Poetry Workshop
Saturday November 20, 2021
The Language of Recovery
Poems of Hope and Healing
with Carmen Bugan
For many people around the world the Covid-19 Pandemic has created a spiritual nightmare. Yet for many others, the isolation, the death of loved ones, the confusion and uncertainty about personal and public safety have initiated a spiritual journey about loss and survival. Poets have always embraced the deep changes life brings about. To some, the sense of journey from darkness to light, from powerlessness to strength is expressed in spiritual terms.
As we emerge from lockdowns and restrictions and begin enjoying the smiles and hugs of family and friends, and as we begin feeling a certain sense of having survived it all, our language too re-emerges and is held steady by words of recovery, healing, hope, and peace. So, what are some of the poems that express that sense of rebirth with a newly gained appreciation for the fragility of life, freedom, and love? How to do we chart our own journey onward in poetry?
In this workshop we will look at several poems of healing, recovery, and hope from around the world and write own, with the help of writing prompts. We will create our own “music of what happens”.
Dr. Carmen Bugan’s books include the memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police, which was a Waterstones Book Club Choice and serialized for radio as BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. The book also won the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist in the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The documentary film based on the book has also just been released as part of the Astra Film Festival.
Her collections of poems are: Releasing the Porcelain Birds,The House of Straw, Crossing the Carpathians, and Lilies from America, which won a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She is also the author of Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile, and her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University.
