Voice into Poetry
a 7-week poetry writing workshop

What is your relationship to your voice? How does it feel to speak out loud what resides within your internal world? When you apologize, speak up for what you believe in, use your voice to be playful… what arises within you?

Join five other participants for a rich and compassionate exploration of voice using poetry as your tool and companion. In this series, you’ll read poetry from six different authors writing on the same themes as us, speak poetry out loud, and write your own.

Writing can be a wonderful tool for empowerment. Even if you’ve never written or read poetry before, join us and explore how writing can be used to better understand yourself, and (if needed) to dream into being a different way of showing up in the world.

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What to Expect (Class Format)

This series is capped at 6 participants so that real bonding and sharing can take place. For the next 7 weeks, we’ll create a nurturing and spacious container together where you will reflect on your relationship to your voice along others who are doing the same.

Here is the shape of each session:

1. Opening Conversation, guided by a poem

We’ll begin every class with a guided conversation about our relationship to silence, apology, assertiveness, and more (different theme each week, see below). I’ll provide a poem that speaks to that theme and some initial reflection questions to get us started, and then your curiosity will guide where we go. Through these conversations, we’ll allow ourselves: to wander, to question, to trust the movement of our own inquiries, and to listen.

2) Discover the joy of speaking poetry out loud

Next, we’ll explore the process of speaking that week’s poem out loud with an awareness of:

• our relationship to silence, breath, and the audience;
• how we might resonantly speak the phrases that most honestly expresses our experience;
• how we might play with both movement and sound;
• and more

These explorations of speaking are gentle and can be done privately (with your camera and mic off). The intention is to offer you simple somatic exercises to physically explore your experience of voice, using poetry as your text.

3) Writing Practice — a 45 minute guided ritual

In the second half of class, you’ll nestle into a 45 minute guided writing practice (you can turn your camera off) where you’ll bring your reflections together by a writing a poem. You can think of the poetry you write during each session as a time capsule — capturing your experience now, to be returned to later whenever it’s needed.

Don’t panic if you’ve never written poetry before! I think you’ll find this segment surprisingly easeful, and even fun.

4) Share your poetry/experience with the group

At the end of each class, you’ll have an opportunity to speak the poetry you just wrote out loud, and hear the poetry of others (sharing is not mandatory). You’ll be invited to respond to one another’s work and share where each poem carried your imagination.

We’ll bring everything together in the final class of this 6-week series.

Here’s a breakdown of each session in this series:

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Week 7: Performance

“I remember the way the movement of a poem would get stuck in my head until I wrote it down… I remember the sensation and calm afterward, the same now, as it was then. The gasp of relief that something new was discovered where it could have been easily lost. I didn’t perform on stage until early 2009, the feeling was instantly amplified. Me, alone on stage holding my own throat like a bottle full of lightening, and a whole room gathered around to witness.”

 – Jillian Christmas, from her interview with Poetry is Dead Magazine (Issue 19:Drama)

In the final session of this series, you’ll choose one of the poems you wrote (or one of the poems we read) and you’ll engage in a 3 part mindful rehearsal process, before speaking your poem out loud for the group. You are not required to share your poem at the end, and can opt to simply listen.

We’ll conclude with a final reflection and conversation on what it has felt like to share your voice in this way through poetry and performance. What did you predict would happen? What did you find surprising?

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