WORKSHOPS & EVENTS CALENDAR, 2019

Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment. An operation capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolutionary by nature; a spiritual exercise, it is a means of interior liberation. Poetry reveals this world; it creates another.                                                             -Octavio Paz

Event Archives 2018

JANUARY

TAOS, NEW MEXICO

EAT, DRINK, & BE LITERARY

Sponsored by SOMOS: The Literary Society of Taos

• • • Dates: Saturday, January 19
    • Times: 6–8pm
    • Location: Mable Dodge Lujan House, Taos, NM

  Description:  SOMOS cordially invites you to a literary dinner with the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Taos, Sawnie Morris, at the historic dining room of the Mable Dodge Lujan House. Dinner will be prepared by executive chef, Sophia Vigil and her staff.  After dinner Sawnie will read and speak about her POETRY IN WAITING project. POETRY IN WAITING was inspired by the highly popular Poetry in Motion© project of the Poetry Society of America, in which poems are posted in all forms of public transportation in cities across the United States. Taos does not have an extensive public transportation service, but it does have waiting rooms.  POETRY IN WAITING is providing a poem or a poem-fragment anywhere that people have a moment – by choice or by necessity –  to wait. Morris explains, “The intention of POETRY IN WAITING is to light the imagination in unexpected ways and within the context of daily life, and to awaken us to beauty and connection to our world and to each other.”

  Seating is limited to 25 people.  All Reservations and paymentS are required by phone.  TO RESERVE YOUR SPACE Call the Mable Dodge Lujan House at 575-751-9686.

  FOR MORE INFORMATION: CONTACT US

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  FEBRUARY

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  ONLINE!

  THE MAGIC OF THE POETIC LINE: A GENERATIVE WORKSHOP 

  • • • • Dates:  Sundays, February, 3 – March 24, 2018
        • Cost Per Person:  (payable by check, Zelle, or Pop Money)
        • Location:  Online! (anywhere relatively quiet & with internet access)
        • Technical requirements:  A computer with a built-in camera and the ability to send and receive email attachments in a word doc format
    • Your Workshop Companions:
    • Poets from all over the country (max 10)
    • Poets who desire to learn more about their craft
    • Poets willing to allow themselves to be vulnerable tothe poems they read, as well as the poems they write
    • Poets who are excited about writing poems!

  Description:  Part of what makes poetry a magical art is the poet’s ability to orchestrate language in a way that creates an unforgettable experience in a reader. Line breaks, spacing, and punctuation provide cues intrinsic to that orchestration. This 8 week online workshop will focus primarily on the free-verse line (sometimes a fast moving mountain river, sometimes a trapeze act, sometimes a quiet meditation). Each week we’ll meet together as a group via a stable online platform to discuss the poems and prose-about-poems we’ve been reading, perhaps try our hand at a few in-class writing experiments, and share our own poems with one another in a generous, respectful, and informed workshop format. You’ll receive written comments on your poems from Sawnie, with the opportunity for a weekly one-on-one Skype session with during “office hours.”

  TO REGISTER AND/OR FOR MORE INFORMATION: CONTACT US

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  APRIL

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  TAOS, NEW MEXICO

  APRIL IS POETRY MONTH:

  A POETRY READING WITH SAWNIE MORRIS &

• ELIZABETH JACOBSON 

  • • • • Date:  Saturday evening, April 6, 2018
        • Location: SOMOS in Taos

  Description: Sawnie will read new poems, along with Elizabeth Jacobson of Santa Fe, who will read from her exquisite and award winning new release Not Into the Blossoms and Not into the Air (Parlor Press, 2019), selected for the New Measure Poetry Prize by Marianne Boruch.

  FOR MORE INFORMATION: CONTACT US

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  JUNE

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  DENVER, COLORADO

  ANYBODY CAN GET INTO A POEM, BUT IT TAKES “A POET OR AN OTTER OR SOMETHING SUPERNATURAL” TO GET OUT OF ONE” (Jack Spicer)

  • • • • • Date:  June 12
          • Times:  4:30-6:30pm
          • Location:  Lighthouse’s Lit-Fest, Denver, 1515 Race Street, Denver

  Description: When we are lucky, the perfect last lines arrive whole in the wake of the rest of the poem. The best of those last lines reverberate back up through the poem to its beginning like an electrical charge shooting up through the spine. But what about all of the times this doesn’t happen? What are some approaches to discovering the luminescent ending? In addition to enlisting the help of otters and the supernatural, we’ll look to the last lines of multiple master poets for instruction and experiment with our own. Bring two poems whose endings have eluded you. 

  FOR MORE INFORMATION: CONTACT US

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  DENVER, COLORADO

  SPIRIT IN MATTER, MATTER IN SPIRIT: POEMS

  • • • • • Date:  June 12
          • Times:  2-4pm
          • Location:  Lighthouse’s Lit-Fest, Denver, 1515 Race Street, Denver

  Description:  An osteopath once said to me that matter and spirit exist on a continuum, with matter at the heaviest, densest, visible extension of the continuum and spirit at the lightest, most ephemeral, and invisible end of the continuum. In this workshop we’ll look at poems that explore, or are at least conscious of various perspectives on reality – in their natural relationship to one another – poems that at some point, however briefly, express or acknowledge that awareness. We’ll write our own poems at the intersection of the known and the unknown, the quotidian and the mysterious.

  FOR MORE INFORMATION: CONTACT US

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