May 11-13, 2007
Join internationally recognized poet and teacher Anne Waldman for an exciting foray into “experiments of attention,” which will include work with journals, dreams, performance strategies, and traditional and invented forms. For beginners as well as accomplished writers, Anne brings a vast array of gnosis and experience to working with the writer’s mind.
We will participate in writing exercises that focus on ritual objects and memory, the erasure of the dominant first person “I”, narratives of intervention, practices that involve the minute particulars of sense perception and investigation, surrealist cut-ups, collaboration, and oral modes of presentation—the litany, chorale, sprechstimme (spoke-sung performance). On Saturday night, we hope to have a public performance with Anne, a noted performer of her own work.
Anne Waldman, co-founder, with Beat legend Allen Ginsberg, of the Jack Kerouac School at the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University, is Distinguished Professor and Chair of Naropa’s celebrated Summer Writing Program and core faculty member of New England College’s MFA program. She was the director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. A poet, performer, professor, curator, and cultural activist, she is author and editor of over 40 books and interviews, including Fast Speaking Woman, Vow to Poetry, Marriage: A Sentence, In the Room of Never Grieve, and her most recent book of essays and poems, Outrider. She inherited the mantle of the Beats (Allen Ginsberg called her his “spiritual wife”) and the New York School (Frank O'Hara told her to “work for inspiration, not money”). She has collaborated with students, dancers, videographers, visual artists, musicians, composers. She has received numerous awards, prizes, and residencies and has taught at universities, colleges, and centers here and abroad.