Braided River: Naropa’s Summer Writing Program 2015

by Andrea Rexilius (Editor), Omar Berrada, Rachel Levitsky

EP 38.

These are three interviews with the same questions for three eminent, progressive poets who have been guest faculty during Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Program, all visiting/teaching/performing at Naropa before these conversations took place, but queried here specifically in the context of our 2015 pedagogy, which carried the themic rubric of Braided River,the Activist Rhizome. These poets are Fred Moten, Rachel Levitsky, and Omar Berrada.

Excerpt:

There’s a lot of good energy that flows from the love of poetry that the folks who gather hold in common” Fred Moten says. Rachel Levitsky quips that perhaps common ground is a coffee bar. Omar Berrada references Édouard Glissant’s distinction between “common place and lieu-commun” (common ground) with its “conditions of possibility for the emergence of unpredictable feelings of resistance against the systematic truths induced by commonplace thinking and reasoning; and against the meanings imposed by the logics of coloniality and governmentality.
—Anne Waldman

55 pages, ebook

First published October 14, 2015

About the author

Andrea Rexilius is the author of: Sister Urn (Sidebrow, 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks, Séance (Coconut Books, 2014), To Be Human (Horseless Press, 2010), and Afterworld (above/ground press, 2020). She earned an M.F.A. in Poetry from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), and a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Denver (2010). Andrea is the Program Director for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing. She also teaches in the Poetry Collective at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado.