Study Abroad On The Bowery

Here is an opportunity to literally make history...in your own words and with your own actions. For two weeks in summer '06, a small group of humans will venture into a new terrain of study: a poetics program which umbilically links poetry to the world, that believes poets have a real job, a critical job, and that, together, we can create a place for poetry. The curriculum: Writing, Performance, Activism, and Direct Study with some of the most exciting and relevant writers working today, and two astonishing seminars as anchors. Our hub is the club - the Bowery Poetry Club, an artist-run safe house situated in a neighborhood with a rich, culturally diverse, poetic history.

1. Howl Fifty Years Later: A Seminar
August 19, Saturday 1-7pm
Amiri Baraka Performance 8pm

The afternoon will open with a three-hour seminar featuring authors who contributed to The Poem that Changed America: Howl! Fifty Years Later, edited by Ginsberg scholar and activist Jason Shinder, who will preside over the event. Expect performances, talks, and a ton of audience participatuion with Amiri Baraka, Alicia Ostriker, Robert Polito, David Gates, Bob Rosenthal, Gordon Ball, Kurt Brown. At 5pm, there will be a celebratory community reading of the entire poem, conducted by Maestro Edwin Torres. At 6pm, SAB students will share their own poetry. And at 8pm, Original Beat and the Father of Contemporary Black Literature Amiri Baraka will perform with Amina Baraka and the great Newark jazz ensemble, Blue Ark.

2. Poetry Now! The East Village Scene
August 26, 1-5pm
Katrina Benefit 7pm
Gallery Six Re-creation 11pm.

This seminar will include panel discussions, live interviews, and performances to illuminate the roots and traditions of the historical and present cultures of the Downtown Poetics. Expected participants include: John Giorno, Erica Hunt, David Henderson, Celena Glenn, Steve Cannon, Miguel Algarin, Willie Perdomo and Sapphire. This being the First Katrina Anniversary, we will follow this event by putting our poetry into action with a Mega-Marathon Benefit, produced by former SAB student Nick Bredie, whose internship involved working with NOLA art groups, and summer SAB participants. The conclusion of the Seminar will be a re-creation of the fabled Six Gallery Reading, where Ginsberg first read Howl, performed by the summer students.

3. Performance Lab
Tuesday 1-4 Aug 15 & 22

Sheri-D Wilson, the "Queen of Canadian Spoken Word" travels south to kick your poems into orbit. She will direct the stuient performances, and , with Bob Holman and dormer student Edith Corrra, the Six Gallery recreation. Expect an intense, hand-on, all-consuming experience.

4. Writing Lab
Wednesdays 1-4pm Aug 16 & 23

Lisa Jarnot, one of poetry's great young voices and the editor of The Letters of Robert Duncan, leads this participatory workshop forum, designed to inspire new poems, new forms, new modes of thinking.

5. Poetics Lab
Fridays 1-4pm Aug 18 & 25

Kristin Prevallet, dean, renowned poet, author of a new book on Helen Adam, introduces and discusses the larger philosophical and cultural contexts of East Village Poetics. each student will receive a Sourcebook with writings by/about the Visiting Writers in the program which will serve as the basic text.

6. Activism: Katrina Benefit/Poetry Is News
Saturday, Aug 26

Each student will participate in behind-the-scenes action/creating, producing and promoting the First Anniversary Katrina Benefit at the BPC. Students will also help develop nationwide events for Poetry Is News, a collective project to find a place for the imaginative and creative use of language in the political arena, as overseen by Nathaniel Siegel.

Hip-Hop Poetry Lab
Monday, Aug 14

Celena Glenn, voted Best Local Poet in Downtown's Readers Poll (not so shabby when your "Local" is NYC) will lead this one-day workshop on cross-breeding Hip-Hop and Poetry on the Stage. Fashionista, techno gear, and politics will set the frame.

Cyber Poetics, Conceptual Poetics
Monday, August 21

Journey to the edges of the mind and science as literature as total poe Shelley Jackson invites students to explore the possibilities in the hyper-cyber and to contextualize contemporary performance poetics.





Wandering around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go?

We hope you will join us...
on the verge!
& on the Bowery!

Artistic Director: Bob Holman, poet, performer, founder & proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club and Bowery Arts and Science, Visiting Professor of Writing, Columbia University School of the Arts.

Co-Artistic Director: Anne Waldman, poet, performer, editor, professor, Director, St. Marks Poetry Project for many years, co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, Chair, the Kerouac Summer Writing Program.

Dean of Poets: Kristin Prevallet, poet, translator, essayist, editor, performer, professor, faculty of Naropa University's online MFA program, The Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, The New School.

Faculty Advisor: Alan Gilbert, poet, independent scholar, author of Another Frame: Art and Politics in a postmodern twilight (Wesleyan University Press).

Outreach Project Director: Nathaniel Siegel, poet, independent scholar and advisor.