Death Meditations: Exploring Mortality with Poetry with Jessica Jacobs (IN PERSON at HVWC)

We live in a time of always more, always faster, a time of disembodied screen-living where what’s new insists on itself as what’s most important—a culture built to help us pretend death is something for other people. But outside this frenzy are questions that demand slow pondering, queries old as human consciousness: Why are we here? What happens when we no longer are? And how do we live with the knowledge we are moving toward a definite but unknown deadline? With close-readings of work by poets including Marie Howe, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Ellen Bass, and Ross Gay, we will look directly at death as a way of more fully living our lives.

(For this workshop, it’s ideal if students can bring a laptop with a short-ish poem they’d written, which they’d like to revise, or three printed copies of that poem printed out, with the poem triple-spaced. Scissors are also helpful, but not essential.)

NB: This class will be taught IN PERSON at HVWC and will be capped at 10 students. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. Please email ask@writerscenter.org with any questions.

All HVWC scholarship applications will be available on Dec 1 and will be due on Dec 15 for all winter/spring 2024 classes.

Jessica Jacobs is the author of unalone, poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis (Four Way Books, March 2024); Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year and winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards; and Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and is the co-author of Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/Penguin RandomHouse, 2020). Jessica is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.