Look at It This Way

So many people have a negative view of poetry. One woman in New York City told me to my face that poetry “makes her cringe.” I’m out to change all that. Next month I’m launching a weekend retreat at the Wisdom House Conference and Retreat Center in the beautiful northwestern hills of Litchfield, Connecticut.

I’m out to show – and convince – people that they can apply poetry to see their life more clearly and apply poetic techniques to achieve greater happiness and personal success in every walk of life: family, work, social relationships.

The program is titled Unleash Your Poetic Mind and covers ideas that include:

·      Embracing poetry for self-knowledge and self-healing

·      How to write poetry to sooth stress and anxiety

·      Applying your innate poetic mind to breakthroughs in family, business organizations, and social situations

·      Amplifying your journaling with the ancient, three-line, Japanese poetry known as haiku

·      Enriching your spiritual life with poetry

As a member of the National Association for Poetry Therapy, I’ve seen that for myself how someone who feels their life is out of control or short of their expectations can write a poem and put themselves on the path to taking back their life. Haiku are often used, for example, in clinical settings for veterans and survivors of domestic abuse because writing a brief haiku is an act of self-sufficiency that provides an immediate sense of completion and mastery.

Why poetry?

Because we have a 5,000-year history of making poetry to celebrate ourselves, console ourselves, and empower ourselves. Every human civilization has enshrined its highest aspirations in verse: 

·      The Psalms and so much else in the Hebrew Scriptures are poetry 

·      The Hindu Bhagavad Gita (Song of God) is a poem

·      The Islamic Qur'an is considered untranslatable because its divine meaning is in its original Arabic language and sound

The powerful poems discussed in Unleash Your Poetic Mind are easy to understand, beautiful, uplifting, and helpful in easing the stresses of a bad diagnosis, a divorce, death of a loved one – just about any emotional trauma we face.

Participants do their own writing throughout the program and share if they want to. It’s a supportive, no-critique, safe space – not an academic class about writing better, but more a contemplative approach to feeling better.

Wisdom House is an interfaith retreat and conference center that presents programs in spirituality, wellness, the arts, and ecology while offering hospitality to academic, civic, nonprofit, and business organizations.

This former college and convent for the community of Catholic sisters – the Daughters of Wisdom – continues as a ministry of the Daughters of Wisdom and provides an environment for reflection and expression. 

Unleash Your Poetic Mind begins on  November 13 with dinner at 5:00 and wraps up with lunch November 15. (Meals are healthy and extraordinary, created by Chef Margaret Jacobs, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America.)

You can register here.

For those of you who don’t know me, I began my career as a newspaperman in New York City and went on to head communications for business units of IBM and Siemens. I launched and operated for two decades a corporate communications agency partnering primarily with hi-tech Silicon Valley firms. I’ve had a novel published along with four non-fiction books, write poetry that appears in numerous literary magazines, and since 2013 have posted a weekly blog without missing a week. I’ve taught college writing classes and now volunteer with the American Cancer Society in teaching patients and caregivers to write poetry to help ease the emotional trauma of the disease. I also guide healing poetry retreats and workshops in person and via Zoom, and bring comforting poetry to hospice patients and their families.