Denver is Lonesome for Her Heroes

The course Jack Kerouac Wrote Here, a sociology course taught by Dr. Audrey Sprenger at SUNY-Potsdam, is based upon the work of Jack Kerouac, and the literature courses are primarily taught by Penny Vlagopoulos and Joshua Kupetz, with Adira Amram teaching the texts as the basis for performance.

The seminars focused on Kerouac's poetry and prose through two assignments: Sketches of New York and DharmaPops on Avenue A.

Sketches of New York

Penny Vlagopoulos and Joshua Kupetz, two of the four co-editors of the forthcoming scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Adira Amram, a New York City-based actor and performance artist, conducted literary seminars and performance workshops aboard the California Zephyr and the Lake Shore Limited. The workshops explored the development of Kerouac’s narrative technique through the more-conventional prose in On the Road to the spontaneous prose techniques in Visions of Cody.

While the courses focused on close reading and the ways that Kerouac uses grammar and syntax to convey meaning, students also considered how those intentional styles affect cognition, and how that cognition effects performance.

Based upon these discussions, students completed both conventional and spontaneous narrative assignments, culminating in Sketches of New York, spontaneous prose descriptions of people and places in Kerouac’s New York which the students will perform at Goodbye, Blue Monday in Brooklyn, January 11, 2007, at 7:30 p.m.

DharmaPops on Avenue A

Penny Vlagopoulos and Joshua Kupetz, two of the four co-editors of the forthcoming scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Adira Amram, a New York City-based actor and performance artist, conducted a literary seminar on Kerouac’s use of spontaneous prosody in his “Western haikus,” a form that he felt “must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery.”

After examining a selection of Kerouac’s haiku, or “dharmapops,” students composed their own dharmapops on the streets of New York and workshopped them at the Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, at the foot of First Avenue between Houston and Bleecker.

---

Penny Vlagopoulos is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She holds an M.A. and M.Phil. in English from Columbia. Currently, she is an Adjunct Professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and is working on her dissertation, which examines the underground in post-World War II American Culture. She is also, along with Howard Cunnell, PhD, George Mouratidis, and Joshua Kupetz, editing Jack Kerouac's scroll manuscript of "On the Road." It will be published by Viking Penguin in 2007.

Adira Amram is a New York based actress and performance artist. After graduating from the State University of New York at Purchase she appeared in the Off-Broadway production of "Door Wide Open" as the young writer Joyce Johnson, a play based on the letters between Joyce Johnson and Jack Kerouac. This year she debuted in "The Sopranos" as Stacey in the season finale. She can be seen in the feature film "Some Kind of Awful" set to be released August 2007. She is a fixture of the NYC downtown alternative comedy scene. Her CD "Me & Bill," out on Northstreet Records, received a rave review from "Jane Magazine" as well as interviews with National Public Radio, "WBAI," "backstage.com" and "The Gothamist." She is currently in production with a new CD due out in 2007.