Workshop
Fanny Howe Feminist Reading Group with Laura Henriksen
Approaching language as a medium of play, children possess an inherent, embodied sense of the poetic. They know how to apply a relaxed and curious effort to the arrangement of words. When provided a form for the wilderness of thought, they delight in the poem’s apparition. Through the course of this 5-week poetry workshop, we will pursue an attunement to children's ways of knowing. This is a knowledge to which we all have our own singular access, and it is not so distant. We will read poems that encourage both permission and form, inviting the spirit of play and safety of structure that allow the child’s mind to thrive. This will be a primarily generative workshop, in that what we read will be in the interest of what we write. All are welcome, especially those for whom writing feels a little out of reach. Poetry is in our midst always, with the written word as its record.
Possible reading includes the fragments of Sappho, H.D., Dionne Brand, Sei Shōnagon, N.H. Pritchard and Christian Bök, among others.
"The green mountains are always walking" comes from Mountains and Waters Discourse (Sansui Kyo) by Sōtō Zen monk Eihei Dōgen, translated by Kazauaki Tanahashi. This phrase evokes something of a child’s perceptive feeling for the animate world—the movement vibrant and alive in all phenomena.
