The Inspiration
Although I’d felt drawn to write poetry from a fairly young age, High School English class zapped the pleasure right out of it for me. Suddenly poetry was dry, and complicated, and required you to understand of variety of complicated terms, and then find them like you were completing the most boring treasure hunt in the world.
I didn’t start to fall in love with reading poetry until I realized that I was allowed to interpret a poem in whatever way I liked.
A poem wasn’t this rigid thing with a single correct answer. My life experience had a necessary influence on the way I understood a line, or an image, or a metaphor. My imagination also mattered a great deal: I could stretch the language I found most intriguing right off the page, and experience the world of the poem in my own way, using all of my senses. Poetry could be both personal and surprisingly immersive.
But what really began to excite me about reading poetry, was that it invited an experience of my body, making it a startling call to mindfulness. It was a delight to later find that this could also be true for writing poetry.
“…poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art. In poetry, the medium is not the expert’s body [as it is when witnessing a dancer] but the audience’s body. The artist’s medium is my breath…. This makes the art physical, intimate, vocal, and individual.” – Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry
– Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry
About the Embodied Poetry Workshop
Back in 2020, I began to design a poetry writing workshop that centred the experience of the body. I called this workshop Embodied Poetry, and have had the great pleasure of teaching it 6 times over the last 2 years, each time improving on the material.
Each week — as we write, read, and explore the language of poetry — we dare to simply notice our experience, without calling it right or wrong. We’re here, simply, to explore how writing and reading a poem could include all of who we are.
Wait, What Exactly is a Poem?
Well, a poem is… A poem is…
Robert Pinsky basically throws up his hands in the glossary of ‘The Sounds of Poetry’, and writes simply “poetry is what a bookstore puts in the section of that name.” I love that, and there can also be a certain delight in answering this question in our own way — putting words to our own assumptions and intuitions.
I give participants a chance to answer this question at the start of each series, and again at the very end. It’s always interesting to witness what gets added.
“We had so many grandiose ideas at the beginning,” reflected one student “but maybe that was because I viewed poetry as intended for an elite audience and it’s not.”
I teach Embodied Poetry several times a year, online. There are 6 spots max available per workshop. To view the next start dates (as well as our writing topics and class format), go here.
** By the way, this workshop is peppered with wonderful insights from poets like Molly Peacock, Naomi Shihab Nye, James Logenbach, Mary Oliver, Jane Hirshfield; storytellers like Ursula K. Leguin and Christopher Castellani; educators Rudine Simms Bishop; linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff. Thank you for your wisdom. This series would not exist without your insights.