As we move into the new season, I’m excited to offer a completely free a-synchronous three-day series of classes and guided writing experiences the last week of September, and I want to let you know about it now.
As Eric and I prepare for our longer course, The Poetry of Silence and Voice, which we’ll be teaching live over ten weeks starting in October, we want to create a teaching that everyone can enjoy, whatever your schedule, whatever your finances.
In three short recorded classes that you can watch on your own schedule later this month, we’ll explore how to listen to sacred silence, how to break uncomfortable silences, and how to write poems--or prose--with greater nuance and depth.
We'll guide you in some meditation and embodied practices, give you prompts, and guide you to write your own poems.
Over these three days, you'll come away with three new poems, new practices and insights into poetry and your own silences and voice.
I’m sharing this information now so that you can plan ahead–the free teachings are short and can be done on your own schedule, but they’ll only be available for a week.
Simply click here to be automatically registered to get the free teachings.
Or sign up here to register for free—and please share that page with any friends who might be interested in joining!
If you’re interested in the longer class, after registering for the free teachings, you can also enroll now to secure your place and also get an in-depth time-limited bonus teaching.
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I also want to share a poem: Rainer Maria Rilke’s first Sonnet to Orpheus.
This is a poem about the way voice and music can arise out of silence. It's about the power of the poet to be creator—the word poet comes from the Greek word "poiesis" which means simply making, or the process of creation.
In this poem, Orpheus, the great musician who mourns his beloved Eurydice, uses his music to remind the animate world of sacred connection, even in the face of loss.
Rilke wrote the 26 amazing poems in this series in an incredibly fertile burst over only two days, but they’d been brewing for a long time–he’d been in a period of deep depression caused, in part, by World War One, and had a multi-year period of silence–a profound writer’s block in which he could write nothing at all.
And then these poems poured forth. This is the first.
The Sonnets to Orpheus
I, 1
by Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell)
A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.
Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,
but from just listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
at most a makeshift hut to receive the music,
a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind-
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.
This poem is full of wonderful surprises, turns, images, and music itself. There is much to learn from the craft of the poem and the translation.
It's also an inspiring message. From difficult periods, new beginnings, possibilities, and even transcendence are possible; they come from the "silence," from the places of "hush."
And if we listen, music itself becomes the “tall tree in the ear.” If we listen, we can fulfill our silent longings, give them voice, expression, and form.
This listening allows us, like the animals, those “creatures of stillness,” to emerge from our hiding.
We live in a society that wants us to believe that our longing is for material things that can be bought from big corporations, but poetry reminds us of the power of the inner life, of the ability of each of us to be a creator, to build a temple deep inside.
I hope you’ll join us for the free three day teaching/ writing experience later this month that you can access on your own schedule. We’ll be exploring more poems by Rilke as well as poems by poets such as Joy Harjo, Patricia Smith, and Sylvia Plath.
with love,
Nadia