adult RE: soul poetry
This five-session course was led by Carole Grace in April-May 2010. Carole provided the following information prior to the course:
Poetry speaks to the soul for so many of us and we often have a favourite piece that speaks to us and I hope that these evenings will give us an opportunity to share some of these. There will be 5 Thursday evenings when you can come along to share, by listening to others or reading your poems aloud. I believe that spirituality is experienced in many different ways and with a surprising range of feelings so I have structured these sessions around love, anger, joy, grief and hope. I was thrilled to run a similar workshop at Summer School last year and it left a lasting impression on me of a beautiful multi-coloured kaleidoscope which changed and fell into new patterns whenever I looked at it.
Michaela von Britzke offered the following reflections after the course finished in June 2010:
We've just finished a five session course called Soul Poetry, ably led by Carole Grace on Thursday evenings. What a delight to hear people reading their favourite poems to one another, to be reminded of old classics and to hear some poems for the first time. I don't think any of us except Carole managed to make every session but the format of the evenings worked well for people to drop into as they could.
Each session had a different emotion as a theme - love, anger, joy, grief, hope - and elicited such a diverse collection of chosen poems from us all. We heard poems written in English, Italian, German and Farsi and talked of the difficulties in translating poetic language and the pleasure of hearing the spoken word, the rhythm and cadence of a foreign tongue, conveying meaning through tone and expression. Two published poets read their own work to us - what a joy.
We liked the angry poems, poems that complained and found fault, poems that raged. Here's the first verse of Maya Angelou's 'Still I Rise':
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
The poems of joy were so often about the natural world and the beauty of being alive, like Dylan Thomas' famous 'Fern Hill':
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means
My favourites are probably still the Sufis - Rumi and Hafiz - who so eloquently express the absolute simplicity of loving the divine so that all else falls away.
This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival
A joy, a depression, a meanness
Some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
So thank you Carole and thank you everyone for all that you brought to enrich these evenings of poetry - we must do this again before too long.
last updated: 26 Apr 2011
