POETRY AND THE SACRED will consider a number of poetic efforts to map out the terrain between the ordinary, the everyday, and the sacred.  We will read poems that are more direct or perhaps traditional in this thinking—as in poems that make use of Christian exegesis or midrash in the rabbinic tradition or Sufi poems that address the beloved as both the loved other and as God—and poems that are less transparent, or more secular.  We will explore the work of poets who negotiate the space between the real before us now—the grass, the dirt, the bedrock—and imagination, poets who take up elemental human questions and human longing.  We will read closely, too, for craft, for how a poet makes use of image and form, music and story, to deepen our considerations.  And, we will keep as a kind of touchstone Keats’s idea of “negative capability”—to be able to be in an uncertainty or mystery without what he called “irritable” reaching after fact or reason—that this kind of engagement with belief has also at its heart the unknown, the uncertain, the contradictory, even doubt, disbelief. Instructor: Anna Catone

About Frequency Studios:

• All of our studios are geared towards drafting new work.
• The pieces you’ll be drafting will be about, or inspired by, select readings that the instructor will share with you.
• The studios are open to anyone who writes, or who wants to begin writing. (In the past, we’ve had a range– newbies to post-MFA).
• Come ready to read and discuss a little bit, and to write a lot.

WHEN: Saturday, February 4, 10 am – 2 pm
WHERE: 73 Harrison Street, Providence, RI
REGISTER!