Ami Regier

Occupy “The Lord’s Prayer”

Poetry

By Hamilton Williams and Ami Regier

We playfully revised “The Lord’s Prayer” during a long night drive across the country. The spirit of Gordon Kaufman,  author of In the Beginning, Creativity, came to our aid when we realized we could no longer utter the familiar prayer that speaks through medieval, feudal, patriarchal metaphors: lord, kingdom, father.  We perceive creativity as well as the ideologies of time and place inhabiting the ancient words of the scriptural prayer.  We imagine the ancient prayer is still unfinished. We hear other voices with their lists of deliverances through time. We hope others will offer infinite and contesting revisions, reflecting their perspectives and language. We know our voice in this poem escalates here and there with our ideological issues of the millennial moment.  We hear in the occasionally wrenched cadence much  ongoing wrestling with religious inheritances. We hope for cross-cultural religious intersections. We imagine a reverse occupation, whereby the religious tradition that occupied indigenous religious spaces could be in turn re-occupied, in the spirit of the Occupy movement, of course!  We share a tendency to experience religious language as struggle and transformation. Gordon Kaufman recommended addressing divinity as a non-anthropomorphic construct, Creativity:  

 

Our Creativity, which stretches throughout the universe,

Hallowed be thy energies.

Thy challenges come, as true human beings we become

Changed by the garden, and changed by the sky.

Mutate us this day our daily being.

Forgive us for climate change, as we forgive those one-percenters who duped us, those trespassers.  

Forgive us our blindnesses.

Transform our biases — for example, the blindness of whiteness.

Lead us away from capitalism and into social embraces.

Deliver us from individualism and cultural stagnation.

Guide us away from GMO biological manipulation, to respect culture and food sovereignty. 

Protect us from privatization and its refusal of public good.

Bring us the grace of earth and heaven, as we restore the indigenous values of your being.

For creativity has the power and glory to transform us, forever and ever.

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To Infinity and Beyond: Imagining Liba College Futures and Other Science Fictions

Short Stories

By Ami Regier

***

The new entrepreneurial president was desperate. What small colleges do that no other form of higher education can do, he thought, is create a world. It is a very special, intense world, characterized by full-body, full-mind, live time scenarios 24-7, involving arduous journeys through the rugged terrains of, among others, liberal arts, technology, music, undergraduate research, and athletics. With much creativity, small colleges create their own educational structures and intercollegiate competitions. While musing about this, the president was multitasking along with the first-year students, having occasional google hangouts while reading the community-wide text Reamde, by Neal Stephenson. Reamde imagines that videogame realities are starting to intersect with real-world economies and power-brokers. In Reamde, students in China hack into Russian mafia financial data in order to make college tuition money. The data sets get imported into the game and held for ransom. Students problem-solve how to win access to the data sets in gaming logic (by winning in the game construct) but end up resolving real-world conflicts. When the president read the line about how people were tracing each other’s locations in two realities, the president turned to the webcam and shouted “Brilliant—that’s it!” Before long, the college had shifted the location of classroom learning into narrative worlds. A new major combining gaming, programming, international business, and writing was developed. Students developed problem-solving methods in the narrative context of multiplayer games, writing the next plot event after each problem was solved. As in Reamde, tuition money could be sited in the game, with portals for payment and collection based on student research, labs, logic proofs, performances, and creative activities built into the game. Soon, students world-wide were enrolling in the narrative world of Liba College. Residential inhabitation was optional, but students tended to choose it, because they could live as their game avatars and written selves during the duration of each class segment. Invented lives of mathematicians, economists, scientists, computer programmers, musicians, innovators, and super-athletes became real lives.

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Geographies of New Mexico: a Dialogue– Spring Break, 2012

Poetry

By Ami Regier    

1.

I can feel the energy coming from the land.

This is where I bought parts for the truck.

There’s where I went rock crawling with the truck.

I didn’t get far from Myrtle Beach before breaking down on the side of the road.

Pointy toe cowboy boots are cockroach kickers because they go for the corner wham. New Mexico style is more the square toe.

This is the loop that we took coming back into Gallup from Zuni.

That’s a 550. It’s like a ton and a half.

That was a Charger. You can tell by the taillights.

Miata.

That’s a pretty Road King.

I drove my truck on top of that hill of  caves and areas where squatters, homeless, partiers, trashburners were, where we went stargazing last night. Homeless  may be living in the cliffdwellings now. See the stuffed teddy bear, a shoe.

Warning, the sign appears to say:  proposing marriage in Canyon de Chelly may make you lightheaded.

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