Naropa's Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics' Audio Archive 50th Anniversary

Entry written Summer 2004. !!!  

Allen Ginsberg has left us his cultural heritage in Naropa’s audio archive.  We have Allen, Anne Waldman and many luminaries hatching incandescent pearls recorded and housed as womb inside the body and soul of Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics.

I envision this archive to float in the meta conscious. Engaged in hypertext consciousness.  Links into a discourse, versus being bound by eroding magnetic ribbon. Can the words be spoken with transparent imagery layered over the poem and/or the prose? Characters collaged, narration fragments performed, allowing simultaneous slippage, correlated to past archival rumination on the future found in this very present? Things will change in this direction. Making spaces with a different form so writing can take on a tonality that lends themselves new works. What are your liner notes in the 21st century Erin? Do you have a eco/climate impulse?  What is your relation to time? Make a mythology, collage from print to sound, from word to all digital.

Feb 2024

That entry was written almost 20 years ago.  It was the 30th anniversary of the summer writing program from the first session of its tented habitat in July 1974.  I uncovered it today in a journal.  Written while attending the 2004 Naropa summer writing program before I joined the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied poetics as a graduate MFA student.   I now read these entries as if they were written to a future me in 2024 to find.  The 50th celebration of the Summer writing program / archives will take place this June 2024, which I just learned about last night.  Looking forward to reconnecting.

I was transitioning my life in 2004 from living in a very creative and high pressure Software / Internet business that I grew over ten years and sold to a New York Stock Exchange corporate bureaucracy (too many r’s, u’s and c’s in the word bureaucracy for R. U. Crazy).  Selling the business to pursue a creative life of a different order.  Soon to become a mother of twins.  Now my twins are moving away from the nest.  I am dedicating more of my time to creative works again, a full cycle repeats. Allowing myself to get back to the 'white knuckle poetry' in this autumn period of my life.

When I found this 2004 journal entry, asking me “what are your liner notes”, I realized that a magic seed planted long ago, sprouted.  For the last two months I’ve been working on Autumn-Mixup and did a very quiet soft internet launch just a day ago.  Last night I reread Dharma Art written by Chogyam Trungpa. A good pep talk well needed, to grow the barely sprouted seeds of Autumn-Mixup.  Do I even dare to try to move towards an awakened meditative state, characterized by Trungpa as directness, unselfconsciousness, and nonaggression. And of course, very few can realize this state, but I believe Jack Kerouac was closer than most westerners.

I was drawn to Naropa's poetry department for the original intent which I found intact, circa 2004: "To teach meditators about the golden mouth and to educate poets about the golden mind.”  Even better was that I too felt like an "outrider" — my whole life I made my living by riding parallel as entrepreneur.  I did trust Naropa when I enrolled. It thrived as “outrider”  … outside the academic mainstreams of poetry, yet not 'outside' the worlds of poetry.  "You ride Parallel.”  (Not sure who to attribute the quote - - Ginsberg / Waldman )