Grief(s) - communal, private & ecological mourning (later session)
Event Details
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.
Warsan Shire, What They Did Yesterday Afternoon
To live is to love, in all its many forms. Myriad entities become the subjects of our love: human and non-human animals, the land and water and sky. Because we love, we must suffer its corollary—loss. But how do we process the many losses we face, personal and communal, over a lifetime? Experts say that in the West our mourning rituals have diminished, even while we are confronted with increasing reasons to feel grief. Today, the world feels deeply damaged. Everywhere, it and we are hurting. In the last two decades alone, we have been confronted with raging wildfires. Increasing hate crimes. The depletion of non-renewable resources. A global pandemic. In these unsettling times, every flash of breaking news is enough to crack the human heart. And while we bear these, we continue to sustain personal devastation.
Can poetry help us process our grief? Can it be part of a grieving practice to help us make sense of our feelings? Can it invite us into a community of mourners who find strength in each other’s stories? Can it teach us about other cultures’ forms of mourning? In this workshop, we will examine three poems exploring different kinds of grief: communal, private, and eco-grief. Join Julie Sutherland in a study of poems by Heid E. Erdrich (Public Grief), Jackie Kay (Darling), and Pamelia Mordecai (My Sister Cries the Sea). We will close the session with a reading of Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods.
STUDY DETAILS:
- Single session study on Zoom led by Julie Sutherland
- Links to the poems included in the study: What They Did Yesterday Afternoon by Warsan Shire; Public Grief by Heid E. Erdrich; download Jackie Kay’s Darling; My sister cries the sea by Pamelia Mordecai; In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver.
- Sunday 24 September 2023, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK)
- £45 including introductory notes
