Archive After All // June 9–29, 2024
After war or disaster; after the end; after the grieving, a feeling comes—a feeling for embodied memory, a feeling for the archive after all: imperfect, partial, yet humming with the voices, images, artifacts and records of culture: a counterforce to erasure and obliteration; a memorial, and new beginning all at once each time the archive is activated; each time the sentence is set down, for language too is an archive. We mean to think with and through the archive as both a conceptual frame and practical resource for world-building: “the imagination is not only holy, it is precise / it is not only fierce, it is practical” (di Prima).
By high-lighting the archive, we mean also to celebrate the fifty years of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa: to listen and study with the collection of postwar poetics, and counter-culture activity & thought that can be found in the digital collection. We mean also to take joy in the beautiful flourishing and survival of an experimental and contemplative school in these late, hard hours of the Capitalocene, and to ask the questions that will be required to sustain the project over the next fifty years: what will be the signal challenges for sustaining committed arts communities in the coming decades; what will be key infrastructures to assemble or rejuvenate; what stances need to be taken, what measures undertaken to further the project of collective study of writing as an art, spiritual practice, and agitating force for social change.
To further both celebration & solidarity, and as a first response to these questions we invoke the necessary and alchemical possibilities of coming together in community and imaginative coalition; and we invite writers, and students, and thinkers, and performers to continue the lines of critical voicing, creative work, and spiritual sensibility that have defined the Summer Writing Program since 1974.
Faculty & guests include Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, CAConrad, Carolina Ebeid, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Cedar Sigo, Laird Hunt, Lisa Jarnot, Dawn Lundy Martin, Eleni Sikelianos, and others.
As part of a contemplative education project, and an experiment in community, the Summer Writing Program does not engage in gatekeeping, and nearly all writers, artists, and interested or curious students are welcome to register—there is no application fee. Scholarships are also 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 /
In these long seasons of emergencies we mean to recall a futurity in which an economy of shared human flourishing arrives; we intend to think memory as a speculative fiction, to think memory as a reckoning case; to remember the responsibilities of the writer/artist to agitate, and imagine life otherwise; we mean to remember through the image of Indra’s Net, the radical interdependence we are all caught up within and constituted by; to remember memory as the dreamer does; to think memory as/or beyond the body’s limits; we mean to inhabit the memorial as a social project and urgency. Read more.
Framed by the ever-increasing damage to the biosphere, and forces of war and genocide, the world is haunted ruins; and it’s there on that terror-ground we find ourselves troubled by questions: how precisely can writing address this era of ruined realities of persons, animals, spirits and cities; what are the songs and ceremonies that could give access to an “equal music,” a music that does justice to the world at the brink, the person pressed to the edge of all living, the disappearance of almost innumerable species; what are the rituals & ceremonies that have sustained creativity and poesis from the beginning of culture as a material practice; what ceremonies are called for now, and which are the ones that will open to living formations and reconstruction. Read more.
We know that art alone is not revolution, that art alone is not the answer to the questions of how life be otherwise; and yet we still dream through art’s emergent possibilities and insurgent edges precisely because art is at once “essence, science, and vision.” How can we extend this radical lineage of thinking, writing, and performance in which art is “our magic weapon,” as Amiri Baraka called it, “to create and recreate the world and our selves as a part of it. How can art become the unpredictable event, the insurgent dream that disrupts, ruptures and transforms the on-going regimes of consciousness and control. How can art lead us into, or catalyze the ungovernable, transdisciplinary forms of practice and urgency needed to meet our contemporaneity, its many emergencies.
