Program Information
The Living Thread :: Eco-Urgency & Antithesis Reality
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.
Week 2 Schedule
All events will be held in the Performing Arts Center on Naropa University’s Arapahoe Campus, unless otherwise noted.
Schedule is subject to change.
Monday, 6/16
1:00–2:30 PM :: Opening Panel:
Panelists: Anne Waldman (chair):
3:00–4:00 PM :: MFA Lecture ::
Tuesday, 6/17
1:00–2:30 PM :: Lecture ::
3:00–4:00 PM ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Wednesday, 6/18
1:00–3:00 PM :: Dharma Arts ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: SWP Staff Reading
Thursday, 6/19
1:00–2:00 PM :: Artist Talk ::
2:30–3:30 PM ::
4:00–5:30 PM :: Student Panel
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading:
Friday, 6/20
1:00–2:30 PM :: Artist Talk ::
3:00–4:00 PM :: Colloquium
7:00–9:30 PM :: Student Reading
Saturday, 6/21
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading:
Workshop Faculty for Week 2
Workshop :: Anne Waldman
Workshop description forthcoming.
Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Rues du Monde, English and French (Apic Press, Algeria 2024), Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House 2023), a memoir with poetry, essays, interviews, Para Ser Estrella a Medianoche, English and Spanish, (Arrebato Libros, Madrid 2021) and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat 2022). Her most recent book from Penguin is Trickster Feminism, and forthcoming: Mesopotopia (2025).
The Grammy-nominated William S. Burroughs-inspired opera and movie, Black Lodge, with music by David T. Little and libretto by Waldman, premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022. Patti Smith has called Waldman’s album SCIAMACHY with cover and interior art by Pat Steir, 2020: “Exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times.”
She was arrested at Rocky Flats with Daniel Ellsberg and Allen Ginsberg in the 1970s, reading poems that challenged deliveries of plutonium for the manufacturing of pits for nuclear warheads. Waldman has published over 60 books of poetry, including the 1,000 page feminist epic: The Iovis Trilogy: Colors The Mechanism of Concealment which won the PEN Center Literary Award for Poetry.
She was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement in 2015. Waldman is one of the founders and a former Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery and a founder of the Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, CO where she is the Artistic Director of the annual Summer Writing Program.
POETICS/POETRY ON MYTH, CASTE, RACE, SUPREMACY, AND EMANCIPATORY PRACTICES :: Prageeta Sharma
In our workshop we will be watching Anand Patwardhan’s film We Are Not Your Monkeys (1997) and reading poetry by Dalit writers and poets to generate a discussion and poetics/poetry on myth, caste, race, supremacy, and emancipatory practices.
Prageeta Sharma is the author of six collections of poetry, which includes her forthcoming collection Onement Won out from Wave Books this fall. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Race, Creative Writing, and Artistic and Aesthetic Practices, a recent recipient of the 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and is currently the Henry G. Lee ’37 professor of English at Pomona College.
FLYING BETWEEN FACT AND IMAGINATION :: Cedar Sigo
In this class we will explore the dependent relationship between literary fact and the imagination. As writers we can use the details of our real lives to reinforce any action that occurs within our work. In fact, sometimes the use of traditional sentence structure can camouflage the imaginative statement and make it read immediately as truth. Other times we try on tones of voice as if we are trying on clothing, quickly and for fun. The poet Ted Berrigan once said wrote, “Be born again daily, die nightly for a change of style.” The use of the first person ‘I’ does not necessarily indicate that the real author is speaking. The ‘I’ is sometimes a crude device used to connect made-up details with actual instances of autobiography. We must remember that the intention of a poem and an essay are not always so far apart. In this workshop we will investigate the work of John Wieners, Tongo Eisen Martin, Joanne Kyger, June Jordan, Eileen Myles, Joe Brainard and Sei Shonagon among others. We will use these writers to spark new turns within our own voices. There will be plenty of time for in class writing, collective reading, conversation, performance and collaboration.
Cedar Sigo is a poet and member of the Suquamish Nation. He studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of endless books and pamphlets of poetry, including All This Time (Wave Books, 2021), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently Siren of Atlantis (Wave Books, 2025). In 2022 he received a grants to artist’s award from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has taught all over the country including The University of Washington, Bard College, Washington University, Naropa University and The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.
STEAL IT BACK: THE CRAFTS OF PLEASURE & LIBERATION :: Farid Matuk
We’ll consider decolonial and relativist takes from Fargo Tbakhi and others to denaturalize what we might mean by the notion of “craft.” Edouard Glissant, Nuar Alsadir, Juliana Delgado Lopera and Danez Smith will help us think through how we’re positioned and to whom we address our texts and performances. Alice Notley, James Baldwin, Fred Moten, Mary Ruefle, and Audre Lorde will be with us as we begin again to weave our own embodied relations to language. The stakes are high, the keys are on each other’s tongues.
Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), The Real Horse (University of Arizona Press, 2018), and Moon Mirrored Indivisible (University of Chicago Press, 2025). With visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From Spanish, Matuk has translated Tilsa Otta’s selected poems, publishing these under the title The Hormone of Darkness (Graywolf Press, 2024). His poems appear in The Paris Review, The Nation, Brooklyn Rail, Bomb magazine, Lana Turner Journal, Poetry magazine, among others, and they have been anthologized most recently in The Best American Experimental Poetry, Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, and the Library of America’s Latino Poetry. Matuk’s work has been supported by residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship from United States Artists.
DIALOGUES, CORRESPONDENCE, COLLABORATION :: Jennifer Firestone
In this workshop, we will consider poems written as echoes, conversations, and collective gestures. We will reconsider and subvert the patriarchal and hierarchical model of influence to instead re-envision influence as dialogical and generative, bringing it back to its Latin roots of in– meaning “into” + fluere meaning “to flow.” We will study poets such as Bernadette Mayer, Harryette Mullen, Jen Bervin, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Hoa Nguyen, Terrence Hayes among others, and widen our scope about poetry-making by participating in collaborations with classmates, inanimate objects, other species, and beloved, “influential” poets of your own choice.
Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry including her latest collection Story by Ugly Duckling Presse. Firestone is the co-editor of two anthologies, the recently published MIT collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry (co-edited with Marcella Durand) and Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax). Firestone co-authored the collection LITtle by LITtle with photographer and urban geographer, Laura Y. Liu. She is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies and Chair of Writing at the New School’s Eugene Lang College.
Sympoiesis: Making-with :: Eleni Sikelianos
“Nothing makes itself; [nothing is really auto-poietic or self-organizing]… earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with” (Donna Haraway). Lineage, in its profoundest sense, vibrates with the ways our lives are intertwined, at the very level of our DNA, with the plants and animals and air around us. In this workshop devoted to worlding-with, we’ll peer into the micromacrocosmos, following an atom or a sparrow or human through time. In our time together, we will consider how to think and create in proprioceptive relation, with bees, trees, streams, poems, and/or other ancestors.
Eleni Sikelianos, a graduate of the Kerouac School, is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Your Kingdom and What I Knew (and two hybrid memoirs: The Book of Jon, and You Animal Machine, which has recently been adapted into performance by the Nostalgia Theatre Company in Athens Greece.
Working in ecopoetics for decades, her writings are deeply influenced by family as well as animal and planetary lineages, and have been much anthologized and translated. Dedicated to the many ways poetry manifests in communities, she has taught workshops in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons, and collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists, among them Philip Glass and Ed Bowes.
MFA Lecture :: Zazil Collins
Zazil Alaíde Collins. Mexican writer and musical curator interested in the spatiality of poetics. She is the author of the poetry books Junkie de nada (Lenguaraz, 2009), No todas las islas (Conaculta-Instituto Sudcaliforniano de Cultura, 2012, Poetry Award La Paz City 2011), El corazón, tan cerca de la boca (Abismos-Mantarraya, 2014), Sipofene (La tinta del silencio, 2016), the bilingual chapbook Pink (Ofi Press, 2018) and Omen (Valparaíso, 2023). Her work was selected for the General Anthology of Mexican Poetry: From the Second half of the Twentieth Century to Our Days (Océano, 2014), Descarga Cultura UNAM and the prize Poesía en Voz Alta17 at Casa del Lago UNAM. She is the coeditor of the project Musicians in Mexico City, together with US musician Todd Clouser. M.F.A in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, and currently a Ph.D Candidate at CU Boulder.
Web: http://zazilcollins.com/ https://linktr.ee/zazilcollins
Dharma Art :: Anna Dinallo
Dr. Anna Dinallo (They/Them) is a lover of complexity, contradiction, and creative investigation.
Dr. D is a curandera cross-trained in expressive arts counseling (MA), linguistic studies (PhD) and Daoist medicine. They are a Doctor of Oriental Medicine practicing acupuncture and herbalism, and a psychotherapist who teaches in the Graduate Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling program at Naropa University. Dr. D’s research and art include reclaiming and connecting with ancestral linages through nature, family constellation, dance, and stories from the stars. The face is the library of lived story and elemental preference. Let’s show face and explore road maps and hidden gems.
May our time together create mirrors and miracles, as the body is a microcosm for the macrocosm.
Special Guest :: Joshua Beckman
Joshua Beckman is a poet, editor, and translator. His most recent books include Animal Days and Tomaž, an extended biographical poem about the life of Tomaž Šalamun created from interviews.
Guest Artist :: Margaret Randall
Poet, independent scholar, photographer, translator, and social activist Margaret Randall was born in New York City and grew up in New Mexico. Taking active part in the Mexican student movement of 1968 and then living in Cuba for eleven years and Sandinista Nicaragua for four, Randall returned to the United States in 1984, only to face deportation when the government declared her writings “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” With the support of many, she won her case in 1989. Randall is the author of more than two hundred books, including Che on My Mind (2014), Time’s Language: Selected Poems 1959-2018, and I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary (2020). Her most recent titles include WILD CARD (Casa Urraca Press) LETTERS FROM THE EDGE: OUTRIDER CONVERSATIONS (New Village Press), Artists in My Life, Luck, and Home. She has received the Poet of Two Hemispheres award from Poesía en Paralelo Cero, Quito, Ecuador, AWP’s George Garrett Award, Albuquerque’s Creative Bravo Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of New Mexico, among other recognitions.
Harry Smith Recording Studio
Ambrose Bye is a musician, engineer, and producer living in Mexico City, and is the co-founder of Fast Speaking Music with Anne Waldman. He has produced over 20 albums and frequently collaborates with poets. Recent productions include “Among the Poetry Stricken” (Clark Coolidge and Thurston Moore) and “Artificial Happiness Button” (Heroes are Gang Leaders). He has worked and performed at Masnaa and the Ecole de la Literature in Casablanca, Le Maison de Poesie in Paris, the fieEstival Maelstrom in Brussels, the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Pathway to Paris at Montreal POP 2015, and Casa Del Lago in Mexico City. He has also been involved in the recording studio and workshops at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University since 2009.
Fast Speaking Music
