And the Beat Goes On

A A A Comments (1) By Patricia Calhoun Thursday, Jun 10 2010

“The Kerouac School is not a lineage with a program, but a program with a lineage,” says Lisa Birman, director of the Summer Writing Program presented by the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Co-founded by the late Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, the program is now close to thirty years old — but it’s evolving all the time. “This is my tenth summer working on the program,” explains Birman (who was a student in the program for two years before that), “and over the last ten years, it’s been a trend in contemporary literature — and very happily here — that there’s less of a ‘this is a poetry class, this is a prose class’ division. It’s much more of a hybrid environment, a fermenting, cross-genre environment…. We’re finding new ways to use the inspiration of the Beats — revolutionaries of their time — and bringing it into what it means to be a revolutionary in 2010.”

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Even if you can’t sign up for one of the four, week-long sessions that start today with “Poet or Assassin?” (Waldman will chair the opening panel at 1 p.m.), you can experience the revolution during one of the regular evening readings in the Naropa Performing Arts Center, 2130 Arapahoe Street in Boulder, which are open to the public and free for the first time this summer. The inaugural reading, at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow, features faculty members Thalia Field, Ross Gay, Joanne Kyger, Linh Dinh and Bobbie Louise Hawkins.

For a complete schedule, go to www.naropa.edu or call 303-245-4665
June 14-July 11, 2010

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bil brown 06/11/2010 7:18:00 PM

The Kerouac School has progressed over time from a haphazard mix pulled together by the simple will, and friends, of Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman - the centrifugal force majure of the Rockies poetry and Buddhist Arts scene - to an established writing program with a MFA and all the bells and whistles of any in the "Rebel Establishment." As a former student, and like Birman, working closely with Anne and Allen during a time in the mid-90s when Naropa proper was going through it's second round of accreditation - I can tell Westword readers and the world that putting this program together every year is no small feat. A lot of the writers and artists involved are not traditional academics - both a good and not-so-good thing in the scheme of things for administrators and students alike. What someone WILL get out of a summer program is a lifetime of ideas. Ideas in the sense that your mind is blown. What The Kerouac School lacks in practical real-world sense of publishing (not that it hasn't had graduates go on to publish with the likes of Penguin and more) it more-than makes up for in the sense of commendeering the tools of that same publishing and a real DIY attitude. Like the Beats that are the spiritual precursors of this school within a school, your friendships turn into lifelong partnerships and lives intermingle and when the right time comes - as co-founder Anne Waldman is likened to say - the world is indeed "Safe for poetry." But, is the poetry safe for the world? Let's hope not! Bil Brown, Poet Kerouac School Alum '94 co-founder, Prazska skola poetiky/Prague School of Poetics