A look into Thurston Moore's Naropa poetry workshop

Thorin Klosowski wrote a report for the Denver Westword blog detailing his experience of Thurston Moore's three-day poetry workshop at Naropa University. (To quote ourselves: "Most famous for his 30 years as a singer and guitarist in the art-rock band Sonic Youth, Moore is also a poet, writer, avid collector and archivist.") The article comes with scanned versions of Moore's class notes.

Here's how the workshop began:

On the morning of July 4, twelve of us wandered into an auditorium for a class with the innocuous title of "In Silver Rain With a Paper Key." Nobody, myself included, had any idea what to expect from this. We knew Thurston Moore the Rocker, but nobody really had an idea who Thurston Moore the writer was -- or if he actually existed. It turns out, he has a poetry journal he runs off his record label called Ecstatic Peace, and in a slightly overrun, rambling, three-hour introduction, he revealed that when he initially moved to New York in the '70s, it was not to make music, but rather, to be a writer.

On to the second day:

Day two was a bit more like what you'd expect from a class with Thurston Moore. We wrote down short stories and poems, then recited them into a cassette deck, while he played guitar. Then he screwed around with them and made -- in his words -- "some sick poetry noise," while we stood around and watched.

For day three—and more—click here.