Naropa University

Just in case it could last

Archival poetics at Naropa

Columns of copymaster cassette tapes from the Naropa Archives in a drawer — Copymaster cassette tapes in the Naropa audio archives, photographed by Amanda Rybin Koob.

It would be a worthy metaproject to attempt to trace instances of this concept of “archives” in the JKS SWP audio and video archive — patterns, evolutions, and contradictions — but here, we look just briefly at one potent recording, the 2012 JKS SWP opening panel “Archival Poetics and the War on Memory” (this panel takes its name from Steven Taylor’s June 2007 essay “Remember the Future: Archival Poetics and the War on Memory” published in Beats at Naropa (Coffee House Press, 2009).

Recording (Naropa’s archive): Archival Poetics and the War on Memory
Date: June 11, 2012
Featured panelists: Anne Waldman, Stacy Szymaszek, E. Tracy Grinnell, Steve Dickison, Eleni Sikelianos, and Steven Taylor

'Post-pleistocene relic world'

Alternative communities and writing, part 2

Jaime Groetsema and Amanda Rybin Koob

Book opened to copyright pages. Include title, authors, and publisher details. — Photograph by Jaime Groetsema. Courtesy of Naropa University Archives.

Is it necessary to think about community from an ecological point of view? If so, would our depicted world community be more populated with trees than our current ecological moment?

Naropa archive recording title: Alternative Communities and Writing
Date of recording: June 09, 2003
Panelists: Anne Waldman (Chair), Eleni Sikelianos, Peter Warshall, Ed Sanders, Marcella Durand, Robin Blaser.

Interlude: Rereading the beginning

Featuring Anne Waldman

Jaime Groetsema and Amanda Rybin Koob

Black and white image of a woman and man holding a large quilt. — Ethel Sampson’s historical quilt from 1937.

Are archives necessarily institutional? Is an archive simply a collection of things representing something? Does it matter if the collection of things is metaphorical, commercial, or virtual? Must the materials of the archive represent an event and must they include a nod to the longevity of narrative and the pursuit of preservation? Is an archive still an archive if it is inaccessible? (I’ve written more specifically about archives and language over at Reconfigurations.)

Jaime Groetsema: Whenever I think about archives or the material culture that could possibly constitute them, I try to define what an archive is.

'Here I am out in the woods …'

Alternative communities and writing, part 1

Jaime Groetsema and Amanda Rybin Koob

Collage of text and image. Text includes printed biographies of faculty. — Collage of program material for Summer Writing Program, courtesy of Naropa University. Photograph © Jaime Groetsema.

The Summer Writing Program came out of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (JKS) at Naropa University. JKS was officially established in 1974 along with what has been called the Visiting Poetic Academy, the Summer Institute, amongst other conventions, and now the Summer Writing Program (SWP).

Naropa Archive Recording Title: Alternative Communities and Writing Date of Recording: June 9, 2003 &nbs

'Cross Worlds'

On 'Transcultural Poetics: An Anthology'

Patrick James Dunagan

Naropa University’s program in poetics has gained near legendary status. The annual summer sessions bring in poets from around the world to teach week long seminars, give readings, and participate in panel discussions. Founded in 1974 in honor of Jack Kerouac by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, it has long since eclipsed its early beginnings when it was generally taken quasi-seriously as a place for the devoted to study with surviving elders of the Beat generation, et al., while pursuing meditative practice (i.e., “disembodied poetics”) with varying levels of serious intent among participants.

Recasting poetry

'The long biography of a poem'

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand

Kaia Sand

In Distant Reading, Peter Middleton describes reading a poem as though it has a “long biography.” This approach involves “mining what is available of the aggregative textual archive that composes the textual memory of the poem, its showing in magazines, performance, anthologies, its construal in reviews and commentaries and other treatments” (23).

Consider the long life of Claude McKay’s "If We Must Die."

Recently in Jacket2

Downgraded to scribble (PoemTalk #178)

Matvei Yankelevich, 'Dead Winter'

PoemTalk

from left: Ahmad Almallah, Huda Fakhreddine, and Kevin Platt.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

For this PoemTalk episode about Matvei Yankelevich’s book of poems (or book-length poem), Dead Winter (Fonograf, 2022), Al Filreis convened Kevin Platt, Huda Fakhreddine, and Ahmad Almallah to discuss four poems/sections from the work: “Winter comes calling” (7), “Winter have I lost your thread?” (12), “In a disjunctive age, disconsolate, without connection” (21), and “Winter and one more mine is the other guilt” (27). Our recording of these poems was made by Matvei just for PoemTalk and is available now at his PennSound page. (That PennSound author page, by the way, already includes a video recording of a conversation with Matvei himself about Dead Winter — joined by Kevin, Ahmad, and Al as well as a dozen or so of Ahmad’s students.)

November 24, 2022

Poets' Letter in Solidarity with Jailed Iranian Poets

Charles Bernstein

As American poets who have committed our lives to free expression, we are devastated by the attacks on our fellow poets and writers in Iran. While the horrific news of the attacks of women and girls, and indeed on men and boys, has been publicized, the attacks on these Iranian poets and writers has not been fully reported. We are grateful to poet and activist Sepideh Jodeyri for sending us this long list, compiled by an Iranian poet. Chillingly long. We call out to these poets and writers: we see you, we care, we stand with you, we want to read your future works. Poetry matters — in the U.S. and in Iran. The imprisonment of these Iranian literary artists is an attack on all of us.

Atefeh Chaharmahalian (poet, a member of the board of committee of Iran’s Writers Association, and social activist) / arrested by security forces in Tehran on October 3, 2022 and is being held in Ward 209 of the notorious Evin Prison. She has been denied the right to have a lawyer and her bail request has been rejected. She has been reported to be under pressure for forced confessions, causing considerable worries about her well-being.