Professorial Poetics

I remember lighting up as a teacher of mine in high school read William Blake: “Tyger Tyger burning bright” aloud. I felt I had embraced fire. When I looked at the poem on the page the letters seemed illuminated by their own power as they coalesced together. William Carlos Williams has spoken of the poem as a complete little universe & also as a perfectly oiled & functioning machine, nothing redundant in its parts. As I studied the fragments of Sappho her passion lived in me through the condensed diamond-like sounds & images that moved like arrows into the heart. Does it breathe? Emily Dickinson asked of her own luminous poetry. This would be the measure. Melopoeia, Logopoeia, Phanopoeia—music, sense, images all dance together. Energy exists in the interstices between the phones & phonemes. It is the rub between the gestures inherent in language—all languages—that spark imagination, revolution, new life. Make it new, make it new! Ezra Pound admonished. How to pass this on to others…

The connection was early. I want to recreate the chill of first coming to poetry, a virgin. But I had the voice inside me waiting to be unlocked.

My mother read aloud to me as a child, those rhythms and rhymes of Mother Goose of Alice In Wonderland of The Bible were inscribed in my psycho-physical being. A commitment to the sweet & terrifying sounds of language that work—like mantra—magic on the senses was to be the lifelong path. Poetry heals and protects. I wanted a life that included poetry, always.

No one taught me to write as such, but “elders” along the way were examples, were critics, were outrageous in their own iconoclastic tendencies with voice & page. I was encouraged. We read a lot in the classroom. We read in our homes. We had a little “salon” when 1 was 15. We studied poems in other languages. I felt part of a lineage of word-workers. I sought out my elders. I sat at their feet. I waited on them. I was also a woman burning with her own light who needed to steal secrets from the patriarchs. I needed to stomp & dance on the corpses of what went before me. I had to—naturally—elegantly—create my own universe.

Trust your great vibrato, one told me. Write long, get up and sprech—sing your poem, another advised. Sappho lives in you! Mayakovsky lives in you! Guillaume Apollinaire lives in you! Walt Whitman lives in you! Gertrude Stein lives in you! You must go to the edge & muster your strength. The decision is choiceless. Poetry is food & light, is air, is survival.

I was excited by the “outrider” tradition—innovative, outside the usual academic mainstream—in American Poetics that became especially evident to me in the 1960’s. The New American Poetry represented by the Beat Generation writers, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance. I travelled to hear great poets read their work. I cm-founded a magazine which led to correspondence with notable writers. I travelled to San Fransisco. I helped found the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in New York City in 1966 and was Director of that hot-bed over a decade. We had a library, we had weekly writing workshops, weekly readings & performances, a lecture series, magazines, newsletters. Teaching which included reading others’ texts, and writing out of a vast array of possible experiences & suggested experiments and hearing each others’ work aloud was part of the plan. A community that worked together, that studied together was the plan. We were a moisopholon domos —a house that cultivated the muses.

I was also interested in the poetries of other cultures—of indigenous peoples. I travelled to South America. I travelled to Asia. I travelled to Indonesia. I incorporated these voices and my own tantric Buddhist studies into the work. Always studying, reading, listening, sounding.

Poets teach by example.

Neurosis is a disease of attention.

Take one poet, take one time period, take one culture’s poetry and study it for life. Become a scholar of the imagination.

Test your limits.

Poetry will never gratify the hungry ego.

You write poetry to save sentient beings.

It is a calling. You are called to witness.

It is sacred act, sacred word, sacred mantra.

Wake up!

What you teach is what you know and the students uncover what they know. They know “it” already if they are real writers.

Keep the world sane for poetry.

We founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at The Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado in 1974 to keep the world sane for poetry. We teach not only Reading & Writing Classes, but classes in Translation, Ethnopoetics, Performance, the Poetries & Cultures of India, Pre-Millenial Poetics, Fiction workshops, Modern Novel Readings, Dharma Poetics, Engaged Poetics, Outreach Project where we work with students in prisons, homeless shelters, old peoples’ homes, grammar schools, alienated youth who have “dropped out” of the American system. We have a letterpress—the Kavyayantra (Sanskrit for “the poetry machine”) Press where students learn print & book making. Some of the poetics students now travel on semester-abroad programs to Nepal and Bali.

I prepare for classes by reading texts I will present out of which we will write. We will be triggered by these ancient texts to our own recognitions and negotiations and dramas of language. It is never easy. We are considering poets’ plays today. We will look at the role of the Greek Chorus, or the Chorus in Japanese Noh Theatre. We will consider the similarities and differences, the origins of Dionysian rites in the one, Shinto rites in the other. We will look at an Egyptian Coronation text, the role of Floras. We will further read aloud plays of William Butler Yeats, of Garcia Lorca, of Surrealist scenarios, of Gertrude Stein, of ourselves. We will write for each other, for our individual voices. What is persona? we ask. I want to sing my piece like an opera and wear a mask. We will create a chorus of voices and sounds together.

A series of experiments has evolved out of my work over the years, particularly the work at The Naropa Institute and at the Schule fur Dictung in Vienna. These are exercises of attention. I generate my own—often primary work—out of these exercises myself. I might work in collaboration with students. We present group performances. I give assignments that focus the mind. Go to the same spot every day for a week at the same hour and write for a half hour. Ride public transportation for an hour and write. Write hypnogogically as you are just emerged from dream/sleep. Write to end the suffering in Bosnia or Grozny. Write to a dead person. Cut up your own text, inter-cut it with someone else’s. I am still at work on my 600 page collage poem IOVIS (Of Jove) which is inspired out of the experimental exercises I do with others. Many voices & sensibilities weave into the text: the voice of the child, the dead mother, the Balinese hermaphrodite, the battlefield of Mars is the battleground of war & love, the mind’s map for struggle. It is an argument with male energy that provokes the poem. I interview my male students about sex & heroism.

Students begin to understand for themselves what sounds “on”, “right”, “strong”, when they are not faking. They start to hit their stride, a kind of magic, free from personal aggrandizement, from indulgence, from phony emotion, kneejerk rage, sentimental slop. The work transcends, often, the personal “I”. Sometimes it creates a “Third Mind”. What a relief. And flies & exists outside the boundary of room, school, history, market-ability. Younger writers feel success when it is a reciprocal relationship. The work demands you to write it. It preys upon you, haunts you til you act. Community is important because poets are marginalized.

Create more alternative schools based on sangha (Sanskrit for a community of like-minded seekers). On intellectus (light of the mind).

Be grounded as a visionary. Pay attention to details. Details are life.

An Academy (a grove with trees) exists in the mind. You are your own best school & muse. But I might set you on the right path. Join this one. This is what I have been reading for years.
or This is what I notice.

Inspiration travels through the body—a body poetics—out of the mouth—or flows into the pen (perhaps dances on the computer screen, a veritable theatre of the senses). Students: Can you see the shape it makes? What do you see? Hear? Know?

A deeper Gnosis.