Friends General Conference Gathering workshop, offered 1993-2002
Poems we may have read
Description of this Workshop, from the Advance Program
We will read about ten poems and other texts from scriptures and
secular literature, reading each text in the silence for 15 minutes,
then opening discussion in a worship sharing format. Poems by Yeats,
Stevens, Rilke, Dickinson, Atwood, others. See my Web site for texts. Not a writing workshop. P/T.
Welcome to the record of nine years of The Poem as Silence.
We'll read a number of poems and sacred texts. We'll begin by reading
them in silence for 15 minutes. Then we'll go into a modified worship
sharing format, with each person speaking from the silence until all
have spoken who wish to, concentrating on personal experience with the
text, for about another 20 minutes. Discussion will continue in a less
structured fashion. We'll be able to read only two or three texts each
morning. The process is slow.
You'll receive each text in the same form, identically printed (by my
computer) in a very plain format and photocopied, with the
identification of the author and other information given to you
beforehand. If the text has a foreign language original, you'll receive
both the original and a translation. Biblical texts will be given in
both the King James Version and a modern English translation, as well as
Greek and Hebrew texts.
I have written a Web site for this workshop, with many of the texts posted on it. [You're on it!]
I was a modern language (German) major in college. I graduated in 1959
and became a physician. I'm an experienced reader (and writer) of
poetry, but I have not been through the miseries of graduate study in
literature.
Bring your own texts if you want, and we'll copy them at the Gathering
(I'm bringing a laptop computer (Macintosh iBook, with a printer and a modem,
and they've got photocopy facilities). Better yet, e-mail them to me at
RSRichmond@aol.com. Or we can get them off the Web during the Gathering - I've actually done this several times in past years. Please bring poems of adequate density to withstand the process (do YOU want to stare at "Mary Had a Little Lamb" for fifteen minutes?), and choose them fit onto one page (maybe two). If the poem is in a foreign language, bring the original and a translation.
Dead white European males (and I belong to this general category in all
respects save one) predominate in the material I've selected, and you
are invited to try to redress this imbalance.
One thing we won't do is read any of our own poems in this format. Bring
your own poetry, of course, and maybe we can organize a reading, as we did very successfully in 2001.
Poems we have read in past years include:
- W.B. Yeats: Long-Legged Fly, The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium,
Mohini Chatterjee
- Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
- Emily Dickinson: Because I could not stop for Death,The Soul selects her own society, The Gentian weaves her fringes
- R.M. Rilke: Archaïscher Torso Apollos, Der Panther, Der Ölbaumgarten, Es winkt zu Fühlung/Everything beckons to us
- Maria Zaturenska: The White Dress
- John Crowe Ransom: The Equilibrists
- Mark Doty: Nocturne in Black and Gold
- G.M. Hopkins: The Windhover
- Stéphane Mallarmé: Une dentelle s'abolit
- Isaac Penington: (give over thine own running)
- From the Bible:
- Psalms 23, 29, 100, and 148
- the Beatitudes,
- I Cor 13 (though I speak)
- From the Qur'an: the first surah (the Exordium or faatiHah)
- Adrienne Rich: Negotiations
- Margaret Atwood: Death of a Young Son by Drowning
- Walther von der Vogelweide: Under der Linden
- Gilles Vigneault: Mon Pays
- Frances Thompson: The Hound of Heaven
- Ernesto Cardenal: Amanecer (Dawn) and La Mañanita (Morning)
- Sidney Lanier: The Marshes of Glynn
E-mail Bob Richmond.
Return to top of this page.
Return to Bob Richmond's personal Web site site map
Posted to the Web 4-21-1999.
Revised 10-21-2004.