Topic: Awakening Our Deep Earth Connections by Reading Poetry in Community

Presenters: Kathleen Wakefield

Kathleen A. Wakefield, a frequent participant in our Cobb & Friends conversations, is skilled in creating poetry and in engaging others in the poetry experience.  She describes her time with us as   

“Awakening Our Deep Earth Connections: how reading poetry in community inspires loving attentiveness to the natural world and each other.”  She invites us into this experience.

Poetry is a deeply embodied art rising from the rhythms of breath, the senses, and the emotional and spiritual memories our bodies hold. Its music and image-making qualities are uniquely suited to expressing how our lives are bound up with the earth’s body, attuning us to the sacred web of relationships of which we are a part. Poetry voices grief for the wounding of our home, while also nourishing us as we seek to heal our relationship and move forward. Reading poems in community can be a transformative process as we share perceptions, “ah-has” of insight, and life experiences; the self is excavated at the same time surprising connections are made to the seeming “other,” human and nonhuman. Our world is enlarged, our compassion stirred.  

Kathleen A. Wakefield is the author of two books of poetry, Notations on the Visible World (Anhinga Press, 2000), which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and Grip, Give and Sway (Silver Birch Press, 2016). She has taught creative writing at the Eastman School of Music, worked as a poet-in-the-schools, and she shares poetry through public libraries. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Christian Century, Georgia Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Visions International.

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