Overview

Advanced Poetry: Writing the Spirit In this 6-week advanced poetry workshop, we will use spiritual poetry as a generative lens, provoking our own creative visions and spiritual visitations. What is it that stuns the mind, stops the heart, and eludes ordinary speech? We will celebrate poetry, ancient through contemporary, as an expression of the spirit, considering the divine from the daemon to god, the unconscious to prayer, silence to the supernatural. Possible topics include the soul, afterlife, grace, apophasis, decreation, the anam cara, the numinous, and the I-Thou. In addition to grazing excerpts from philosophers and early mystics such as Martin Buber and Simone Weil, we will read poems from Kaveh Akbar’s Anthology of Spiritual Verse and others (such as Celan, Donne, Hopkins, Dickinson, Stevens, Rumi, and Basho, Clifton, and Valentine). The majority of our time will focus on workshopping your poems and discussing craft, form, and revision techniques as they arise. Optional weekly prompts will consider mystical practices and divination tools from the spell to the seance, tarot to ouija, meditation to Lectio Divina. By the end of our 6 weeks, each participant will have received oral and written feedback on three poems, from peers and the instruction.