Feb 22-24, 2008
What is the Knocking? (It is three strange angels. Admit them. Admit them.) This will be a weekend of generating writing toward new poems. I have been wondering lately about writing into what we don’t know. What if we have little to say in a poem? What if the poem is trying to say something through us? What in the world might it be trying to say? How we can learn to listen? to the actual world? to the apparently inert things around us? to our own unconscious? How can we set aside our ideas about what we want to say and allow the deeply unfamiliar to arise? (Who are these strange angels that DH Lawrence writes about?)
We’ll write our way into the unknown — practicing receptivity. And we might be astonished by what speaks and what it says. Come with lots of paper, pens or pencils, and be prepared to not know what you are doing. We’ll write with our non-dominant hands. We’ll make poems without paper and speak them into the air. We’ll break syntax, mix sound, look to the left of whatever it is we’ve been staring at — and practice a curiously relaxing and rigorous kind of creation. We’ll make poems we never expected to make. Everyone is welcome.
Marie Howe’s first collection of poems, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1989 National Poetry Series. What the Living Do was selected by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the five best volumes of poetry in 1997. She co-edited a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic and her much anticipated new book is The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. Her poetry is intensely intimate, brave, and resonant, exploring themes of relationship, attachment, and loss in a uniquely personal search for transcendence. Inside each poem there is also a joy, a new breath of life, some kind of redemption. Currently she teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, and New York University.
“Marie Howe’s poetry is luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life. Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.” — Stanley Kunitz