See the notes from Thurston Moore’s unlikely poetry university workshop
Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth’s guitarist and vocalist, is responsible for writing most of the band’s lyrics, so it’s unsurprising that the musician has also experimented with the world of poetry.
In an interview with Dazed, he once revealed that “someone somewhere once referenced to poetry as the essence of writing, and perhaps it’s that quality that attracts me”. Detailing further, Moore continued: “I see poetry more like the song, and as a songwriter I find immediate influence from reading and studying the history and forms of poetry”.
Moore has been involved with the Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal since the early 2000s, eventually creating his own independent poetry publishing imprint named Flowers and Cream Press, which aims to illuminate the work of young poets. He describes his love for poetry as emerging in the 1990s when he began “collecting and archiving underground, post-war poetry from the USA [and] UK”.
Moore is best known for his pioneering contributions to the experimental and no-wave scenes of the 1980s and 1990s. However, the musician – who released an instrumental album called Screen Time just last year – was invited to lead a three-day poetry workshop at Naropa University’s writing program in 2011.
The co-founder of the writing program, Anne Waldman, stated: “We’ve been trying to get him for a while. We need him”. Although not everyone was so impressed; the late Amiri Baraka was quoted saying: “He needs to work on those poems”.
One student, Thorin Klosowski, shared that the first day of the program began with Moore’s “rambling, three-hour introduction”, which revealed that when “he initially moved to New York in the ’70s, it was not to make music, but rather to be a writer”. Another student named Katie Ingegneri provided notes from the sessions, which have been transcribed below.
Workshop 1:
Teacher improvises on electric
guitar while
students write single words
each to his/her own sense of
space and Rhythm and evocation
For 4 minutes
the guitar is recorded on
cassette recorder
or computer
Recorded music played back
through amp. while students
Read aloud their writing
Simultaneously, All recorded
by cassette rec’r or comp.
MAKE CASSETTES
