KD seminar by prof. Line-Gry Hørup
at HfG Karlsruhe

Programme for a first Winter School. Reader on off-site education. Books for the Greatest Hits Library at ORBI in Southern Jutland, Denmark.

12.5 – 18.7 2023

Reader:

Programme: www.orbivraa.dk

Description:

“During the summer of 1965, I travelled across country with my younger brother, Carl, and a school friend who had a job lined up in Hollywood. Yet Berkeley—then the mecca of creative and political scholarship and action, where an important poetry conference was just about to begin—was the tangible destination. Little did I realize how this trip would affect the entire direction of my life. In retrospect it seems miraculous that being in a particular place at a particular time should activate or propel one’s life in such a purposeful way. I was perhaps already primed. I was a novice, naive young votary. I was curious to hear some of the live voices of these persons I was privately emulating. They were less predictable, far ranging, their field was much more open, expansive. So-called subject matter was explicit, tender. The poems were political, spiritual. Lines were shocking, dissonant, powerful, beautiful, lyrical, strange. The audience stayed with these poets all the way. Responsive to the point of shouting out commentary. These were not entertainments. The poet was not a politician or salesman per presence, the groping for what was it? More light? More glimmers that were poems? Outside poems? The sense that one had a personal dance or motion in the world, a “job” to do, seemed to sustain this huge bear of a man whose feet lifted off the ground as he read, arms supporting his massive frame on the podium. And his arms had waved and danced in the air as he read, gestures into the ether. This was a body poetics. And these poets had put their whole beings on the line. Was I being too roman for a liberated life. Women could be empowered, more in touch with their bodies as landscapes for writing, not imprisoned by hope and fear of being desirable, feminine. Language could stretch to these new parameters. Other cultures—ancient cultures—were being rediscovered. We could see newly, freshly, through prehistoric eyes. Sappho’s fragments were suddenly modernist poems. Ethnopoetics was as relevant—more relevant in fact—as it studied the songs and rhythms of the indigenous people of this continent—than the European canon. “Make it new”. “Projective verse”. “No ideas but in things”. “Exploratory poetics”. “Form is no more than an extension of content” “Duende. ” “Personism.” “Continuous present.” Although I never eschewed commas, Gertrude Stein said they were only good for hanging your hat on. Of course!”

— Anne Waldman on the experiences which lead to establishing the Naropa Summer School programme: Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

We will examine ways in which to build a Winter School and propelled by this destination, the mechanics of building bricks will break off smaller imminent projects. We will study the history of off-site education, trace their lineage and plot a new target. We will learn to build chairs, draw-up space to work, write for the future, read from the past and produce books to the Greatest Hits Library(I will explain).

Presentation:

Merchandise: