The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (no kidding, that’s its name) was founded in 1974 by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Boulder’s Naropa Institute. Since then a number of figureheads from the Beat and off-beat literary scenes have been on staff or visiting lecturers at Naropa, including Robert Creely, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sonia Sanchez, Gary Snyder, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan and Anselm Hollo. It is their speeches, panels, interviews and documents that make up the bulk of Waldman’s new Civil Disobediences anthology. The title seems less a description of the book than a ploy to attract readership in a highly polarized election year—there is very little politics in action, unless you consider politics to be poets talking about how they write, where they came from and what role poets should have in society. It’s more like a backstage tour of the writing world, a workshop in its own right that challenges the reader to think about writing in fifty different ways. It’s addictive stuff, and, as is often the case with anthologies, the stand-out contributions are from the lesser-knowns. For example Ted Berrigan’s zany, off-the-cuff "Workshop":

The ability of human beings to make something strong and beautiful and marvelous out of dark things that happen is what makes people be human beings. Dogs can’t do that. Maybe they can, in the dog world, but they can’t do it in any way that we humans can see it, except very briefly or momentarily. Maybe they don’t want us to see it, which is an idea I would like to entertain. I think that probably is the truth.

There is a small section about writing and Dharma, including James Grauerholz’s interesting account of William Burroughs and Buddhism (he often referred to it as "cosmic junk"). And an essay about hieroglyphics and money by Peter Lamborn Wilson that is every bit as fascinating as the Da Vinci code, without the idiotic plot and characters. Some of the lectures only touch on writing tangentially, for example ecologist Peter Warshall’s "Symbiosis", which is an illuminating if dumbed down account of inter-dependencies from an evolutionary biology perspective.

Many of the pieces do have a political tie-in. For example, Lorenzo Thomas, after a lecture on myth perception and Frederick Douglass, answers a question about the botched 2000 election:

The point is either people are going to say that they are into issues or they are into the personalities and, "Well, I like his hairdo." Otherwise, it doesn’t matter what the figures are or who tabulates them because the public is not into making these decisions. Someone somewhere else in this system is doing it.

Waldman’s own gift to the collection is a series of "Femanifestos", and they truly are political, execrating burqas, patriot acts and wars on terror in a tone that sounds shrill even when read in a quiet room. (COULD YOU BE A LITTLE LOUDER ANNE??) Allen Ginsberg’s lecture (with Helen Adam) on the ballad could have also been politically oriented, as many of them (the Robin Hood ballads, Chevy Chase, etc.) had a political dimension; unfortunately Ginsberg only has enough ballad expertise to identify a few lines in a Dylan song. Still, it’s amusing to see the whacked out author of "Howl" in an academic role. Overall the collection is highly readable, and writable too, in the way that it makes you want to rush back to the keyboard or notepad, meditate, find identity, and make your own voice heard.

- Joel Van Valin