Unfolding a Poem: Reading in a Process Perspective
Live Session Info
Dates: March 2, 2022 – March 23, 2022
Meeting Times: Wednesdays, 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM Pacific
Zoom Info: Click on the session links below to access.
Course Summary
This is the first in series of three four-week courses taught by Christina Hutchins. Participants will carefully consider the following question: How can the process of a poem not only facilitate the widening of our existence but also enact an experience while simultaneously reflecting on it?
Course Description
Have you ever wondered why people so often turn to poetry at memorial services and weddings, times of deep grief and human celebration? The words of poems can be evocative of, paradoxically, a wordlessness at the heart of existence.
Though poems can connect with or respond to our feelings in relation with the natural world, solitude, and intimacy, sometimes we are not comfortable reading poetry, finding the language dense or difficult, or simply different than its familiar usages. It is worth learning to read poetry for its pleasures. As Whitehead writes, poetry and process philosophy are kin, because both reach beyond a superficial level of language, philosophy with logic and poetry with the music of language. Two different kinds of precision, and we need them both.
In this class, we will explore poems written or translated into English: contemporary and old, in forms mostly in free verse, from several cultures, with particular attention to how poets touch on the sacred in the ordinary, whether named that or not. We will adventure amid the poems with a process perspective informed by Whitehead and encounter poems as occasions of felt becoming.
Each hour and half meeting time will include a brief presentation and reading a few poems together, sometimes very slowly, with ample discussion. The class is for those who have never read much poetry or read it reluctantly in high school, and it’s also for people who regularly read poetry, both for those who hold developed process thought and those newly encountering it. For millennia, poems have modeled the ancient mystery of being lured toward/into the never-before, trying to touch the more within and between us. As poet Carl Phillips writes, poems offer the evidence and comfort of lives beyond our own. “Think of the sunlight we failed to welcome, / How others stepped forward to take it in.” We may have missed it, but the poem refunds that sunlight and leaves it on the page for us to find.
