Critical/Animal Inhabitance (at Naropa's Thinking/Writing/Being, the Jack Kerouac School [Dis]embodied Poetics Conference)

Critical/Animal Inhabitance (at Thinking/Writing/Being, the Jack Kerouac School [Dis]embodied Poetics Conference)

My presentation for this panel, titled "Withness/Withinness/Witness: Manifesto/Spell/New Mythography," considered how an inhabitory poesis relates to larger frames of ‘being’ in a time of ecological crisis; how it disrupts destructive myths - primarily those of human relations to resources as inert matter - and helps create new ones. Poets discussed included Stephen Collis and Wendy Burke. Portions of this presentation will appear in my upcoming commentary for Jacket2, "Inhabitory: Poesis & Place."

I concluded my talk with this assignment to the audience, from Joanne Kyger's 1981 class at Naropa, Compassion for Place, in which Kyger encouraged students to develop an Animal Spirit Companion connected to a certain place:

Find a place where they can walk to and visit once a week, preferably at the same time, a place with “as much of a nonhuman universe as possible,” little pockets/gardens, where you can see animals; a big enough place with a diversity of things going on. Go there once a week for 5 weeks, and note what you see there – plants, trees, insects, forms of vegetation, “name things if you know them and/or use your descriptive powers. Associate yourself in some familiar way with it; make a description of the place so you can see it in your mind’s eye; visualize it when you’re not there.” Note the activity that goes on, and the changes – you won’t notice it all at once. “allow the tree to talk to you” “bring your own human universe as a way to look at something” – feel completely personal and interpretive about it; “project everything you want into it, all your mind states/activities” “that tree looks like it’s out to get me today” “loosen up your sense of relationship to what’s going on”; “put down how the place makes you feel, how it alters the feelings you bring to it”; “if you sit there long enough, Boulder Creek starts talking.”

(Assignment transcribed from the Naropa Poetics Audio Archives)