Unfolding a Poem: Writing in a Process Perspective
Live Session Info
Dates: April 6, 2022 – April 27, 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 second in series of three four-week courses taught by Christina Hutchins. Writing a poem, for the first or thousandth time, is an adventure into new constellations of feelings, thoughts, and experience, and writing a poem also opens fresh insights into the creative process itself. With gentle guidance and process insights, participants in this class, will do both.
Course Description
The poet Adrienne Rich speaks directly to the days of her life. (In a poem, you can do that!) She says to the days, “I want more from you than I ever knew to ask.” To write a poem is one way of tapping our days for the “more” than we knew to ask, delving into the actuality of being human. To write a poem can be a satisfying spiritual engagement, a way of following sacred yearning and coalesce felt experience of the world and self in new ways. To write a poem is to enter language both raw and crafted, bringing together sounds and images. To write a poem is also to discover, in an intuitive way, the dynamics of a creative process. That is, to experience from within, how the universe or an ocean, a leaf, an atom, a human life becomes what it is. In this class, gentle prompts and process insights will guide participants into playing with language as a medium where the desires and constraints, praises and griefs of living converge.
The class is open to all. Often a creative urge waits in us that we attended to as young people then abandoned in adulthood. Or we may be drawn to try forms of creativity we never have. Perhaps you have written hundreds or poems or can’t remember ever having written a poem. The class is for experienced poets seeking insight into creative process and for process thinkers who are brand new to making poems, and everyone between.
Each hour and a half meeting will include brief teaching about a process perspective and an aspect or technique of poetry, using an example poem, and a brief quiet period to write “together,” the poem-making enticed by means of a related prompt, a chance to surprise yourself. There will be a time for always optional sharing at the end. Have pen and paper ready. Writing by hand is recommended, because the physicality and imperfection (!) of making marks on a page can aid imagination. But use any way you find helpful. The course can be taken as an independent four-week class or as part of the three-course series on Unfolding Poetry and Process Thought.
Like Vincent Van Gogh, perhaps something feels alive in you. What can it become? We are life-involved in personal relations, the natural world, inner thoughts, as well as in the religious, political, and cultural landscapes of our lives. The creative process offers us ourselves anew.
