Women Poets on Devotion and Courage Workshop
May 10th / 1:00 – 4:00p ET
Poet Mary Oliver famously said, “attention is the beginning of devotion.” Novelist and essayist Anaïs Nin said, “life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
In this workshop, we will practice paying attention as an act of deep inquiry, devotion, and where we can, courage. We will read selected poems from a range of contemporary women poets—Marie Howe, Martha Silano, Traci Brimhall, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Isabella DeSendi, Carlene Kucharczyk, and Megan Pinto among others—whose writing is courageously awake to the world and the poet’s own movement through it.
Through in-workshop exercises and reflection on our own writerly processes, this workshop will encourage you to further your practice of sustained attention and inquiry into the worlds (yes, all of them!) you inhabit. We’ll use the various affordances of language and poetic techniques to investigate personal history, the (often-fragmented) self, as well as daily encounters as sites of observation, devotion, and daring discovery.
