July 19:
“Words Rise Up From Silence: A Poetry Process Workshop”
with Dvorah Simon, Ph.D.

Change is a place where new realities tremble on the verge – and the difference that makes a difference 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 one-day poetry-writing 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.
We’ll work with a two-stage process:
(1)accessing primary material through trance, rhythm, dyadic and group processes, and journaling; and then
(2) crafting and editing these words with the power of tonality, rhythm, reference, formality and so on. You’ll leave at the end of the day with poems you’ve written and the skill and confidence to keep writing them.