Poetry as organization of creativity: Lessons from ‘the Jack Kerouac school of disembodied poetics’

Janet Borgerson, University of Exeter

The poetic word is a microcosm. (Jean-Paul Sartre)

I am building a dream machine . . . (William Burroughs)

At the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, USA, teachers and students of poetry, music, semiotics, Buddhist psychology, martial arts and dance gathered for the summer 1986 four-week session. The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the poetry program, attracted, as usual, illustrious and infamous U. S. poets and writers engaged with so-called Beat generation values to work with less experienced writers. Students met with teachers, such as, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Robert Creely, Alice Notley, Clark Coolidge, Jim Carroll, Joy Harjo, and others in small groups, one-on-one seminars, and at larger panel discussions and talks, poetry readings and performances, as well as, late night parties. These Summer ’86 Naropa poets had histories, genealogies, mythologies, practices, and bits of advice that they shared with students, and reconfirmed with each other, over the month’s course.

I invoke and explore poetry as organization of creativity through an engagement with the following three lessons, paraphrases of writing advice, given in one-on-one seminars of which the author was a part:

Don’t stop at the end of the phrase! Keep going until you have nothing more to say! (Allen Ginsberg)

Don’t listen to what Allen says! Read his work and learn from his poems! (Anne Waldman)

You are just beginning! Don’t worry about what you’ve already written! Keep writing! (Joanne Kyger)

Many individuals and fields of study have advanced varying and particular views on what creativity is. I do not draw upon, nor attempt, direct definition here, but rather indirectly through discussion of some poets’ tendencies to comprehend poetry in certain ways, and believing that poets have experience with creativity, explore poetry as a mode of organization. Nevertheless, we might for clarification begin with Audre Lorde’s definition of poetry as “a revelatory distillation of experience” (138).

In this view, the organizing – what I’m calling “poetry,” – of creativity (force) or creation (activity) takes place precisely when and where typical organizational features are absent and during which “those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us (Lorde, 137). Poetry emerges in, perhaps from, this absence, against Old Testament genealogies: “But necessity is always deeper than genealogies” (Nancy 1993, 26). Progenitors and predecessors serve as inspirational, pedagogical context, not preexisting determinants. 0 x 1
0! Or as E. E. Cummings writes, 2 x 2 “is 5” (1926). Manifesting the as yet unsaid, unobserved, unthought forms a core interest here, suggesting poetry’s role in making new connections and realizations possible. Nevertheless, a presence of human creation, evocative of actuality and experience will not be excluded, foreclosed, or dismissed as otherwise than lived.

The perspective emerging here suggests that the organizing of creativity happens when control is held at bay, not when control returns. It’s difficult, then, to avoid the further insight that organization, as typically understood, is steeped in doing and attempting and trying and controlling and making happen: yet if we’re to investigate the potential of understanding poetry as organization of creativity, then non-doing, non attempting, a reciprocity of doing and not doing, and so forth must be faced in the organization context.