Registration required:
1 session / in person / $125
Register
This class invites students to experiment with contemplative approaches to both reading and writing poems. In our three-hour session, students can expect to learn about the role of poetry in Buddhist practice and the parallels between writing/reading poetry and practicing meditation from a Buddhist perspective. Through contemplative writing exercises, we will explore concepts and poetics of emptiness as it relates to compassion, of "beginner's mind," and of poems as pursuits of our highest attention, looking together at key Zen texts such as the Heart Sutra and Eihei Dogen's "Rivers and Mountains" sutra and "Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi." Then we will apply our heuristic Buddhist formalist lens to reading American poets such as Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Filip Marinovich, and Brandon Shimoda.
Students can expect to leave the class with a felt sense of the mutually illuminating relationship between writing poetry and mindfulness, and practices with which to continue to explore it.
Class modality: In person
Required textbook purchases: No
Recorded: No
Writing: Yes
Workshopping & feedback: No
Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Granny Cloud (NYRB, 2024) and Great Guns (Canarium, 2013), editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB, 2018), and the founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives and teaches in New York.
A limited number of need-based scholarships are available to cover the enrollment costs of Poetry Society classes. To receive and fill out a scholarship survey, email parker@poetrysociety.org
