July Classes: Poetry as Permission and Tarot Journaling to Know Yourself

July Poetry Opportunities

Imagine: Two hours in a room with other writers. Each loves words as much as you do! Where else can you spend time reading and writing poems? The answer: Monday Mantarays Poetry Read and Critique, upstairs at San Diego Writers, Ink. We meet weekly on Mondays from 10-12 noon.

In our very first class (today) we considered definitions of poetry. Is poetry “being, not doing” as E. E. Cummings says? Or is it “a place to tell secrets—a lamplight for difficult experiences” after Burroughs? Or after Kunitz, is poetry “the telling of the stories of the soul?” 

We also made a list of forms we’d like to try. After writing to the notion of “first permission” (taken from the poem “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” by Robert Duncan) and Audre Lorde’s timeless assertion that “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” we considered directions in which to point the arrow of our inquiry over the course of our classes so that we each end up with our own particular series of poems based on a theme or question. 

I hope you’ll join us. We dive deep in the pursuit of all the Big Questions in Life and study the skillset of poets across time to hone our own poetry skills. We will be using Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook among others. Next class meets Monday, July 8, 2019. Sign up here: Monday Mantarays Poetry Read and Critique. 

If meeting during the week is not an option, join me for Second Saturdays Poetry Read and Critique; this class convenes once a month and our next session meets Saturday, July 13, 2019. 

Tarot Journaling to Know Yourself: A Tour Through the Majors

Knowing that I’m an unapologetic tarot lover, a number of my friends suggested that I watch Wine Country, a movie out on Netflix about a group of women on retreat in Napa Valley. They land in a house staffed with a cook and suffer through an ominous session with a tarot reader, Lady Sunshine, camera foregrounding the black silk. One by one, the usual tarot card heavyweights fall: Death! Wheel of Fortune! Chariot! to name a few, which of course, with Sunshine’s unsunny take on what the energies portend, entirely unsettles each recipient.

The truth is that tarot energies can be explored through the lens of lived life in a gentle, manageable manner to consider our goals and potential with an eye towards joy. Certainly the cards represent major and minor transitional experiences. Indeed, some cards do stand for facing loss or change of situation, habit, job, or friendship as we all inevitably do over and over again throughout the course of our lives (Death). We also face changes in the way we view or experience our soul-wealth, heart-wealth or pocket-book-wealth (Fortune) or periods of time when we are trying to grow a new self or choose a new part of ourselves to bring forward into the world (Chariot). How we respond to these situations (as failures for example or as opportunities) can make all the difference in how we move on from our obstacles.

 

The cards give us images and symbols that we can use as focal points to ask: Which part can we change? Where is our perspective unmoving? What stands to be re-ordered, digested, understood, forgiven? And most importantly, where is the love we've been looking for? How do we know when we've arrived? Tarot journaling gives us a chance to make a truce with the past, freeing up our energy to create or map a path forward to new opportunities.

This course is based on worksheets from the forthcoming Heart’s Compass Tarot Workbook (Saddle Road Press). For the full course description, visit: Tarot Journaling to Know Yourself. We meet over live video call. For more information, or to sign up, use the email form on this site or IM me at the Heart’s Compass Tarot Facebook page. 

April Tarot Writing Prompts and a June Themed Poetry Workshop for you....

Theme, Set, Go: Monthly Poetry Workshop at SDWI

I know you have some magic words...we all do. Would you like to shrine them in poems? This is an ongoing in person workshop that will meet the first Tuesday of every month starting in June at San Diego Writers, Ink at Liberty Station from 10 am to noon; the first six months of themes, offered as touchstones here, and open to a wide range of interpretations, include: 

June: Mothers and Fathers

July: Travel

August: Harvest

September: Animals

October: Music

While the poetry we write starts as a conversation with the Self, it inevitably becomes a conversation with Other Poets. If we are lucky, that conversation extends itself in front of an audience of Enthusiastic Readers. Come up out of your basement, down from your gable, or away from that crowded coffee shop you frequent. Bring paper, pencil, and your device. Let’s partake of all three conversations and write together!

While we will read and write poems based on a particular theme each month, I invite you to rebel and write the poems hunting you if the themes don’t suit you (though I believe out of the bedrock of resistance emerges some of our most feral, inspired poetry).

Expect to read poetry out loud, write and workshop poems, share ideas for potential submission targets, and grow as a poet. You will come away from each of our classes with enough assignments and started drafts to keep you busy during the month apart til our next meeting. I'll post a link once the course is Here's the link to the course description at SDWI where you can sign up; cost is $30 for members per month or $36 per month for nonmembers. Keep it in mind for keeping your summer writing practice robust; for more information about my relationship to writing poetry, check out this interview conducted by SDWI's Casey Cromwell.

Tarot Tuesday

Here are the latest in the series of Tarot writing prompts I am offering on Tuesdays on my main website. I am working my way through the deck, one card per week. We have moved into the Suit of Disks. I invite you to write to the prompt and share it with us on the Tarot Tuesday Facebook page or in comments on the site:

The Ace of Disks, or the Gift of Preparing to Receive

The Two of Disks, or the Unconscious Juggler

Tarot for Two

Writer Mary Allen and I continue to co-blog at Tarot for Two. We share our reflections on the card we lived with for the month prior, connecting our daily lives to the symbolism of the cards. This month we wrote to Hierophant and  Art/Temperance Cards:

Excerpt from The Hierophant (Tania’s card of the month):

Knowing there were multiple incarnations made this one seem optional, mundane. Traipsing around on our various field trips, I wondered: Why learn about fertilizer for seed crops or butchering methods at the slaughterhouse or chemical mixtures for sewage? Why would we, the chosen children, need to know these things, if we were once Lemurians or Atlanteans? Why did we fall from grace? How was it possible to skin a knee? To lose a cat to a car on a hot tar road in summer? And how am I to know which past incarnation’s work I need to complete in this incarnation?

Excerpt from The Art card, or Temperance (Mary’s card of the month):

This is a beautiful card with many strange and arresting images:  a circle in the woman’s chest holding a clutch of celestial blue balls, a large oval of pale yellow light behind the woman, with writing in it (what does that writing mean? I don’t even know what language it’s in), the woman’s green dress decorated with bees….When this card comes up I think it’s talking, not so much about art as we think about it but about the art of life, the alchemy of mixing things together—a little of this, a little of that, sorrow, happiness, darkness, light, and what you do with all of that—to create a life. 

We invite you to read the rest of both card of the month reflections at Tarot for Two; we'd love it if you dropped us a comment about the writing. I hope this post finds you thriving and taking time to reflect on the moments that brought your joy, or that you find your way back to joy through writing about the challenging moments. Tarot blessings, as I like to say these days.

Photo Credits: Artwork in the top photo is by my poetry movie collaborator Robyn Beattie; the remaining three photos are hers.