The Writer's Desk features the desks and writing practices of Gemini Ink faculty, visiting authors, teaching artists, volunteers, students, interns, staff, partners and more. Receive new posts in your inbox...
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Join master poetry teacher Veronica Golos on an international poetry tour. Next stop: the Middle East! In this four-week generative poetry workshop we will read, discuss deeply and draw our inspiration from foundational poets Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine), Etel Adnan (Lebanon), Saadi Youssef (Iraq), and contemporary Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif. We will explore each poet’s craft tools and apply these techniques to our own work.
Whether a writer is talking directly to God or using religious reflection to try and make sense of humanity, poetry is shrouded in spiritual mystery and is often used to explore both concrete and intangible concepts of a higher power.
In this three-week workshop, we will study impactful poems from three women poets who invoke ideas of God or the gods. Louise Gluck’s book The Wild Iris enlists flowers from the garden of eden to help tell a story. Lucille Clifton’s “brothers” is an eight-poem conversation between an aged Lucifer and God. Natalia Toledo’s body of written work speaks to the Zapotec gods in three languages: Zapotec, Spanish, and English.