A poetry workshop with Brad Davis
June 5-7, 2023
Nashotah House Theological Seminary
Participants in Making Something of It will not need prior experience in poem-making. In fact, if your history with poetry has intimidated you or otherwise discouraged you from making poems, this workshop may be just the right fit. Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer, when asked why religious imagery had begun appearing in his poems, once said, “I see a kind of meaning in being present, in using reality, in experiencing it, in making something of it.”
This workshop will proceed upon the assumption that the actual drafting of a poem is the last thing one gets around to when making poems. Of critical importance is not, therefore, what form the poem will finally take—will it rhyme, will it have stanzas, will it employ traditional syntax and punctuation—but how one lives, moment to moment, in relation to reality. Tranströmer, at the least, was aware that earthly “reality” includes such things as religion and the word “God.” Poetry that refuses to be present with reality’s fullness and the particulars thereof, even (perhaps especially) the uncomfortable bits, fails as art. This workshop will begin with being present in the midst of innumerable particulars: windows, trees, linoleum, one another, those little green plastic bags with dog poop in them that people, for any number of unacceptable reasons, leave along the forest path.
We will be silent, we will talk, we will think, we will laugh, and we will write. Come join us.
Learn more about Brad Davis.
Time: June 5-7, 1:40-4:00 PM
Workshop participants are welcome to eat lunch with the wider Nashotah House community in the Refectory (campus map) at 12:30 PM and to attend Evening Prayer/Evensong in St. Mary’s Chapel at 4:30 PM following the workshop, Monday through Wednesday.
Cost: $250. This includes workshop registration and lunch in the Refectory.