Approaching the Divine: Poetry as Spiritual Practice with Jeremy Paden

Join Jeremy Paden, author of how to recognize god’s chosen, for an exploration of poetry as spiritual practice. Both song and prayer are, perhaps, our earliest forms of poetry, and both give voice to our deepest longings. Both are also central in most religious practices. The word religion comes from religio. While Augustine proposes that religio come from religare, to bind again or to bind fast, Cicero states it comes from re-legere, to re-read or to read with care. In this workshop, we will focus on Cicero’s notion of reading and rereading: (re)reading the self, (re)reading the world, (re)reading other spiritual poets. Participants will be provided with an anthology of poems, as well as and reading and writing prompts that engage those poems with an eye toward writing new poems.

Jeremy Paden is a poet and translator who writes in Spanish and English and translates into and out of both languages. Among his most recent books are the Spanish language translation of Ada Limón’s Hurting Kind/De las que duelen (Valparaíso Ediciones), the English language translation of Mario Meléndez’s Waiting for Perec (Action, Spectacle), and how to recognize god’s chosen (Accents Publishing). In 2018, he was awarded an Al Smith for Poetry and his children’s book Under the Ocelot Sun (Shadelandhouse Modern Press) was awarded a Campoy-Ada prize for Spanish-language children’s books. He is professor of Spanish and Chair of Humanities at Transylvania University and on faculty with Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. 

Online

$40

10/9, 6-8pm est

https://bit.ly/poetry_spiritual