Deep River 2024-2025: At Home in the Poem

We live in dislocated times. Throngs of desperate people roam the earth seeking refuge from wars, persecution, oppression, hunger, drought, floods, fire and earthquake. Others of us, still living in the land of our birth, feel dislocated by radical changes in climate, technology, culture and politics. The nature of childhood has mutated as have the rituals of adulthood. This can leave us feeling cast out of our history, dispossessed of the ground of our being.

 

The late poet and critic Meena Alexander conceived of the “Poetics of Dislocation” as an important strand in American, and indeed, world poetry. She writes eloquently of the poem as a sanctuary for the dispossessed poet and/or reader. To make such a poem is to create a dwelling place in which the dislocated psyche can gather the past, connect to the future, and, in the process, heal. We will read Alexander's work and poetry, as well as the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish--the Palestinian poet of exile--and Joy Harjo--the indigenous American poet of her own lost culture--and write under their influence.

 

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, PHD is an analyst member of the San Francisco C.G. Jung Institute. A widely published poet, Lowinsky won the Blue Light Poetry Prize, the Obama Millennial Award, the Atlanta Review Merit Award, the Sinkroniciti Magazine Space Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.