· FALL OF 2026 ·
THE Poetry
of Silence and Voice
with Nadia Colburn, PhD & Eric Colburn, MFA.
poetry Class Taught live Online & Recorded for lifetime access
And we’ll celebrate the beauty of sound and voice— of a greater collective voice that we can each tap into and of your own unique voice.
One of the greatest powers of poetry is its ability to express what often feels inexpressible, to give voice to what often feels voiceless, to create through language.
Become a more astute, skillful creator with language, expand your range, write poems that resonate and sing.
For poets and secret poets, prose writers and anyone who wants to tap into greater insight, expression and freedom.
Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (trans. Stephen Mitchell)
The Poetry of Silence and Voice will give you tools to use language to get outside of traditional narrative into the spaces of the “unsayable”— those spaces of trauma, grief, joy, and awe.
sign up for lifetime enrollment
Use poetry to understand and explore your own relation to silence and voice, mystery, grief, wonder.
Write poems with greater nuance, precision and skill.
Total value: $4,500+
For a limited time: Get $300 off the regular price. Only $797 or three payments of $276.
Also get an extra bonus teaching:
Considering YOUR WORK AS A WHOLE ($399 value)
Plus, join next year's live coaching sessions for free!
100% money back guarantee in the first 15 days if you work with the first two modules. Come live and/or watch recordings.
(See terms below)
Where to begin?! Some of the things I loved about Nadia’s poetry course:
Being able to take the class as a complete beginner.
The amazing people I met, starting with Nadia.
The intimacy, the safe environment.
The division of class time between the studied literature and our work.
The literature we read.
The assignments which I took very seriously, often getting up at 2am to work on them–
Looking at my work as a whole–finding commonality between the poems, having them speak to each other–
Coming back session after session.
Starting my book.
Taking Nadia’s class changed my life and I do not exaggerate when I say it was how I found my true life, my true self.
JOANNE REYNOLDS
Author of Comes a Blossom
"This course was nothing short of transformative. It has been a touchstone in my own evolution as a writer, helping me connect with my own voice and the world in profound ways."
"I finished putting together my manuscript of poems and feel it has more coherence and focus now than it did before. I was feeling lost and now I'm really excited about my writing again."
"This class is an investment in yourself and your craft. Nadia is an incredible guide, whose insight and analysis opened in me one of the most generative periods in my writing life."
The class is for poets and secret poets, prose writers, anyone wanting to use poetry to connect to the sacred and to gain greater freedom.
It's for you if you are:
These are unsettling times.
In The Poetry of Silence and Voice, we will explore the ways in which poetry invites us to pause, to reflect, and to re-encounter the sacred.
We'll explore poetry as a place of balance and connection in a time of unbalance and fragmentation, and the ways in which poetry offers resistance, resilience, and growth.
We'll be inspired by not only the beauty of the poems we study, but also their wisdom and bravery and be encouraged to write into our own strengths.
And we’ll explore the ways in which poetry disrupts and questions old forms as a liberating force for freedom.
As much as the word is overused, Nadia Colburn is an unusually gifted presence and teacher, helping many transform their practice and their willingness to trust themselves enough to get to the heart of what they are trying to say.
She is that rare teacher who creates an atmosphere of trust and honesty. An accomplished writer herself, Nadia brings a rare balance to her teaching: deep reflection and critical thinking about language, ideas, images, and meaning; and a compassionate, open heart that allows everyone to feel safe sharing and offering personal responses to one another.
MARILYN LEVINE
MIT Faculty member, Comparative Media Studies and Writing
sign up for lifetime enrollment
Write poems with greater nuance, precision and skill
Use poetry to understand and explore your own relation to mystery, grief, wonder
Total value: $4,500+
For a limited time: Get $300 off the regular price. Only $797 or three payments of $276.
Plus get an extra bonus teaching Considering Your Work as a Whole ($399 value)
100% money back guarantee in the first 15 days if you work with the first two modules. Come live and/or watch recordings.
(See terms below)
NEW BONUS INCLUDED IN THE PROGRAM
Join Next year's live coaching sessions
($1000 value)
This is the only year we're going to teach the class live, but in future years, we'll have some extra live coaching/ discussion sessions for Poetry of Silence and Voice students.
We've decided to offer next year's special live sessions for FREE to this year's students. So not only will you get lifetime access to all the teaching recordings when you enroll, you'll also be invited to join us for free next year when we offer this class.
We believe that this is a practice that will have positive benefits on your writing and on your life--even if you experience it in small doses. If there were a treatment that were going to help you, why put it off to the future?
Nadia Colburn, PHD, RYT 200.
Nadia is the author of two award-winning poetry books, The High Shelf, and I Say the Sky, and her work has been published widely including in The Sun, The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, slate, Lion’s Roar, Truthout, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and taught at the university level for many years (MIT, Lesley etc) before founding the Nadia Colburn Writing School, which brings together the best of literary study, creative writing teachings, mindfulness, embodied practices and social and environmental engagement. The school has a community of more than 30,000 mindful writers, and Nadia has worked with tens of thousands of students helping them to come into their full creative voice. Nadia is married to Eric Colburn, and they have two amazing young adult children.
Eric Colburn, MFA
After earning a degree from MIT ( in literature!) and an MFA in poetry writing, Eric taught elementary school in Harlem and then taught English at Brookline High School for over twenty years. In his time as a teacher, he has brought poetry to students of all ages, enlivening and demystifying the form for them. He’s also taught adults, studied and taught mindfulness, been an environmental activist, and built several small off-grid cabins. In the past four years he’s published more than 40 poems in such places as Appalachia, Nimrod, and THINK Journal. Eric is also Nadia’s husband and her first–and last–reader and editor, and a deeply engaged father to their wonderful children.
(see more of our story below!)
What will you come away with?
This class is designed to give you new tools, skills and techniques as a reader and writer of poetry, help you write a strong body of work that you love, connect with teachers, community, and support, break out of painful silence and patterns that might hold you back, and reconnect with your own deep wisdom, rhythms, and voice.
- A greater understanding of your own relationship to silence and voice
- Guidance, support, accountability, encouragement, and more from two master teachers
- A strong community with other poets and writers
- Techniques for making your poetry deeper and more sacred
- New skills and greater craft, including how to make your poetry more nuanced, musical, and dynamic
- Many new techniques and practices for revision
- A greater appreciation of poets you may know and poets that are new to you
- Deeper ability to listen to and honor silences in your own heart and soul
- New techniques and freedom to break uncomfortable silences
- Deeper integration of mind, body, and voice
- Greater wellbeing through greater expression—when we live with old silences, they can literally make us sick and limit us in many areas of our lives. This class will give you tools to break through those old patterns.
- Many new poems and their revisions–perhaps the start of a manuscript!
- How to have live with greater expression, freedom, spirit and authentic power.
Here's what's included in Poetry of Silence and voice
Modules 1 and 2 will establish the terms of the course and give background.
You’ll be asked to explore what it is you are coming here to work on: What are your own sacred silences and what are the silences you are ready to break through? What parts of your voice want to emerge more fully? In both of these modules, we will be sitting with silence and listening to the body, spirit and earth.
Module 1
Sacred Silence and Sacred Voice.
Module 1 — Sacred Silence and Sacred Voice
We’ll explore the ways in which silence and voice support one another across traditions, from the opening of John's Gospel (“In the beginning was the Word”) to Patanjali and Buddha’s noble silence, to the Diné teaching that you must be careful with your words because people create the world around them with their words, cultures across time have been aware of the generative power of both silence and voice. We’ll look at some older traditions and explore some contemporary poems by poets such as Jericho Brown, Camille Dungy, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Mary Oliver.
Module 2
Difficult Silence and the Dangers–and Rewards–of Breaking that Silence
Module 2 — Difficult Silence and the Dangers–and Rewards–of Breaking that Silence
If silence can be generative, silence can also be restrictive and painful. In this module, we’ll explore traumatic silences, the silences that are imposed by others, by difficulty, the scars they leave and the limitations they impose on our voice. We’ll look at writers such as Celan and Sylvia Plath, as well as contemporary poets like Emmy Perez and Jimmy Santiago Baca.
Modules 3 and 4 will take two poets as case studies;
We’ll explore the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Patricia Smith in depth and explore the ways in which their unique life experiences, cultures, and voice come into their work. We’ll study their techniques and also use their poems as jumping off points to explore your own unique experiences, interests, music and voice.
Module 3
Rilke, translation and music
Module 3 — Rilke, translation and music
We’ll take Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems as a case study in silence and voice. Writing in German at the beginning of the twentieth century, Rilke's greatest poems come out of his spiritual crisis of meaning–out of what others have characterized as "God's Silence" and Nietzsche called the death of God.
When we read Rilke's intensely lyrical poems, we will look at different translations (and glance at the original German), we’ll explore the ways in which poetry is always translating between silence and voice, and we’ll look across translations to explore poetic technique and how to create poetic effects. We’ll also explore poetry as a form that taps into myths and deep human paradigms. You’ll be asked to experiment with your own music, your own rhythm and inspiration for your poetry.
Module 4
Patricia Smith and the Wonderment of Voice
Module 4 — Patricia Smith and the Wonderment of Voice
Patricia Smith is a virtuoso of voice, a four-time National Poetry Slam champion, a winner of the National Book Award, and a master of poetic form. We'll explore her poems to see the way she speaks beautifully in, not only her own voice and persona, that of a Black woman from Chicago, but also from the points of view of other people, sometimes those close to her, like her mother and father, and sometimes far from her, like gay men or, famously, white-supremacist skinheads.
Smith writes in many forms, as well as many voices, but what her poems all have in common is an extraordinary control of language and attention to the way different human experiences affect the way we think and talk.
In Module 5 we'll explore a range of poets who inspire us.
We’ll be looking specifically at how to tap into the wisdom of the body and how to write from–and through–difficult experiences into greater resilience and voice. In this modules, we’re exploring poetry as a form of liberation.
Module 5
Silence, Voice and the Body
Module 5 — the Body, Trauma, and Resilience.
We’ll look specifically at the ways in which poetry invites us to listen to the body, confront difficult and often historic silences, and give voice to our embodied experiences. We'll explore how healing, understanding our stories, and transformation are iterative, lifelong practices. We'll consider the political and social stories that we are rewriting as we do this work — how personal healing and alignment contributes to coming into a more aligned, just, equitable, world. We'll look at the connections between healing and feminism, ecology, democracy, and a de-colonized world view. We'll explore poets We’ll look at Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals and her essay "Your Silence Will Not Protect You," as well as poets such as Camille Dungy, Walt Whitman, Forugh Farrokhzad, Marie Howe, and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Modules 6, 7 and 8 will look at four more case studies
Module 6
Bishop and Laux: Control, Precision and Depth
Module 6 — Bishop and Laux: Precision, Control And depth
In this class, we'll study the poetry of both Elizabeth Bishop and Dorianne Laux, two poets who write primarily narrative poems from their own lives with great attention to control, detail, precision and depth. These poets' poems are some of the best teachers for poetry students, as we learn to at once have restraint and courage as we write. We'll explore the boundaries and freedoms, especially for women poets, on writing from our lives, and how historical change has allowed more contemporary women poets more creative freedom.
Module 7
Hopkins: dazzlement, individuality, and devotion.
Module 7 — Hopkins: dazzlement, individuality, and devotion.
Our case study of Gerard Manley Hopkins will explore the way this brilliant poet and Jesuit priest both followed form and broke it, the way he loved and praised the physical world and also forced himself to undergo long ascetic rigors. His poems are some of the most musical poems ever written in English, and also the most devotional. He writes in rhyme and meter, but in a rhyme and meter that he makes his own.
Module 8
Harjo: The earth, regeneration, song
Module 8 — Harjo: The Earth, Regeneration, Song.
In this module we will read Joy Harjo's poems and marvel at the way she sings of the natural world, of the most mundane household affairs, and of the triumphs and tragedies of her people, and pulls these together into a call for courage, engagement and spiritual renewal. Harjo's poetry comes out of, and always draws from, the history and culture of Native Americans.
Module 9 will invite you to look back at the work we've done over the course and look forward to next steps
Module 9
Your own silences and voice
Module 9 — Your own silences and voice
While you will be asked to explore your own relationship to silence and voice throughout the class, in this final class, you will go deeper into your own exploration of your particular themes and styles. We'll look at poets writing about their relationship to their own voice and their creative process and we'll give you supports to keep working with the body of work you've created in the course.
2 months free Membership to the Align Collective
($1200 value)
3-4 live (and recorded) practice/ question and answer/ group coaching sessions/ small breakout rooms per month to connect with other writers. 75-90 minute long (recorded)
These sessions will be at different times each week so that they fit as many people’s schedules as possible. The calendar of live sessions will be posted at least a week before class begins. If you can’t make the sessions live, no worries! The sessions will all be recorded, and you can email any questions in advance.
Plus 24/7 Community space for posting work, getting support, accountability, asking questions and more.
Join Next year's live coaching sessions
($1000 value)
This is the only year we're going to teach the class live, but in future years, we'll have some extra live coaching/ discussion sessions for Poetry of Silence and Voice students.
We've decided to offer next year's special live sessions for FREE to this year's students. So not only will you get lifetime access to all the teaching recordings when you enroll, you'll also be invited to join us for free next year when we offer this class.
We believe that this is a practice that will have positive benefits on your writing and on your life--even if you experience it in small doses. If there were a treatment that were going to help you, why put it off to the future?
working with poetic forms
($299 value)
This one-hour class with Eric, who is a master of poetic form and has published poems in rhyme and meter in most of the leading publications devoted to formal poetry, will teach poetic meter in a new, easier way, will discuss when form can be helpful and when it's effective to break with form or simply leave it behind, and will explore the way form is a powerful tool both for bringing silence to your poetry and for helping to free your own voice.
PLUS EXTRA Bonus
CoNSIDERING YOUR WORK AS A WHOLE:
Listening to Your Own Voice
($399 value)
Most poetry or writing courses leave you with a lot of individual pieces and no real idea how they all fit together, what to keep, what to get rid of, how to build a coherent whole. In this robust bonus teaching that Eric and I will be co-teaching, we'll be talking about how to listen to your own voice as a whole, how to look over a body of work (what you've written in the course, but also what you've written outside of the course), how to recognize your own themes and styles, and how to begin to put them into a whole. Maybe that means starting to think about a manuscript. Maybe you're already working on a manuscript and that means seeing the manuscript in a new way and giving it more shape.
The benefits of looking at your work as a whole extend beyond what happens on the page. When you have tools to gather your work, to listen deeply to it, to recognize the patterns of voice and theme, you also get new insight into your own inner life, see into and break through old patterns and gain new freedom. This is a deeply rewarding—and joyful—practice, and we're excited to share it with students!
When you add it all up, that’s a value of over $4,500.
But when you enroll in Poetry of Silence and Voice today, you'll get access to everything for one payment $797 or 3 payments of $277.
Get lifetime access now:
One Payment Of
$797
Three Payments Of
$277
15-DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
Signing up for this course is a commitment to your voice and to the artist in you. I want to encourage you to honor that commitment. I stand 100% behind the quality of the course. If you’re not satisfied, I offer a 100% money-back guarantee. I only ask that you show me that you've tried the material in the first two modules and engaged with the work. If you try it and it's not for you, you get a refund. Because the course comes with lifetime access, I don't offer refunds if you don't have time to engage in the material.
Many teachers and therapists are able to get continuing education credits/ hours for their time in the class.
This is also a tax-deductible expense not only for teachers and therapists, but also for many writers, creatives, and business owners.
Love notes from my students
Nadia's programs have been a lifeline for me—to be writing again and connecting with writers. And more than that it's led to powerful healing--body, mind, spirit. Incorporating meditation, yoga and mindfulness practice with writing practice is freeing and powerful. It's a form of resistance to the mainstream-dysfunctional-violent- society. And a way for me to take my creative life/writing life back into my own hands, my own body.
Thank you for creating a SAFE, ENCOURAGING, AND POSITIVE learning environment in which to be writers and to share our stories and our work.
I love Nadia's classes so much!! They are very rich even the third time around. They have so much depth. It's such a great compliment with Align Your Story. I never get tired of it. Thank you Nadia!!!!
Betsy Tarlin
Nonprofit Fundraising and Management Consultant
I had been searching for several years for a teacher who could help me take my writing to a new level of expression while preserving the integrity of my own voice. When I met Nadia, I knew I had found my teacher. Nadia helps writers find the authentic in their own work and in the work of writers they read together. Her workshops are thoughtful, well organized – and inspiring. Working with Nadia, I have created a coherent and strong body of work. Nadia is a smart, skilled, insightful, and kind teacher. Who could ask for anything more?
Myra Cornelius
Therapist
I am so blessed to have been able to take The Poetry of Attention course. I have benefited immensely: I learned not only some of the mechanics of poetry, but, even more importantly, the class offered me a place of “belonging” to be able to express my unique poetic expression without judgement or needing to subscribe to a particular style of poetry. I learned how to tap into my unique inner poet, while recognizing that the inner critic was always in the background, which is a result of my varied life experiences as an African American.
Before the course, I would hear and listen to the inner critic and allow doubt and questioning to influence how I wrote, but after taking your course, I have learned to allow the writer within to flow and to trust what she had to say as “valid and significant”. In the past, this “inner critic” tended to analyze every thought and word. Now, I am able to “allow” expression rather than “control” expression and, I must say, it is very freeing.
I especially appreciate your mentorship and guidance in helping me and others to better understand the diversity of expression. You validated and encouraged each of us to be uniquely creative, spontaneous and liberal in our imaginations and perceptions.
Although the live classes have ended, I like that I can move through the course at my own pace and readiness and always reap the benefits.
Although I am what I consider a late bloomer, your class made a BIG difference in my life; I feel more empowered and have been creating my own style of poetry. Your class helped me to recover my creative passion.
“
"I was surprisingly happy with the poems I wrote. The course was so life-giving...I couldn't wait until I had some time to write. Even though I was carving out that space to write, it allowed me to be more present with everything else."
—Caroline Triscik, therapist and mother of three.
“
"It definitely helped me be a more centered person, which is so important as an activist. The course was a great way to learn about myself and also poets I didn't know about before."
—Eileen Ryan, environmental activist.
Our more personal stories
Whether reading aloud while doing the dishes, talking about poetry on long walks, memorizing poems together on car trips, or reading and discussing drafts of newly written poems, we have been reading, sharing, writing, and discussing poetry together for over thirty years, and silence and voice have been important in both of our lives.
Nadia: Since I was a child, I have felt a connection to a kind of expansive silence and voice, a mystical connection to the universe that I accessed in part through language. At the same time, I had my own difficult silences, secrets in my family growing up and trauma that as a child was stored in my body that was able to be expressed in the dream language of poetry more than the linear space of prose. Poetry has always been for me a place to explore the wonderful and also the very difficult, it has been a place of deep healing and also deep pleasure. I absolutely love sharing poetry with others.
Eric: I’ve also been on my own journey with silence and voice. When I was a boy, my family was not comfortable talking about our feelings. My parents split up when I was very young, there was little conversation about that, or how I was feeling, and I turned to literature as a place to explore expressiveness. I turned to reading both because it had a deep quietness in it and because I’ve always just delighted in the play and joy of language, and I've written poems and stories since I was very young. But in my own publication path, I needed to confront my own relationship to silence and voice. For decades, I didn't publish anything, but as I looked back to, and wrote about, my relationship to silence and voice in my childhood, that really helped me, and over the past four years, I’ve been publishing poetry prolifically. So I know for myself how much an exploration of these themes can really be transformative.
"I had an idea of what I wanted to say, but this course taught me how to say it. I feel like I have the tools and power to do real art-making now with my material. The course gave me the skills to be so much more confident as a poet."—Brooke Bailey, educator
sign up for lifetime enrollment
Write poems with greater nuance, precision and skill
Use poetry to understand and explore your own relation to mystery, grief, wonder
Total value: $4,500+
For a limited time: Get $300 off the regular price. Only $797 or three payments of $276.
Plus get an extra bonus teaching Considering Your Work as a Whole ($399 value)
100% money back guarantee in the first 15 days if you work with the first two modules. Come live and/or watch recordings.
(See terms below)
CAMErON L. MARZELLI, PH.D.
Expressive Therapies, Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, Lesley University Certified Reiki Master, Co-Founder: Still Woman, Director of Spiritual Education: Villa Serra Retreat Center
My work with Nadia in her poetry class was personally and also professionally transformative. I deepened my understanding of the psychological and spiritual benefit of attending to detail, and of recognizing significance in the ordinary. Nadia taught me to be still, to befriend silence, to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity so as to penetrate “what happened”, in order to recognize what I was meant to learn from my situation and experience. There's a reason she has so many positive online writing class reviews. She encouraged and supported patience as a necessary skill when the intention is to dispel illusion and come to know what needs to be known in order to embrace growth and productive change.
Katie ROSE
Thank you Nadia for your generosity and kindness. I really enjoyed, even loved, the poet's you selected for us to study. I've never experienced a deep reading like we did together and found it exceptionally helpful, opening up understanding of poetry and the particular poem we were reading in ways I would never do on my own. I found the community sessions surprisingly enjoyable and positive as well. I truly appreciate all the time and materials you provided as well as your valuable insights and spirit. I've learned to appreciate more my own unique expression at the same time deepening my appreciation of other people's voices and styles.
Christine Poreba
Poet and Teacher, author of Rough Knowledge
The writing and revisions I’ve done on my poetry since taking this course have seemed so much truer to my own voice, from which I had felt fairly removed for a while. Nadia’s teachings helped me find a renewed joy in writing. I feel overall freer, and my work is much more powerful as a result.
Esteban LOpez
Enrepreneur
I thoroughly enjoyed reading and writing from all the poets we studied. I was hesitant about signing up for an online class, but I'm so glad I did. I have a collection of poems that I wrote in this class that I feel good about, and I look forward to continuing to write and study with you. Thank you, Nadia.
LIANE SOUSA
Oh my gosh, I liked it all. I liked the close attention to a specific poem, I liked being exposed to different poets and poems, I liked how the course invited us to think about our own lives and environment, and how we could practice our lesson during the week through the engagement section. I also enjoyed the live sessions and how rich the sharing of ideas was during these sessions. And of course, the meditation and writing practice was very enjoyable and fruitful.
The course strengthened my writing process, expanded my knowledge of poetry, and opened up endless possibilities for expressing the full spectrum of emotions. Because of this class, I now feel able in a new way to write about mindful, difficult, and also joyful moments in my life. I'm very happy with the poems I've written in this class. Thank you!
Pamela Tanner Boll
Director of “Who Does She Think She Is” and “A Small Good Thing”
I signed up for Nadia Colburn’s poetry seminar with great trepidation. I was afraid that the act of facing a blank white page would be scary; it had been so very long since I had put my longings, my failures and my observations on the page for other readers. But, I had this yearning to come out of hiding. A yearning to be known in the way that one is known in poems.
So, I did sign up for Nadia’s poetry class. I found Nadia’s deep knowledge about the history of verse and poets to be calming. Nadia shared with us poems that used metaphor to both reveal and to hide those deep (scary) emotions. Her close attention and respect for us as human beings and for the writing process allowed me to both reveal and to keep hidden those terrifying feelings.
Nadia created an atmosphere of respect in her class, and I loved both reading and commenting on the poems our classmates had written. This is SACRED work when it is done in the right space; Nadia created that space.
I credit Nadia for giving me the courage to write about and through my pain and fear. It was through this work that I came to a new career—making documentary movies.
Good writing teachers encourage true expression; that expression acknowledges pain and also leads to real self empowerment. Nadia Colburn is truly one of those very great teachers.
“
"My word choice is more precise and my poems are richer. I'm much more prolific, and something opened in me. Writing has become a daily joy; as a caregiver you need to give to yourself, and for me, after this course, writing poetry is giving to myself."
—Katey Largey
“
"Nadia empowered me in this course. The course gave me the tools to think of my poetry as something "real," and I've had some great successes with my poetry since the course.
—Robin Clifford Wood, author of the nonfiction book, The Field House
Yes! Each session will be recorded so that you can watch on your own schedule, and you'll get lifetime access to the recordings. You will also have a chance, in the community space, to interact with us and with other students in the course. We have students on every continent, and it's impossible to match everyone's schedule. Some students come to all the live sessions; some can't make any of them live or prefer to watch them as recordings. Whatever you do, you'll have a very rich experience and even without coming to the live sessions, you can to connect with the community and be an integral part of the course.
Yes! This class will definitely help you improve your writing. You will be reading some great poets and looking, through the important lens of silence and voice, at how they do their magic, and you will then be using what you've learned to write poems of your own. Silence and voice are crucial elements of nearly any poem, and we think you will find yourself seeing and hearing your work--and your life--in new ways.
Many poetry classes focus on critique without really giving you the tools to go deeper into your creative process or the revision process. This leaves students in a constant cycle of writing for others and waiting for critique and feedback. In many decades of teaching, we have both found that the most important thing for writers is to learn to hear themselves. In The Poetry of Silence and Voice, you'll get tools you need to break your dependency on other readers and to trust your own voice
Absolutely. We're so excited to welcome you to this course! This course will meet you exactly where you are. You don’t need to know anything more than you know right now. It will give you all the tools you need to dive in, enjoy poetry, and start writing your own work in your own voice. Don't worry about knowing "enough" or having a fancy education or background. We are all language users every single day in our lives. This course is a great introduction for complete beginners. If you have a desire to be here, you belong. If you are curious, you belong. We are all experts of our own lives, our own perceptions—and no one other than you knows what you know. Each of us has a song in our hearts that wants to come out and this course will help make that happen. You cannot be too much of a newbie for this course. We're so excited to welcome you to the world of poetry.
Yes, yes! As experienced poets, we can always go deeper, gain new skills, practices, and insights. And sometimes we need a reboot, new energy, and a deeper connection with ourselves and our art form. In the Poetry of Silence and Voice, we study and learn from some of the world's most inspiring and talented writers, so there is always something new to learn. Many of our students have been writing for years, but find new ways to bring more aliveness to their work. This class will meet you where you are and ask you to go to the next level. You can use this class to revitalize or finish a book project, work on a new project, or just fall back in love with poetry.
Absolutely. Our focus on silence and voice is crucial to all human language, and is invaluable for writers of all genres. You will learn to notice what is not said, as well as what is, and you will learn how writers create pauses and show silences in their work, and you will develop, refine and expand your own voice. You can choose to write either poetry or prose in response to the prompts. Prose writers are often amazed at not only the new skills they get as writers when they engage in poetry, but the way the form opens up new parts of their story, their creative imagination, and their freedom as a writer. The course will lead you to a new relationship with your writing process and a new way to approach the role of writing in your life.
Poetry helps us get out of the left brain into greater insights and wisdom. Poetry can gently guide us into the places of silence with reverence, give that silence language, and lead us into greater healing, connection, and peace. It can also help us cultivate our attention to renewal and joy. We both turn to poetry in times of transition, and poetry has helped us to heal deeply--so we will be there to support you from a place of understanding.
You get lifetime access to all the online teaching materials. Unlike regular poetry classes, there is no need to do it all this fall. Come back to the teachings, practices, prompts, and readings whenever you want! Sign up now while the course is open for enrollment and come through on your own schedule.
Investing in this course is investing in yourself. I ask you to consider the cost of not giving space and attention to your creative life. An investment in your creativity is an investment in every part of your wellbeing—including your physical and emotional. Similarly, the quality of your attention affects every aspect of your well being and your art--whatever form you practice in. You will come away from the course with new skills, a strong original body of work, and a new pleasure and appreciation for not only poetry but also new forms of attention and engagement in every area of your life. And you'll be able to return to the material whenever you like, going deeper each time.
You will have lifetime access to all of the teachings, so you can come back to them over the years. This is the one time we will be teaching this course live, but you will have access to the recordings, and you can go back and watch them again and again. The one thing that is time-limited is access to the community. The course comes with a bonus of two months of membership in the community, where you can interact with other students and with us, but you are welcome to continue with that beyond those two months at a reduced rate if you like.
Yes! The live sessions will be very interactive, with extra time for Q&A. And if you can't come live to those sessions, you can get support through the community coaching. The course comes with two months of membership in the community space, where we will be actively responding to people's questions and concerns and supporting you in your work. There will also be several live community sessions in which we will offer spot feedback and coaching.
No. You don't need to share your work if you don't want to.
There will be opportunities to share your work--some people share very widely in the community--but you never need to share your work if you don't want to.
We believe that some of the best work gets written when you don't need to worry about sharing it immediately.
We don't believe in the workshop model, where students spend most of their time reading each other's work. The workshop model sets people up in a constant cycle of listening to other people's voices and opinions instead of developing their own.
In The Poetry of Silence and Voice, your focus is on your own work. You get to focus on what works for you.
You can post work in the private online group where you can connect with a community of like-minded and encouraging writers and where we are present to support you. There will be time on each of the live sessions to ask questions, get spot coaching from us, and share work in small groups in breakout rooms so you can get feedback and connect with other writers there.
We're here to guide your way, support you, and answer any questions. But if you want to take the course as a self-guided retreat, that is also completely fine!
Plus: because the material is housed online, and because you have lifetime access, you can come back again and again and continue to learn, practice, write, and deepen your experiences.
It really depends. Because you have lifetime access to the course, you can really choose to go through it at your own pace. Some people simply don't have 2.5 hours a week, and half an hour a week is much better than nothing. Sometimes slow and steady is where we are in our lives. But if you have the time to focus on the course more intensively, we would suggest 2.5 to 5 hours per week. Of course, some people will find that they love become so engaged in the course that they'll spend an hours a day in reading, studying, writing, and interacting with with the community.
Yes! we believe in this course 100%. If you sign up for the course and are unhappy with it, we offer a 100% money back guarantee within the first 15 days of the course’s start date. I only ask that you try the material; signing up is a sign that you want to support your writing life, and we to encourage you to do that. Since the course comes with lifetime access, not having the time to work with the material is not a reason for me to offer a refund. If you try the material, I feel confident that you will enjoy it, but if you don't, just let me know, show me you’ve done some of the work, and I’ll return your money with no hard feelings.
"Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity… It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action….The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems" - Audre Lorde
sign up for lifetime enrollment
Write poems with greater nuance, precision and skill
Use poetry to understand and explore your own relation to mystery, grief, wonder
Total value: $4,500+
For a limited time: Get $300 off the regular price. Only $797 or three payments of $276.
Plus get an extra bonus teaching Considering Your Work as a Whole ($399 value)
100% money back guarantee in the first 15 days if you work with the first two modules. Come live and/or watch recordings.
(See terms below)
15-DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
Signing up for this course is a commitment to your voice and to the artist in you. I want to encourage you to honor that commitment. I stand 100% behind the quality of the course. If you’re not satisfied, I offer a 100% money-back guarantee. I only ask that you show me that you've tried the material in the first two modules and engaged with the work. If you try it and it's not for you, you get a refund. Because the course comes with lifetime access, I don't offer refunds if you don't have time to engage in the material.
Many teachers and therapists are able to get continuing education credits/ hours for their time in the class.
This is also a tax-deductible expense not only for teachers and therapists, but also for many writers, creatives, and business owners.
