Topic: Songs “Planted in Clay”

Presenter(s): Kathleen Wakefield

In this session of Process Explorations, Kathleen Wakefield shares her creative, trans-disciplinary thinking in a program that promises to be evocative for poets and artists, activists and philosophers alike. She will present “Songs ‘Planted in Clay,’” a plea for the liberating and healing power of Whiteheadian metaphysics and poetry. This theme was her Springboard Project for the 2024 Certificate Program in Process Studies.

Kathleen explores how the process of writing exemplifies Whitehead’s theory of prehensions and how poetry as an art form evoking the thickness of experience “embodies a protest against the ‘bifurcation’ of nature.” (PR 289) Poetry is gradually recognized as a form of earth speech, aligning with Whitehead’s notion of a work of art as “a fragment of nature.” In the light of Process Thinking, a family trauma is excavated through family letters which provide new lures for healing, transformation, and poetic expression.

Kathleen A. Wakefield is the author of two books of poetry, Notations on the Visible World (Anhinga Press, 2000), winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and Grip, Give and Sway (Silver Birch Press, 2016). She holds degrees from Mount Holyoke College (Chemistry) and the University of Michigan (History of Art). She taught creative writing at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Rochester, worked as a poet-in-the-schools, and 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, with work forthcoming in Half-Mystic and Amethyst Review. She serves on the leadership committee of the Cobb Institute Certificate Program.

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