It’s our annual announcement of the Naropa Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, (which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year). The program, starting next month, runs from June 9 to June 29. The theme this year is Archive and After (“Archive After All”), spotlighting Naropa’s extraordinary archives (a resource we’ve made considerable use of here on The Allen Ginsberg Project) – and, beyond that, a consideration and appreciation of the notion of “archive” in its wider context.
“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 late great poet Diane di Prima is quoted – “the imagination is not only holy, it is precise / it is not only fierce, it is practical”
As in previous years, the Summer activities are broken down into three distinctive weekly sessions – Week 1 – June 9-15 – “Reckoning & Future Memory” – Week 2 – June 17-22 – “Ruins – Ceremony & Speculation” – and Week 3 – “Insurgent Dreams/Radical Lineages”
“Reckoning & Future Memory” – 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.
Participants include, amongst others, Anselm Berrigan, Cedar Sigo, CAConrad, and Eileen Myles
“Ruins: Ceremony & Speculation” – “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 poesisfrom 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?.
Addressing these issues – Anne Waldman, Dawn Lundy Martin, Andrea Abi-Karam, Danielle Vogel, amongst others.
Insurgent Dreams/Radical Lineages – “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?
Pondering answers to these questions, Naropa faculty will include Eleni Sikelianos, Laird Hunt, Lisa Jarnot, Thurston Moore, Tongo Eisen-Martin , along with special guests, Andrew Schelling and Margaret Randall.
It promises to be a highly stimulating Summer Session.