What's at Play | A Workshop on Oracular Poetics

Name: What's at Play | A Workshop on Oracular Poetics
Start: 2024-06-01T11:00:00-07:00
End: 2024-06-01T16:00:00-07:00
Location: 2820 Seventh Street,Berkeley,94710,US

Schedule

Sat Jun 01 2024 at 11:00 am to 04:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

2820 Seventh Street,Berkeley,94710,US | Berkeley, CA

Bring your questions about futurity–your future, our shared futures, the earth's too–and let's scry.
Denise, Sean, and Miranda collectively have decades of experience with meditation, divination, and writing. The art of divination empowers an individual to access information through their own connection to spirit, or by way of divinatory tools like tarot and oracle cards, bibliomancy, runes, pendulums and other forms firmly rooted in varied cultural practices throughout history. Your facilitators will enact divination and its improvisations for the whole group, and engage with the creative work of interpretation. We'll teach ways of offering each other divination. Then we will open up the space for participants to practice divination together in pairs.
From your divinations, we will write, gleaning poems and stories as seers. There will be guidance on bringing together your personal desires, hopes, and concerns with your environmental, social, cultural, and political desires, hopes, and concerns, all with the aim of lessening the sense of duality and splitting that our historical moment entails for so many of us.
The structure of our time together begins with a grounding meditation and guided visualization, followed by enactment of divination and interpretation by your facilitators. Then you will do your own practices of divination and interpretation, receiving and offering. From there we will go into several writing exercises that allow us to take up the divinatory content for guidance and onwardness, as well as aesthetic inspiration. We will take several breaks to move contemplatively, rest and nourish, stay embodied, and integrate what's coming through along the way viscerally.
Here at the crux of spring and summer, as the year turns a corner, join us for an open ended cartography by means of divination and poetics.
Everyone should bring notebooks and pens.
Miranda Mellis is a writer from San Francisco now living in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she teaches writing, literature, and environmental humanities at Evergreen State College. She is the author of Crocosmia (forthcoming, Nightboat Books), The Spokes, The Revisionist, None of This Is Real, Demystifications, and a number of chapbooks including, most recently, The Revolutionary. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Millay Colony and was a recipient of the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction and an NEA grant. She is a long time practitioner of divination and contemplative practices.
Denise Newman is a multimedia poet and translator based in San Francisco. Her poetry collections are Future People, The New Make Believe, Wild Goods, Human Forest, and forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press in 2024 The Redesignation of Paradise. Newman is also involved in video and social practice projects that explore dissonances between language and reality, and for many years she has collaborated with composers providing lyrics for choral works and songs. For her translation work, she has received two NEA fellowships and two PEN awards. She teaches in the MFA Writing program at the California College of the Arts and she is a long-time meditator.
Sean Negus is an artist who works in the expanded field of poetics. In addition to a book of poems published bilingually in Portuguese and English, Hurricane Music, he has also published an artist book in limited edition, Congeries. As a translator and editor of contemporary Brazilian and Portuguese poetry he has edited the ongoing Saccades as well as DUSIE 21. A professor in Writing & Literature and also Critical Studies at both California College of the Arts and Santa Clara University, recent work inquiring into archival poetics has been exhibited in publications by the Goethe-Institut and Tasaworat Collective. He has been steeping in emptiness and attuning to the oracular for a good while.