Poetry Lab!

 Title: Poetry as Pedagogy: Finding Healing and Community through Writing

The lab my students and I are developing will use poetry to help young women process traumatic events, forge communities based in healing and wellness, and develop their self-awareness and self-esteem. Participants are not required to have any prior experience writing or reading poetry. The purpose of the bi-weekly exercises in this lab is to identify parallels between a poet's ability to shape language according to their deepest desires and an individual's ability to shape their sense of self according to the desires of their own imagination. As participants become familiar with the style and content of a collectively-selected set of poems, they will also become more familiar with the process of safely sharing both their pain and their dreams with a community of other developing poets. 

In the model that we have developed, participants will read the work of women poets such as Lucille Clifton, Margaret Ray, Claudia Rankine, Sylvia Plath, and Audre Lorde within the context of their personal lives and political beliefs. Reading their work in this way will compel participants to consider poetry as the trace of the complex and difficult experience of being human. Where and why did poets like Plath and Lorde struggle? What can we learn from their documentation of their internal and external struggles within the poetic form? My hope is that the work we will accomplish together in the lab will demonstrate that poetry can be a site of both refuge and communion. Poetry is a space in which the self can be safely explored and shared, initially in the isolation of the page and later in the group setting of the poetry reading.

This semester, we are structuring the lab around the seven stages of grief: Denial, anger, guilt and pain, bargaining, depression/loneliness/reflection, reconstruction/working through, and acceptance. Participants in the lab will respond to poetry prompts structured around these seven stages over the course of the semester. I was inspired by a line in my dear friend Alexa’s undergraduate thesis, Poiesis and Death: Foucault’s Chiastic Undoing of Life in History of Sexuality Vol. 1. In her thesis, she writes that Michel Foucault’s Sexuality One is a book that “calls for a mourning of ourselves while we are still alive.” The process of grieving involves not only remembering and mourning a past self, but also adjusting to the reality of the different person you’ve become.

Sadly, Alexa passed away in the spring of 2020. In her honor, I would like to establish the Alexa Cucupulos Poiesis Award for lab participants. I intend to give the award to a pair of women of different ethnicities who collaborate to create a project which uses poetry to cultivate a receptivity to the mystery of the other. “Other” in this sense is both the external collaboration partner and the internal latent and dynamic self. The idea is that the quality of the relationships between women of different backgrounds can only be as good as the quality of the relationship that women have with themselves. Respecting and learning the difference of an external other through poetry is also an opportunity to respect and learn the differences which exist within ourselves. What do I need to confront within myself in order to have authentic and honest relationships with other women?

We are looking forward to hosting a series of poetry workshops and readings by established and emerging women poets of color including Chet’la Sebree, Pavana Reddy, Nicole Higgins, Jasmine Flowers, and Brittany Groves. If you are a poet who would like to facilitate a future session in summer 2021, fall 2021, or spring 2022, please leave a comment here or email me at amandakbennett12@gmail.com.

If you are a Duke or UNC undergraduate student who is interested in participating in the lab, please fill out this Google form.