Elements of an academy for the training of poets
(by extension, preliminary characteristics for any institution holding and propagating the Embedded Primal)
Generalities – the philosophy, pedagogy, organizational structure, purpose – are embedded in and across the elements. Premature generalization would abstract from their reality.
- Candles and soft lights to light the rooms
- ‘True night’, minimization of artificial lighting
- Plants in the classrooms
- Craft furniture (not mass-produced), non-homogenous, not arranged in lines
- Some classes in the forest, ideally next to a stream
- Emphasis on being penetrated by a poet’s soul
- Occasional collective use of substances (but not excessive)
- History of the English language, going back to Proto-Indo-European
- Learning basic phonetics on the way
- Physical movement to familiarize with the sounds and their transitions; exaggerating the mouth and breath movements into whole-body movement
- Heavy integration with other forms of art
- Eg frequent museum visits, extensive contemplation of pieces, basic workshops in sculpture, drawing, painting, and dance (designed specifically for the transfer to poetics)
- Heavy emphasis on music: music history, basic music theory, sharing music casually, improv singing circles (making sound induced by the collective sound, not limited to explicit singing)
- Freestyle rapping – learning by doing (no class instruction)
- Bulk of the poetic work: going through the canon (pre-contemporary poetry) via imitation (rewriting verbatim then analyzing), in small, intimate groups (2-3) primarily, with exchanges in a full-group context (but remaining informal)
- 1-min-dance, 1-min-freewrite activity: in pairs, one person freestyle dances, the other freewrites while looking at the dancer, switch every minute
- Watching certain choreographers and Cirque du Soleil, a different form of poetry
- Daily group walks in a specific natural area in mostly silence (except commenting directly on the natural features)
- Practices to strengthen world-embedding and open receptivity
- Daoist martial arts (Qi Gong, Tai Chi)
- Attentional practices: exploring different ways of directing and engaging with our attention on the world and within ourselves
- Classes, workshops, and well-designed party-esque journeys to understand and work through the toxicities of mainstream society which subtly penetrate us
- Intellectual, physical, visceral, and emotional threads
- Translation
- Critically engaging with an existing translation of a beloved poet, using Google Translate (not necessary to fully know the language)
- Translation from one English dialect to another
- The Reality of Being reading and practice group
- Contact Improv relational explorations (ie focused specifically on its use as an exploration of relational possibilities and relational patterns between people; not primarily as art form or as leisure)
- Study of Aesthetic frames in the same meta-space as the Embedded Primal – ie tapping into similar types of forces even if manifesting differently (non-exhaustive sample list):
- In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki
- The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand
- Manifesto of Italian Futurism, Filippo Marinetti
- In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
- Romanticism
- Surrealism
Embedded Primal 