Dear Reader,

When we're confronted with life's biggest moments, we often first find ourselves speechless—how express our great wonder at falling in love? How express the passage of time, our children or parents getting older? How express our grief, the loss of a beloved, or our confrontation with our own mortality or with violence?

Poetry is the oldest of art forms because it gives language to the unsayable—whether it is the expansive unsayable of the sacred that holds us or the horrible unsayable of trauma.

We turn to poetry to get beyond the linear, rational narrative mind into the space of dream, the unconscious, the spiritual.

In our upcoming Free Poetry of Silence and Voice class, we're exploring the poetry of sacred, expansive silence and voice on the first day.

​Join us by registering for free here. ​

On the second day, we're exploring more difficult silences and more fragmented voice, how to write (gently) out of pain, trauma, how to listen to the unconcious.

When we learn to listen, even to the fragments, even to what is broken, even in what is painful, we often find that there's a deep connection to what supports us. At the bottom of the pain is also some point of connection, some silence that holds us, some voice that is speaking.

But we need to learn how to listen.

One of my favorite writers is Annie Rogers, who is a wonderful poet herself. A therapist, who writes about her work with patients but also her own brave recovery from trauma and mental illness, Rogers writes:

“The unconscious insists, repeats, and practically breaks down the door, to be heard. The only way to hear it, to invite it into the room, is to stop imposing something over it—mostly in the form of your own ideas–and instead listen for the unsayable, which is everywhere, in speech, in enactments, in dreams, and in the body.....

Befriend your own unconscious–its signifiers, symptoms, and quirky logic–or it will play havoc in the work you do, no matter your intentions, no matter your degrees and qualifications."

In poetry, we can come to hear the unconscious, to let it speak its own language, and to befriend it, and we'll be exploring that in more detail, as I said, in our second free class.

And then in the third class, we'll explore how poetry is always woven out of both silence and voice—like the shadow and light of a painting—to express and enact the rich complexity of being human.

Reading and writing poetry with an attention to silence and voice can be a deeply empowering, healing process--I know it has been for both me and Eric, and we're excited to share it with others.

If you haven't signed up already, join us next week for our free three-day teaching.

These are, I know, difficult times we're living in. A lot is happening.

But when we turn to poetry, when we turn to silence and to voice, we find so many great gifts and rewards, new resilience and new energy.

Our hope is that we can help you find strength in your own voice so that you can sit in your own sacred silences and also bring your voice out more fully into the world—we need it!

With smiles,

Nadia

PS The short version: We're excited to teach about how to approach the unsayable in poetry in our free series of classes next week. Join here. Don't want to hear more about this class? Simply click here to opt-out.