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and García Lorca. The instructor will provide a reading packet.

Jaime Manrique is a bilingual writer born in Colombia. He taught as Associate Professor in the MFA in writing at Columbia University from 2001 to 2008. He has published novels, volumes of poetry, essays, and translations. Among his most recent works are: Our Lives are the Rivers; Tarzan, My Body, Christopher Columbus; Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. He is currently at work on Cervantes Street, a novel about the life of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

Jennifer Moxley Radical Receptivity

We will approach the week’s theme by turning the poet’s role on its head: poet not as writer, but as reader; not as performer, but as listener; not as ideologue, but as interpreter. Instead of asking, “how do poets change the world” we’ll ask, “how does the world change poets?” We will read essays and poems by (among others) Paul Valéry, Ann Lauterbach, and Robert Duncan. We will write the poems these questions suggest.

Jennifer Moxley is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which are Clampdown and The Line. She is poetry editor of The Baffler and contributing editor of The Poker. She works as an Associate Professor at the University of Maine.

Photo Credit:
J. Parkman Carter

Jennifer Scappettone Languages of Dislocation: Poetry Of & Off the Page

Is there a place for poetry in a virtualizing universe? We will explore and experiment with material whose response is a delirious yes—text that revels in charging the confines of the page. Visual and sound poetry, installation and performance works will help us compose our own answers to the (old) question: what forms are poems obliged or inspired to take as language goes viral, in the face of total information, digitization, and post-literary culture?

Jennifer Scappettone, a poet, researcher, translator, and digital salvage artist, is author most recently of From Dame Quickly. Exit 43, an archaeology of Superfund sites and opera of pop-ups, is in progress; pop-up scores are being adapted for performance in collaboration with choreographer Kathy Westwater as PARK. She edited Aufgabe 7, devoted to contemporary Italian poetics, and Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse. She’s an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

David Trinidad The Personal Poem

We will explore what makes certain poems personal and how one’s own observations and experiences can be transformed into art. We will look at “Personal Poems” of Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan, following this thread through such New York School poets as James Schuyler, Joe Brainard, Alice Notley, and Tim Dlugos. We will also look at Joanne Kyger’s diary poems as manifestations of the personal/everyday. Assignments will be given and participants’ poems discussed in class.

David Trinidad’s books include Plasticville, Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse (with Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie), The Late Show, and By Myself (with D.A. Powell) – all published by Turtle Point Press. He co-edited Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry and is editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos. Trinidad teaches at Columbia College Chicago, where he co-edits the journal Court Green.

Special Guests

Steve Evans

Steve Evans is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maine, where he directs the Graduate Program, curates the New Writing Series, and does projects with the National Poetry Foundation. Since 2001, he has chronicled his adventures in contemporary poetry at the Third Factory website

Joanne Kyger

Joanne Kyger is known for her ties to the poets of Black Mountain College, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beat Generation. She has taught at Mills College, the New College, and the SWP. She is the author of over 20 books of poetry, including About Now: Collected Poems, Not Veracruz, and Lo & Behold. Recent awards include a 2006 award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award.

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