This second session of Jane Hirshfield’s online masterclass — whose first session in October 2021 was a big success– will again focus, in new directions, on the poem as an act of connection and interconnection. Returnees and new participants are equally welcome. The series is called Poetry & because a poem is not bottled wine stored in a cellar, but rather a transforming engagement with life that is both within and beyond its own words. How this happens, in any particular poem, will vary. That it happens is what makes a poem a poem. Poems speak to, question, investigate, expand upon, and encompass real things. They hold outer events and inner life, realms of feeling and thought, past history, and imaginable futures. They honor both facts and mystery, both the wholeness and the perplexities of our lives. They engage the entire community of beings and things in one ranging, life-long-continuing conversation.
This three-hour ‘recorded’ Zoom program will be primarily generative, with invitations for each person to approach their own this-moment subjects through various gates of strategy and poem-craft. The hope is that participants will leave with a set of poem-starts (like the young plants you might bring home from a garden center) and also with a set of new possibilities for writing as you go forward.
