Hugo House Eastside Course at Park Place Books, Jan 23 – Feb 26, 2007

Organic Poetry Course Outline

Week I
Week II
Week III
Week IV
Week V
Week VI

 

 

Week III: Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov.

 

1)      Madlib III

2)      Group thoughts after two weeks.

3)      Anne Waldman -

a)      Born in Millville, NY, April 2, 1945. B.A. from Bennington (a creative thesis on Theodore Roethke.) Attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965. Director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1968 – 1978. Co-Founded (with A.G.) the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at what is now Naropa Uninversity. Following AG’s urging that she write long poems, and after Marina Sabina (the Mazatec poet-Priestess who helped facilitate rituales diositos) published Fast Speaking Woman in 1975-1978.

b)      Read Fast Speaking Woman.

c)      Influenced by Buddhism, is considered a Beat poet and a 2^nd generation NY School poet,

she has edited many anthologies including Nice To See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan.

d)      Play Anne reading Dark O’ Night.

e)      Read Oppositional Poetics from Vow to Poetry.
Handout - Feminafesto: Olson from Outriders Other interview cuts.

4)      Writing Exercise One – List Poem. (I am _________ woman (or man). 7 minutes.

5)      Diane di Prima –

a)      Born August 6, 1934 in Brooklyn. Dropped out of Swarthmore College to be a poet in Manhattan. Her Maternal Grandfather was an active anarchist and associate of Emma Goldman. Read Howl and was drawn to the Beat Literary movement.

b)      In 1969 published Memoirs of a Beatnik. Edited the seminal small magazine The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (then Leroy Jones) and co-founded the New York Poets Theater.

c)      Moved to California in the early 70’s and got involved with the Diggers, a community anarchist group. Her Revolutionary Letters, of which the poem Rant was one, is an example of the tone of San Francisco in the early 70’s.

d)      Her lifework is Loba, first published in 1974 as a chap book, with a version in 1978 and an expanded version in 1998.

e)      Recollection of My Life as a Woman published in 2001.

 

6)      Writing Exercise II – Write a title. Go Outside and write that poem in 7 minutes.

7)      Joanne Kyger - 

a) Born November 19, 1934 in Long Beach. Studied at Santa Barbara College before graduating and started to hang out in North Beach in the poetry scene that included Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. Moved to Japan in 1959 with then husband Gary Snyder. Has lived in Bolinas since 1968 and has published more than 20 books of poetry and prose.

b) Michael Rothenberg said “Joanne’s love for poetry manifests itself in a grander scheme of consciousness-expansion and lesson but is always in the realm of the everyday. Or ‘just space.’ She sees all days in every day, where mythologies become the root system. She uses the journal as a hothouse for poetry, where the journal is a place for poems as well as the poem itself.”

c) Of that literary milieu of North Beach in the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s David Meltzer said: “…formalism’s top hats were joyously snowballed by the speech-based vernacular verse allied to William Carlos Williams. The post-war maelstrom and radioactive pastures opened up the end of traditional Western civilization as all had known and believed in it, and young people were there to pick up the pieces and make new sense of everything and nothing.”

      d) Read: Philip Whalen’s Hat and Anything that is created… from Just Space, Narcissus from As Ever, poem from page 69 of All This Every Day, excerpt from Some Sketches from the Life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Bad Bombs from Night Palace broadside.

8)   Denise Levertov – Some Notes on Organic Form. (Handout.)