Beat Babes, Brave-hearts & Bodhisattvas
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The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is rolling out Womxn of Naropa this year for the whole of Poetry Month! It’s how we’re embracing innovation in the pandemic, grateful for such time and opportunity to curate this whole month for you from our archive. Each week will have a focus: multiculturalism, gender queerness, sacred & profane, lyricism. Each day a new recording will be posted through our social media (FB/IG/Twitter @kerouacschool) culminating with recordings curated of current students, faculty, and alum, per usual.
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If you’re new to this event, it was initiated by alumna Lark Fox as a way to celebrate the women who broke the cultural barrier on the male dominated, homo-social environment of the literary world. Women of Naropa has been many things “…being packed into the basement student lounge, belly dancers, pianists, death rituals, sound miracles (one year we almost had no sound system), bahnu writing one off love poems, BLH scolding the reading style of young poets, a plastic shower curtain backdrop, homemade programs and broadsides in cafes, wait lists of readers, always Anne, always flowers, always crowds, always cookies, always ritual and always poems…”.
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We’ve now shifted from Women to Womxn in order to allow a broader spectrum of the embodiment of what it is to be female, feminine, femme, butch, dyke, all the way to the epicene body horizon. The feminine principle is inherent to the writing process as embryonic and nurturing language into being. This is the evolution of our sangha as cohort as lineage.
This year we cannot bring you the embodied practice that this reading is become, but we DO invite you to make your own altar to the Womxn of Naropa by grabbing their books, placing a candle, arranging other ephemera like pussy hats and feathers. At the end of the Poetry Month, you can check out our new SoundCloud & the playlist of the womxn in 2020 who were able to contribute their reading of original works to culminate this month-long marathon of feminist contemporary poetry!
Take a listen to one, some or all of these recordings and use these luminary gxdesses as inspiration to your practice this month.
If you require a transcript or close captioning of this content, please be in direct contact with Cassie Smith, csmith@naropa.edu, Naropa’s Digital Marketing Coordinator, to make those accommodations.
Also, be sure to explore our Master of Arts program in Creative Writing and Poetics!
April 1 – 5 [Introducing WoN Outrider Lineage]
Women Coming of Age in the Beat Generation: Being Writers and Being Women
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| Anne Waldman on Ecstatic Poetry |
| Honoring the Muse: Boulder City Safehouse benefit with various participants |
Honoring the Muse: Boulder City Safehouse benefit Pt. II
Four Extraordinary Women, a lecture series by Bobbie Louise Hawkins
| Marguerite Duras |
| Ruth Draper |
| Camille Paglia |
| Colette |
April 6 – 12 [Multi-cultural Womxn of Prismatic Thought]
| Joy Harjo on Native American Women Writers |
Joy Harjo on Native American Women Writers Pt. II
| Revolutionary Women in Pan American Literature (Margaret Randall) |
Revolutionary Women in Pan American Literature Pt. II
| Women in Japanese Literature by Yuko Eishima |
Student Women’s Panel 1996
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Cultural Activism and Writing
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| Haiku: Japense and English Poetry a lecture series by Pat Donegan |
| Thangka |
| Haiku |
| Haiku pt. 2 |
| Haiku pt. 3 |
| Haibun |
| Rango |
| Imagists: Modernists, Beats and on |
April 13 – 19 [Transcending Binary Language Identities]
Feminism & Gender Panel
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Feminism & Gender Panel Pt. II
| Erica Hunt on Gender & Language |
Politics of Identity/Gender/Queer Theory Panel
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Politics of Identity/Gender/Queer Theory Panel Pt. II
Writing the Body/The Body Politic/Feminism & Gender
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Writing the Body/The Body Politic?Feminism & Gender Pt. II
| Gertrude Stein Marathon Reading with various participants |
Gertrude Stein Marathon Reading Pt. II
| Poetry in the 4th Dimension by LeeAnn Brown |
April 20 – 26 [Sacred & Profane]
Feminist Attitudes through Buddhism
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| African American Literacy Traditions: Spiritual and Secular by Harryette Mullen | |
| Sacred & the Profane: Celebrating Paths of the Spirit in African-American Literature by Akila Oliver | |
Panel: Dharma Gaze: Buddhist and Native World View
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| That Still, Blue, Almost Eternal Hour: Touching the Sacred and the Profane in Sylvia Plath’s Last Poems by Cheryl Hemmerle | |
| Rewriting the Bible by Alicia Ostriker |
| Kali Yuga Poetics by Anne Waldman |
April 27-30
| American Women in the Experimental Tradition by Joane Kyger | |
Shakespeare’s Sisters
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| Measure and Meter by Alice Notley | |
| I: The Lyric Self as Rhizome by Andrea Rexilius |
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In Solidarity,
Swanee Astrid, MFA 2016
S/He : He/r : He/rs
MFA Academic Advisor & Summer Writing Program Coordinator
