Come to an evening with poet Dvorah Simon as she leads a group experience designed to get you acquainted (or re-acquainted) with your own natural poetic voice. Poetry is more than things in books you had to read in school -- it's the living, breathing voice of change, the way all the voices inside you can find a way out and be welcomed and blessed.
Wednesday, July 2nd @ 7pm
$25 donation suggested
Change is a place where new realities tremble on the verge - and can turn upon the naming of the new. True naming is not merely about putting a label onto an experience, but rather evoking or creating that experience or reality in the moment of its naming. For naming to have power, it must rise from places beyond ordinary mental activity, enlisting the magic of the unconscious as well as archetypal, ancestral, and cosmic realms.
Writing poetry is a practice for developing such a power and skill, a way of attuning to a greater wisdom and creativity.
In this evening workshop, we will find the roots of language in breath, body, and wisps of the wind. Words rise up from silence - the silence of bone, of earth, of rain, of the half-heard word in another room, of the dream you wake with the feeling of but can't quite recall. We'll learn to tap these springs, these places of "otherness," and bring their voices to words. The result will be poetry, even if you've never written poetry before or never thought you could.
Bring something to write with, a place to write it in, and your imagination, curiosity, and willingness to play. It helps to wear clothing you feel comfortable moving around in.
The workshop will be followed by a poetry reading including anyone from the class who would like to read what they've written, and featuring poet Chloe (her last name).
Dvorah Simon, Ph.D., is a psychologist and poet. She is the co-editor, with Stephen Gilligan, Ph.D., of Walking In Two Worlds: The Relational Self in Theory, Practice, and Community. Dvorah teaches a full-day version of this workshop in Lake San Marcos each summer (see www.stephengilligan.com and click on "Trance Camp" for more info). For the last two years, Dvorah has been teaching creative writing to residents of a program for homeless women Veterans. Her first book of poetry, Mercy, will be published by Hanford Mead.