Jeffrey Pethybridge Writing, Literature, and Contemplative Approach **** [MUSIC] Hello. And welcome to Mindful U at Naropa. A podcast presented by Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. I'm your host, David Devine. And itÕs a pleasure to welcome you. Joining the best of Eastern and Western educational traditions - Naropa is the birth place of the modern mindfulness movement. [MUSIC] Today, I'd like to welcome Jeffrey Pethybridge to the podcast. Jeffrey is part of the core faculty in the summer writing program. He is the chair of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. So, welcome to the podcast Jeffrey. [00:00:59.02] JEFFREY: Thank you, David. Happy to be here. [00:01:00.13] DAVID: Yeah, itÕs a pleasure to have you. So, you represent something we haven't talked about so much and itÕs the writing department. And would you like to introduce yourself a bit more? I know you have some fun things to say. [00:01:12.00] JEFFREY: Uh yeah, thank you. I've published a single book of poetry entitled, "Striven, The Bright Treastise." In 2013, I came out with a small press named Noemi Press. I serve as the uh North American editor for Likestarlings, which is an archive of collaborative poetry and poetics and here at Naropa I teach classes in poetry and poetics, film poetics, experimental poetry. This term I am teaching a class on three writers - Alice Notley, (?), Raul Zurita, and their relationship to the epic as well as the contemporary moment. [00:01:53.01] DAVID: Mmm that's so great. Awesome. Well we're really excited to speak with you. And, you know I just want to ask like since you're a poet and a writer like do you - do you want to share anything with us. We can start with a poem or something small. [00:02:07.18] JEFFREY: Yeah, I'd be happy to read from my current work. Which is a documentary research based poetry book uh entitled, "Force Drift, an Essay in the Epic." And it really minds clutch of documents that have been called the Torture Memos in the early part of the Bush Administration. The early 2000s when enhanced interrogation and the torture regime was instituted by the Bush administration. All those documents that were both the legal justification for them, which is to say the sort of false legal arguments that were put forward to obscure the illegality of the torture. As well as the subsequent reckoning by the government itself as well as non-governmental organizations. So, this is the first section entitled, "Force Drift." Sometimes a word is a color. Bright apricot. Ivory, tortoise gold. Sometimes you are rose, smoke, bronze, blue, blue subject. Sensitive notification. See also volume 3 for details on other interrogations in which. Sometimes the world is fire light. Red, bronze, horn, cold bronze, black, gray, gray, gray. He does, does not possess undisclosed threat information. Or intelligence that could prevent a terrorist event. After the insurrections, I increase security in all aspects of my life. i.e. constant white noise. No talking. Everyone in the dark with the guards wearing a light on their heads. In part, this meant a return to communicating in person and handwritten letters. This is when I first reached you. The best mechanism for destroying the tapes follows. The world is full of theories of erasure. Was so cold that he could barely utter his alias. That citation can be a counterforce to redaction, obliteration is the dream of the book. Grown from a forest of nanotubes. Banta black isn't so much a color since color is predicated upon reflection. Sometimes you are stray light - a stray thought. A fugitive hopefulness. Sunshine through muslin. Pure sapphire. And does banta black traps 99.965% of visible light. ItÕs the virtual annihilation of color. Thermal camouflage is listed as a possible military application. Which seems almost innocent. (?) was so cold that he could barely utter his alias. I needed the trance. That form of seeing grounded in the epic. The stark brutality of it. To begin to trace the body of the event. Imagine a space that's so dark that as you walk...in you lose all sense of where you are. What you are. And especially, all sense of time. In the forming of the five sense. If that idea of the human remains. If that is a labor of history still. Something happens to your emotional self and in disorientation one has to reach in for other resources. Kapoor told the BBC. This from the story of our aftermath. The story we will have to write. Banta black grown on prison walls, essentially rendered their selves absolute voids. And then, almost at will - the sun disappeared. And then, almost at will - the sun disappeared. [00:06:57.12] DAVID: Wow. That was pretty powerful. Thank you. What do you call that? [00:07:03.09] JEFFREY: "Force Drift." ItÕs a term of art taken from the practice of torturing people, which is to say itÕs a term of analysis grown out of the experience of reckoning, but it is that torturers still are such a present part of state policy and action. And it refers to the idea that in a situation such as the interrogation room that there was a tendency - a drift towards to escalation of violence. So that, even while there were trained for instance - trained psychologists present at Guantanamo and other sites of torture. And ostensibly the purpose was to maintain the legal forms of enhanced interrogation. None of those safe guards if we can use such a word held the space and all the sorts of obscene and sadistic crimes that we think of when we think of torture. Did take place. So, its "Force Drift" is really the - the name for the tendency towards escalation in - in those settings. [00:08:19.06] DAVID: Yeah, some heavy stuff. Thank you for sharing. So, switching a little bit of gears - I'd like to uh talk about how you teach your class? How do you show up? You say you're talking about three authors at this moment that you're focusing on. Can you guide us through class simulation and kind of show us what is contemplative writing look like? How does one teach contemplative writing? [00:08:45.15] JEFFREY: Yeah, well I think that all the faculty at the Kerouac School approach that question differently and so there's a real diversity of tactics about how to integrate contemplative practices into the study of writing and the study of literature and the creation of those ways of being. For instance, in the class I am teaching this term - poetic seminar - one of the authors, the Chilean poet Raul Zurita was imprisoned soon after the 1973 coup. One of the hallmark forms of political violence of the Pinochet regime was the practice of disappearance. Which was political prisoners were taken up into airplanes and they were thrown either into the Pacific Ocean or into the deserts of Chile. Uh so their bodies were never found. Irrecoverable and thus the - the term disappeared. So, in - in approaching Zurita's work this fall I - at the start of one of our classes when we were going to be discussing a book of his entitled, "Anteparadise." In which the landscape of Chile figures significantly. I asked the students to go outside. We all went outside as a group, as a collective to spend -- a dozen or so minutes meditating on the sky. With the reminder that the sky is not an innocent landscape always. That the sky is the site of bombings or the site of throwing political prisoners out of airplanes in order to disappear them. So, it was a contemplative exercise meant to jar us out of our assumed security. From the sky. You know mostly here in - in Colorado the sky is a site of beauty and that beauty is largely innocent. And so, how to integrate into our own being and imaginations a contrary sense. A sense that the sky is not innocent. That the sky is a site of radical political violence at times. So, we did that meditation. We came back together. And then, we pivoted into a conceptual poem called, "Sky Piece." A few of them bought Yoko Ono and we used those conceptual poems as writing prompts and then we began after sharing those from what writing those two aspects of uh preparation had yielded. Then we began to think about approaching and talking about the Zurita's poems and Anteparadise. [00:11:49.10] DAVID: Yeah and when you have conversations with the students - what do those sound like? How do they show up with that? Like what kind of questions do they have because you're tapping into this contemplative way of looking at the sky in seeing in different ways. What kind of questions do the students come up with? Is there anything like extremely clever? Is it - you know itÕs not your average looking - how you view the sky. [00:12:11.17] JEFFREY: I suppose I would call the - the question searching that one of the things that was yielded in this particular exercise - this particular experiment really was an unmooring from our usual senses and our usual habits. And after that unmooring there was a real searching quality to the class discussion, which was a sort of just a kind of just conversation, which I mean to say it was equal to or a perfect function or for rather the Zurita's depictions of the landscape, which are radical and surreal. So much so that the class left us all asking what is even a landscape as itÕs so figured variously and radically in Zurita's poems and that we had had such a contrary experience of meditating upon the skies a sight of violence when the sky right in front of us was one of those brilliant beautiful front range days. [00:13:20.05] DAVID: Yeah, and I guess one thing to notice is itÕs not the sky's fault. You know itÕs a product of human construction I guess. [00:13:30.14] JEFFREY: Yes. Political violence is always that. [00:13:36.01] DAVID: What kind of other practices do you do with the contemplative writing class? Sounds like you have the staring into the sky and contemplative what is going on and viewing it in a different light. Is there anything else that you like to highlight and do with the students? [00:13:50.13] JEFFREY: Well, my aim with contemplative practices is to try as best as possible to integrate them into the content of the course as seamlessly as possible since a lot of our students don't come with particularly practices or particularly sitting practices. I myself don't have a sitting meditation practice. So, the idea is a little more improvisatory. A little more experimental about what it means to approach writing through a contemplative way. And a class on film poetics. We would take an image from a film - so an image that was originally meant to be moving at 24 frames a second and we would still it. And then we would meditate rather uh on that image with the dual consciousness that it was once a moving image and now was a still image and that double experience of time is moving, flowing stream in which we live and that's very hard almost impossible to think as still. To feel it as still and yet there are moments when I think we have all felt out of time. Whether that's been chemically induced or purely experientially induced. [00:15:14.23] DAVID: Yeah, itÕs interesting to think too how movies are just a stream of photos essentially. They're doing like 30 frames a second, which means 30 still photos every second. Or 60 depending on what rate you're filming at. And so, every single what looks like motion is actually just a bunch of stillness stuck together. [00:15:39.05] JEFFREY: Yeah, it was my hope that we would as a group move through that conundrum of stillness and movement as they're experienced inside films. [00:15:50.23] DAVID: So how do you focus on the authors? Do you - do you pick a couple books to read from them and then the class resume - you come together and you talk about it as a collective? You - dissect the angles in which they write at. Like how does one go about that? [00:16:06.01] JEFFREY: Again, I think there's a kind of improvisatory approach to class. But the Kerouac School has never been an English department. And so, pedagogy's here are a little more open than the discipline might otherwise incline us as practitioners and studiers and researchers and writers. So, I think there's a fair amount among my colleagues and myself of interest of different approaches to what it means to study literature. How the body itself might be implicated as a - as a heuristic how performance. So, for instance, in a class a couple years ago in which I was study the Greek tragedians albeit in translation with a group of undergraduates. We were looking at the place of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides and to help the students really imagine themselves across that difference of time and culture and understanding. We isolated the 12 distinct cries of pain that appear the play Electra. And, uh we talked about them. Perhaps in a way that you might talk about them and the play and other sorts of settings where you're discussing classical literature from the ancients. But then I brought in a large diaphanous scarf shroud and asked the students to devise a performance centered on one of the distinct cries of pain from the play. And to use the shroud - the scarf as an expressive prop and one of the great things - one of the great joys about teaching here at Naropa is the openness of students to experiment like that. For them to - the real readiness at which they're willing to implicate their person and their body and their spirit. That approach to the whole person in the classroom is really such a gift to work with as a - as a teacher and a peer and a colleague and a fellow and a researcher. So that we as a group saw 14 distinct performance working over these 12 distinct cries of pain trying to inhabit what it means, what it meant perhaps in 5th century Athens to other those syllables and what it means now for the students to utter those syllables with their own body and to sort of apprehend that experience. [00:18:49.18] DAVID: Yeah, so it seems like you like to integrate the body into the teaching? There's a sense of improve you say to the contemplativeness of teaching as well in what it sounds like to me is have a curriculum - well you have like a skeleton structure of a curriculum, but then when the class shows up because everyone shows up in their own unique way and because of that you customly fit the contemplativeness of the teaching to how the class shows up. Am I hearing that right? [00:19:19.19] JEFFREY: Yeah, I think like all interested and interesting artists and scholars there's a dialectic between preparation and readiness. And anybody who has been in a kind of performative setting whether that's collaborative art making or collaborative learning like teaching - everybody is really alert maybe we're always really just searching for the happy accident in which our personal energies are in that distinct form of harmony that is really such a joy and makes social and social life and sociality uh so sustaining. [00:19:57.05] DAVID: Yeah, so I kind of want to talk about summer writing program. So, there's this really cool thing that Naropa does every summer. Its three to four week - intensive during the summer. And, everyone gets together and just takes 8 hour classes every single day for like 4 weeks, 3 weeks, however many weeks you want to stay and you just have an extremely awesome eclectic writers, authors come and teach. Can you explain more about that? Like what do we do here? [00:20:26.01] JEFFREY: Yeah, the summer writing program was one of the inaugural gestures of Naropa itself uh so it started in '74 when Ginsberg -- Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman and Diana Di Prima and a few other of their friends and fellow artists gathered at the prompting of Chogyam Trungpa uh Rinpoche and after that inaugural summer program they collectively decided to try to make it work as an experiment for a hundred years. This coming year will be our 44th year. As you say we invite around 30 or artists and performers and visiting faculty to come and to hold uh workshops, to give performances and lectures. I think a great thing about the summer writing program uh which is maybe distinct from some of the other programs, which have developed in the time between '74 and now is that there is a real openness to the community. We don't have an application fee. There is no real gatekeeping. ItÕs really an experiment in people who are - share an interest in writing and new American writing, experimental writing. Who are interested in the possibilities of community, of social action and activism to come together and to think together, to think collectively and it is as you say an intensive. Its radically immersive. There's workshops during the morning. We take a lunch break and then there are afternoon colloquial and lectures. And evening performances. It all happens on the original Naropa campus with the greens and the performing arts center and I don't know of anybody who hasn't gone through that hasn't been radically changed. I think for me it really did sort of save my life. In 2015, was the first summer I participated in it and it was a - the kind of shock of recognition of finding comrades and also a kind of rejuvenating experience that broke me out of a pretty terrible depression. [00:22:37.13] DAVID: Yeah, itÕs really beautiful what happens there. I've had the pleasure of witnessing it a couple years in a row because I was working in the events team at Naropa so I was running sound and lights and just kind of making sure everything works right and running video and hear I am running the podcast now. [00:22:52.12] JEFFREY: We totally appreciate all that labor from the crew. [00:22:56.11] DAVID: So, we have a crew kind of running all that fun stuff. But just bearing witness to all the teachings, all the different writings. The - the vastness of the literature that comes out of SWP is really amazing and - I do feel a change as well and I wasn't participating in the classes, but I was there for the colloquiums, the teaching readings, the student readings and everyone was just so well put together and amazing, artistic and a lot of people integrate video and a lot of people integrate music and its really interesting to have everyone come together and show up as is and bring their style with them. [00:23:35.00] JEFFREY: Yeah, itÕs a very interdisciplinary group of people that come together - dancers, writers, artists, musicians, people coming from across the world. We always have some Europeans and some South Americans and uh itÕs just a really amazing experiment in community and thinking together. [00:23:56.19] DAVID: Yeah awesome. So, I keep coming across this idea - the school is called Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. ItÕs really fun to say. ItÕs kind of kooky, its weird. I really like it. Where did that come from? Obviously, it came from Jack Kerouac, but its - itÕs not your normal writing department name. You know you show to a different university itÕs going to be like Writing 101 and we're like disembodied poetics. [00:24:25.17] JEFFREY: Yeah, that's for sure. Uh the name comes in part from a joke, but also in part from a deep love. So, as I said, after the first summer writing program when everybody was coming together - kind of to have a debrief about what had just happened and what was next and the challenge that uh Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche gave to both Ginsberg and to Waldman for whom he was both the teacher and so the challenge was accepted in that light. They named the school after their friend Jack Kerouac who had you know died too early and so sort of loving memorial gesture. The disembodied is the joke in part because they had no materials, they had no money. They had - only the sort of disembodied spirit of writing and thinking and being together that was the propulsion for the school. It was almost the Gertrude Stein school of uh Disembodied Poetics. So that would have been a different uh sort of ethos. It would have made maybe the feminist line, which is present and has always been present and Waldman and Di Prima we're part of the start of the school. It would have made that feminist line more explicitly evident. Like in its name. [00:25:47.19] DAVID: And Anne Waldman is a huge part of JKS SWP. She's - she is such a gem. So, knowledgeable. So, amazing. And also, a great performer. I have seen her perform - read her poetry so many different times and itÕs so amazing every time. [00:26:02.17] JEFFREY: We don't have the time today for me to - to give you all that I own Anne Waldman, but she is a remarkable friend and colleague. A guide and hero in the field. [00:26:13.13] DAVID: Definitely. Yeah, she kind of deserves her own podcast in a sense. [00:26:17.01] JEFFREY: Absolument. [00:26:18.14] DAVID: All right, so yeah, I really appreciate your time speaking with us today. I'd love to end on another poem that you have. Do you have one available. [00:26:27.02] JEFFREY: Oh sure. Uh - I'll read another from the "Force Drift" sequence. This uh particular poem is in response to a piece of art by the - an installation by the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum. I first encountered it some summers ago at the Tate Modern in London. ItÕs called "Impenetrable." And itÕs a uh - 300 by 300 by 300 centimeter floating cube composed of barbed wire. Yeah so it is a exactly erratically arresting uh if object is the right word when you encounter it. The poem is called, "Force Drift." As I said, itÕs a response to Mona Hatoum's artwork "Impenetrable," but it also integrates uh quotes from an essay by Judith Butler. "Force Drift" In the sudden and catastrophic were I proposed consider a dimension of political life Of the Tate Modern A cube composed of empty space A dimension of political life that has to do with our exposure to violence And 40 and 400 and 41 barbed wire rods Suspended in mid air Our exposure to violence and our complicity in it Arrests and thrills the mere body you were And our complicity in it With our vulnerability Moving room to room now urgent a revolutionary with our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning subject even a sublime halt and rupture Loss and the task of mourning that follows if ever if ever And you, yourself a swarm that follows and with finding a basis for community with this urgency And demand this new vocation with finding a basis for community in these conditions In the sudden and catastrophic world. [00:29:04.11] DAVID: Wow. Really good. Thank you so much. [00:29:07.14] JEFFREY: Thank you for having me David. [00:29:09.10] DAVID: Yeah. I'd like to thank Jeffrey today. Jeffrey Pethybridge. He is the faculty in SWP - summer writing program and he is also the chair of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. It was a pleasure having you. Thank you. [00:29:22.10] JEFFREY: Thank you. [MUSIC] On behalf of the Naropa community thank you for listening to Mindful U. The official podcast of Naropa University. Check us out at www.naropa.edu or follow us on social media for more updates. [MUSIC]