honey and sting

I'm teaching a one-day poetry-writing workshop on July 15th in San Diego. If anyone is interested in attending, leave me your addy and I'll give you more info. I'll be doing another one in Rolla, Missouri in late September at a healing center called The Grotto (www.homeatthegrotto.com). Poetry, for me, is a process of inquiry -- I begin by posing a kind of query, and "wait" or "listen" for where it will take me. If it doesn't surprise me, I've failed. Poetry is thus an exploration of consciousness.

The thrust of the workshop is two-fold -- one, discovering and exploring ways of accessing material -- from the unconscious, nature, "found" poetry, etc., and then learning distinctions and criteria by which to shape and craft one's expression into Art. There will be a very strong focus on the actual sounds of words -- their tonality and rhythm, how easy it is to breathe naturally while saying the lines, where the emphasis and sounds of the words "land" in the body, transparency vs. opacity of language, and so on. I'm really excited about doing this -- for the one in San Diego, there will be a number of people attending for whom English is not their first language. Today I purchased dual language editions of French, German, and Spanish poetry -- one thing I'm going to do is have participants who speak those languages read us poems so we can really "hear" the language without that pesky meaning things intruding. *s* It will be interesting to compare how the words actually sound (sibilant, harsh, sonorous, etc) and the mood those sounds create with the "meaning" of the words in translation.