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The Sounding Word
Bobbie Louise Hawkins
A slim, vivid entry in CUNY's Lost & Found series, which recovers overlooked documents of twentieth-century poetics from the archives. This one gathers two lectures the writer and performer Bobbie Louise Hawkins gave at Naropa's Jack Kerouac School — the title talk and one on Colette — together with a late interview. Her subject is the poetics of prose: how sentences carry rhythm and truth, how writing meets experience without flinching. Hawkins was a superb talker, and the transcriptions keep the grain of her spoken voice. For anyone interested in the Beat-adjacent Naropa world, in prose as a poet's medium, or simply in a wonderful writer thinking aloud, it is a small treasure.
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The author
Bobbie Louise Hawkins (1930–2018) was a writer, monologuist, and performer — a fixture of the Naropa and Jack Kerouac School world and, for many years, the wife of the poet Robert Creeley. She built her art from the poetics of prose and the spoken voice, and was a beloved teacher; these lectures catch her in her element, talking.
The book
Edited by Iris Cushing and published in the sixth series of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative — the project in which doctoral students at the CUNY Graduate Center edit unearthed archival materials by important twentieth-century writers. It presents two annotated lectures from Naropa (1989 and 2005), the title talk and "Colette: Earthly Paradise," plus a 2015 interview with Hawkins by the editor.
How to read it
As primary-source poetics: not a polished treatise but the living texture of a writer's thinking, with the digressions and warmth of the lecture hall intact. Its value is intimacy and voice as much as argument.
For more context
Hawkins's own prose (Back to Texas, My Own Alphabet); and the wider Lost & Found series recovering the poetics of the period.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Bobbie Louise Hawkins
- Publisher
- CUNY Poetics Document Initiative (Lost & Found)
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2016
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Chapbook
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Maine