How do our life experiences—sacred, mundane, and profane—shape our identity, and live within our bodies?

Our bodies carry our life experiences, and poetry can be a vehicle for exploring our relationship to our stories. In this course, we will experiment with craft tools like voice, imagery, point of view, language and compositional form to support the self-exploration that gives rise to our unique, embodied voice. Through our personal poetry, we can deepen our understanding and appreciation of the diversity and complexity within us, and in those around us. From this place, our personal poetry becomes part of a dialogue within a larger collective.

In this course, we will explore how our life experiences related to race, gender identity, war, trauma, grief and loss, addiction and healing can be explored through poetry, and held by our poems. This course will include a focus on craft, provide weekly generative writing prompts, poem readings, podcast interviews, experiential embodiment practices, and group discussion over virtual campfire via Google Meet (or Zoom). We’ll also engage in weekly workshop. Each poet’s work will receive peer review weekly, as well as written comments from me.

By the end of this series, you will have generated drafts of new poems, and perhaps revised others. You will have deepened your craft knowledge, explored new ways of approaching your poetry, and will have experienced poetry to be a self-care skill and community-building experience allowing you to inhabit yourself and your life on and off the page in renewed and elevated ways. 

Poets we’ll study include:

Lisa Russ Spaar, Natalie Diaz, Joy Harjo, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Marie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Oliver de la Paz, Terrance Hayes, Ross Gay and Gregory Orr.

COURSE DATES: FEBRUARY 22-MARCH 29
VIRTUAL CAMPFIRES: WEDNESDAYS,
5:00-7:30 PM EST
INVESTMENT IN YOURSELF & YOUR POETRY: $455

Email lindsey.oneill@lindseyoneill.me with questions and to register. Payment options include check and Square.

Space is limited to 10.

“Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.”

~Anne Sexton