Nature and Ecopoetry with Bhisham Bherwani (in person at HVWC)
Poets from the classical (Theocritus, Lucretius, Virgil) to the Romantics (Clare, Coleridge, Wordsworth) to the early and late modernists (Hardy, Frost, Roethke) to recent contemporaries (Seamus Heaney, W. S. Merwin, Mary Oliver) have embodied in verse their unique relationships with and interpretations of nature, applying flora, fauna, geology, and landscape to treat subjects personal and public. Such poetry, both narrative and lyric, may be ecstatic, elegiac, epiphanic, meditative, spiritual, (auto)biographical, historical, or political. More recently, witnesses of climate change and the rapid deterioration of our environment, poets have complemented their registers with the tragic and the apocalyptic, echoing and accentuating their forebears’ protests against encroachment from the industrialization and urbanization of the previous two centuries.
Nature endures not just as a necessary and urgent subject for poetry, but also, despite its fragility, as the motherlode of metaphor, be it to express grief, joy, love, rage, or faith. In this workshop, we will discuss and, through writing exercises, explore ways to employ our individual responses to nature. To illuminate our interests and enlarge our palettes, we will consider illustrative works not just by anglophone poets, but also by poets, Eastern and Western, translated into English (Basho, Rilke, Szymborska). Our objective will be to identify resourceful ways to further develop poems spawned in the workshop, and to equip ourselves to embark and expand on our projects independently. An anthology of readings will be compiled for and distributed to participants before the workshop.
NB: This class will take place at HVWC (Philipse Manor Train Station) in Sleepy Hollow, NY. Scholarships are due on Dec 15th. Please read all cpurse policies before signing up for a class.
Bhisham Bherwani is the author of the poetry books The Second Night of the Spirit, The Circling Canopy, and Life in Peacetime. He is the co-editor of The Shrine Whose Shape I Am: The Collected Poetry of Samuel Menashe and was the guest editor of the Atlanta Review anthology of modern and contemporary anglophone Indian poetry. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The American Reader, Commonweal, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Plume, and The Yale Review. He is the founder and editor of Audubon Terrace Press, an independent publisher of exceptional but overlooked poetry and related literature. Bherwani was born in Bombay, India, educated at Cornell University and New York University. He lives in New York.
