The Poetry of America’s Women Warriors (Online, Zoom)
The women of our nation have been great warriors. From Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, to Mary G. Harris (Mother Jones) and organizing labor unions, to Ida B. Wells, fighting to end lynchings in the South, to Susan B. Anthony and the 19th Amendment, to Mary McCloud Bethune, First Lady of the Struggle & the Female Booker T. Washington, to Dolores Huerta and the United Farmworkers Association, to Angela Davis, Time Magazine’s Woman of the Year in 1971, our nation has been fecund in birthing women activists in social justice, AKA, women warriors.
What about women poet warriors? Who are the women warriors of verse: the abolitionist, the suffragist, the civil rights activist, the feminist, the LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer [or sometimes questioning], intersex, asexual, and others) activist, and in these days of the resurgence of hate and ignorance, the existentialist? The woman who looks at all that is happening around her which seems meaningless, and decides that she has to invent her own meaning in life. What seems to call her. The men in our nation who are not asleep or focused on a myriad of distractions or misinformation, face the goal of answering the same call.
The first 90 minutes of this class for beginning or seasoned poets are focused on such abolitionist poems as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Eliza Harris, or suffragist poems such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Song For Equal Suffrage, to Alicia Ostriker’s essay on Muriel Rukeyser’s oceanic work, Learning to Breathe Underwater. Ostriker quotes Rukeyser with the following truthful, accurate paragraph on poem-writing: There are … two kinds of reaching in poetry, one based on the document, the evidence itself; the other informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep and sometimes—with strength of expression and skill and luck—reach that place where things are shared and we all recognize the secrets. And do we all also recognize the story which resonates with, if not matches, our own.
The second 90 minutes serves up the delicious verse nutrition of such women warriors of poetry as Ellen Bass, June Jordan, Naomi Shihab Nye, the current Poet Laureate of the U.S. Ada Limon, Lucile Clifton, and one of the voices of the Civil Rights Movement, Sonia Sanchez. Fulfilling Jim Moreno’s IMIC, the acronym that stands for Inspiration, Motivation, Imagination, & Contagion is an important goal in Jim’s poem-making classes. You will leave this workshop after completing two original poems. You will also have a bibliography that will provide you with hours of inspirational reading. Join Jim in this Zoom class to taste the poetry cuisine. Click the link at the top of this course description to register.