Casting Spells: Songs, Prayer & Incantations with Pam Uschuk (via Zoom)
Who doesn’t want to have the power to cast a spell? Poetry has a long history of charms all the way back to its roots in the oral tradition. From incantatory songs intoned by elders around a campfire in Sumeria or what is now New York to Shakespeare’s “Double, double, toil and trouble/fire burn and cauldron bubble” to Robert Graves’ “Invoke, People of the Sea, invoke the poet, that he may/compose a spell for you.” to Joy Harjo’s evocative “I Take You Back,” invocations, prayers, spells, charms, songs and incantations are a huge part of today’s global poetry. In this generative three hour zoom workshop, we will take an in-depth look at some ways in which poets have written these in free verse, form and prose poems. Poets include Ross Gay, Joy Harjo, Natalie ‘Diaz, Jane Hirschfield, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Patricia Smith, Terrance Hayes, and many more. We’ll discuss ways in which these powerful forms can carry sound, image, idea and meaning. A writing prompt and feedback will be provided by the instructor.
Pam Uschuk has howled out eight books of poems, including Crazy Love, winner of a 2010 American Book Award and Refugee from Red Hen Press, 2022, named one of the 14 best books of poems by Orion Magazine and one of Kirkus Review’s favorite books of 2023. Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears worldwide, including , Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, etc. Her awards include the 2024 Pearl S. Buck Writer-In-Residency (Randolph College), Storyknife Women’s Writing Retreat Fellowship, Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, and prizes from Ascent and Amnesty International. Editor-In-Chief of CUTTHROAT, A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS, and Black Earth Institute Board Member and Senior Fellow, Uschuk lives in Colorado and Arizona. She edited the anthologies, Truth To Power: Writers Respond To The Rhetoric Of Hate And Fear, 2017, Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, 2020, Through the Ash, New Leaves, 2022 and The Nature of Nature and Human Nature, 2023. Pam is the 2024 Pearl S. Buck Visiting Writer at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She is putting finishing touches on a new ms of poems, Peony Moon, and a multi-genre memoir, Hope’s Crazed Angels: an Odyssey Through The Whispering Disease.
