Starting tomorrow – the 2017 session of the Naropa Summer Writing Program.
Here are all the details. From June 11 to July 1st – “The New Weathers” – Anne Waldman explains: “By The New Weathers, we intend to name the ramifications of climate change wrought in the Anthropocene. The luminous details evidencing these changes abound, and daily the case of inevitably grows. These are urgent days, and a new world is possible––and this world is yet worth struggling for. To face facts with creative and spirited resolve; to see through webs of ignorance and power; to witness and study, and bring a new enlivening energy to being writer and citizen; to work collaboratively; to break open categories of resistance, and creation; to write, and think rhizomatically; to keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time–––these are just some of the modes and tactics we imagine The New Weathers will require. As our beloved friend and co-founder of the Kerouac School, Allen Ginsberg says: “Well, while I’m here I’ll / do the work–– / and what’s the Work? / To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken / dumbshow.”
By the title-theme, we also intend the metaphorical valences––both intimate and systematic––of The New Weathers: for who themselves hasn’t felt mood as a storm, or brilliant exuberant day; or the turning of political events as a cold front advancing, the forces of Reaction here now, and the signs indicating that they will last for some time. And how to shelter through them, and to beat them back. How also to turn writing to a technology for sounding out both affective being, and the complexities of the political––how to write (collectively) now. As a start to these questions (and myriad others) we invoke the necessary and alchemical possibilities of coming together in community, 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 the Summer Writing Program, and the Jack Kerouac School since 1974.”
The Program, as with previous years, will be broken down into weekly segments – (week one) – “Reckoning This Fleeting World“, (week two) – “Cultural Activisms and Infrastructures“, and (week three) “Gimme Shelter – Fugitive Performances and the Undercommons”
Highlights from the sessions include – (week one) – Anne Waldman’s “Dakini Poetics” (‘Is this what Future Feminism might look like: Sky-walking? Twilight language? Mind to mind transmission?”), Brenda Coultas – “In site/Sight and Out of Site/Site” (..”We will investigate inner and outer sites/sights we find ourselves drawn to for narratives and erased histories, as well as to uncover the languages that will take us there”), Eleni Sikelianos – “Alternate (Family) (Histories)” – (“We will work where structures rub up against each other, in the generative instability of forms”), Lisa Jarnot – “Late Hominid Poetics/Dark Ecology” ( “This workshop will address the role of the poet in a time of ecological crisis”) – (week two) – Margaret Randall – “The New Weathers” ( “The New Weathers are brewing without and within. Are they weathers of our making? Can we stand by and allow melting icecaps, disappearing species, fear of difference, the arrogance of human destruction, and new lows of political discourse to shape our lives?), Eileen Myles -“Just Writing” (“What is poetry, what is prose, what is a script. Especially because in social media, which is everywhere, all forms blend,”) – and (week three) Julie Patton (“(She) lives and works among words, sounds, and images. Her wild life poetics take the form of scrolls, extended texts, performances, and installations…She has collaborated with composers and instrumentalists, poets, actresses, filmmakers, dancers, botanists, naturalists, terrestrial molluscs, stray felines, flora, and fauna, in noted venues here and abroad..”).
Alongside the intensive teaching and workshops, there will also be (as usual) a series of readings. Updated news about those readings may be accessed – here.
Highlights from that series include readings from Naropa emereti, Jack Collom (this coming Wednesday), Bobbie-Louise Hawkins (this coming Thursday) and Reed Bye and Steven Taylor (June 29th). Anne, herself (along with Fast Speaking Music) perform on Tuesday June 27th. There will also be a special Joanne Kyger Memorial Reading on Sunday June 18 (from 5 to 8.)