The Living Thread // June 8–28, 2025
Program Information
This program, founded by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg celebrates its 51st year! This year’s theme, The Living Thread, is inspired by this duet between Meredith Monk and Anne Waldman recorded at the Jack kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics: The Living.
The Living Thread is an invocation and invitation to students, scholars and friends out there in league with magnanimous angels, dakinis, protectors of mind and lokapalas (guardians) of our Naropa commons. We summon wisdom holders, ancestors, founders, lineages traditional and wild, of art, music and poetry under the great Naropa Sycamores.
We are ready once again to WRITE, to read, to make books, to meditate, to think on our own, converse and study with investigative intention to move mountains, and listen to one another in the myriad ways we know how to. We also compose on the tongue, mouth syllables, collaborate together with performative glee. Among the skyscrapers of NYC Frank O’Hara told us to lookup more often. Here we touch the stars and Perseid showers and bathe in negative ions for mental acuity. We practice tonglen ritual, a vow of empathy for everyone. We notice and make note of all the particulars of this entangled Indra’s Net with tenderness, opposition, and the mantra Do No Harm.
Writing is our psychic shield. Come make your own version and thread of “survival dancing”.
As part of a contemplative education project, and an experiment in community, the Summer Writing Program does not engage in gatekeeping, and all writers, artists, and interested or curious students are welcome to register—there is no application fee. Scholarships available.
Poetry / Fiction / Meditation / Somatics / Dharma Arts / Contemplative Experiments / Divinatory Poetics / Letterpress Printing / Recording Studio / SWP Audio Archive / No Application Fee / No Gate-Keeping / An Experiment in Writing & Community / Scholarships Available /
Cody-Rose Clevidence, CAConrad, poupeh missaghi, Elizabeth Willis, HR Hegnauer, Edwin Torres, Safaa Fathy, Anselm Berrigan, Dai Kato, and others!
To find the path to life lived otherwise requires first the fulcrum of refusal or rejection––to turn one’s back on the corrupt or constraining familiar forces in order to set out for that liberating field of first permission, that world elsewhere. Art, writing, and dreaming have always been speculative technologies and practices for finding and forging possibilities of collective life beyond the heavy limits of our contemporaneity. Sometimes the other world is occult a cell of activists alloyed by the gnosis of secret knowledge, at other times the possibility for a new world is activated by and emerges through public assembly of mass street protest as Butler argues: “So when people amass on the street, one implication seems clear: they are still here, and still there; they persist; they assemble, and so manifest the understanding that their situation shared, or the beginning of such an understanding. And even when they are not speaking or do not present a set of negotiable demands, the call for justice is being enacted: the bodies assembled ‘say’ ‘we are not disposable,’ whether or not they are using words at the moment; what they say, as it were, is ‘we are still here, persisting, demanding greater justice, a release from precarity, a possibility of a livable life.”
How can art and writing lead us into new forms of collective life; how can art and writing catalyze or call these elsewhere possibilities into being: this questioning for a world elsewhere, and life lived otherwise will inflect our time together; and by coming together within these field of questions, we intend to extend a radical lineage of writers, artists, culture-makers for whom this search for a habitable future is part of the vocation of being. We’ll test the open question that writing always is through experiments with the line, the sentence, the song, and the bodies that articulate them all in lived social critique; we’ll listen and abide with one another in conversation and debate; we’ll respect the possibilities of wandering and errancy; always staying open to the happy accident of collective work, the shock of recognition in the new friend––for in each friend one finds an elsewhere world.
Cedar Sigo, Farid Matuk, Jennifer Firestone, Prageeta Sharma, Eleni Sikelianos, Anne Waldman, Margaret Randall, Joshua Beckman, Anna Dinallo, and others!
We have made for ourselves on this earth an era of intensifying extinction. And more recently the years of excess death from the pandemic, and the many forms of state neglect elicit both the need and urgency of an antithesis reality, and by this designation, we mean the many forms of counter-world-making and preservation we’ll need to navigate this era of ecocide. Missing the metabolic thrum of all those disappeared species, we’ll hold together with forms of mourning and grief, and the question of how precisely to honor and sing of the dying physicalites presses on each of us. Yet beyond these days and seasons are alive more than ever with a need to envision and enact challenges to the status quo, to mutate and evolve beyond this world-system, and its current trajectory toward brutalizing catastrophe. Our grounding mantra for this antithesis reality teaming with diverse life: do no harm, poet!
In our collective laboratory, we want to think towards this antithesis reality and new environments: to experiment with admixtures and assemblages; to choose the possibilities of hybridity rather than strict codes of genre, gender; to translate from and among communities of care and concern––solidarity rising, alchemically, from those exchanges and passages; urgently, to forge the figures, images, songs of a (coming) antithesis-reality, antithetical to all the forces that would make the living world and biosphere a site of extraction, exploitation, and accelerating extinction. We have an intuition that through this collective mediation on and ecological diversity, social difference and hybridity that we’ll find make a poetics that is enlivened, and enlivening; we want to commit to the urgency of exploring this intuition and of substantiating this intuition in our works; we hope to continue, and in continuing, ride the urgent wave of verse.
Tongo Eisen-Martin, Lydia Lunch, Valerie Hsiung, Steven Dunn, Katie Jean Shinkle, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Angel Dominguez, Will Alexander, Jude Blitz, and others!
“Always the seer is a sayer,” Emerson writes indicating a crucial (American) interrelation between imagination and action, between the dream of the poet or prophet and its expression. Taking this intersection of vision and vocality as the ground for our collective thought and study, we’ll explore the possibilities of artistic vision as it finds voice and form, we’ll discuss the way in which art and political vision both overlap and diverge. For example, we know that art alone is not revolution, and yet we still home in on its emergent possibilities to incite the unpredictable event; or propel a new feeling in the social body; or transform our understanding of the limits of the world. We’re committed to art precisely for its capacity to be at once “essence, science, and vision,” as Amiri Baraka called it, “our magic weapon to create and recreate the world and our selves as a part of it.”
Knowing that performance and community can provide leadings, we’ll ask some questions of each other: what needs to be in our repertoire of resistance and creation for the here and now. And as we practice bringing voice and vision into being both as lone performers, and as member of collectives & communities, what principles will help us survive the disaster of the Capitalocene/Anthropocene; what will be the insurrectionary visions needed against the violent confusions of this world-system; what voices will chorus against the forms of repression that increasingly define political life. How can writing, performance, theory, music, and critical thought be brought to bear against the forces that seek to control life, to narrow it down to the pure extraction of profit? how can art be a catalyst for abolition?
