“My first love is poetry and I’m trying to find a way to write sacred poetry, poetry that sends the reader to a sacred place or calls to a sacred place inside the reader. I don’t know how to do that. That’s my wish. That’s what I meditate on and hope for: to discover the sacredness in the profane world.” ~ Li-Young Lee

The workshop that Dan Weeks did last year on Mallarme’s influence on Yeats inspired this series. We spend so much time in workshops on craft and on our own poems, an instrumental process in developing our work. However, sometimes we need to go beyond our own poems, and immerse ourselves in the poems of those masters of the lyric, who have excavated memory, immersed themselves in grief and longing, passion and wonder, and love. We can both experience and explore how that process occurs. The poems we’ll read are by Lee, Hafiz, Paz, Komachi, Shikibu, Rich, and James Wright, and others. (There will be handouts, since I know we won’t cover all of these poems.) I know we’ll have rich conversation and while you won’t leave with a prompt for your next poem, I’m hoping you leave enriched and excited about continuing to unearth that which is sacred within you.