“There’s a crack in everything—that’s how the light gets in” Leonard Cohen
All things are broken and carry at their core a fissure, a rift. Everything has a fault. The best writing honors the scuffed imperfect world. We’ll explore how to write brokenness in ways that give our poems greater depth, texture, and even open a gateway to the sacred.
The reader is like a carpenter bee, looking for a way into the siding of the poem. Where is the crack to get in? Where is an opening? There are many ways to offer an entrance by “breaking” our writing: The lines, the images, the syntax, the thinking, and more. I’ll give a series of five craft talks exploring each of the arenas in which we can invite brokenness into our poems.
FOR QUESTIONS OR ANY PROBLEMS REGISTERING PLEASE CONTACT ARMANDO AT [email protected]
August 4th-September 1st
Sundays at 5 Pm–6 PM Pacific Standard Time
Sessions are live on Zoom
All sessions are recorded. Recordings will be posted 48hrs after each session.
Each session includes craft talk followed by Q&A/Discussion
Themes
Class 1 Why do we need to attend to brokenness? Brokenness as Ritual and Opening
Class 2 Blood and Bone: Looking at the Broken Body:
Class 3 Rust: Looking at Brokenness in the Surroundings
Class 4 Breaking the Line/Syntax: The Poem on the Page
Class 5 Writing Process: Breaking our Habits/Opening to Possibility
“In the art of kintsugi
a potter repairing a broken cup
would sprinkle the resin
with powdered gold.
Sometimes the joins
are so exquisite
they say the potter
may have broken the cup
just so he could mend it.”
Chana Bloch, from “The Joins”
Danusha Laméris, a poet and essayist, was raised in Northern California, born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother. Her first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, and is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program. Her third book, Blade by Blade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.