A Hundred Falling Veils

Dear Friends,

A second section of The Practical Poet (a five-week writing workshop for poets of all levels) has opened on Wednesdays (June 3-July 1).

Mondays are full, so be sure to click on the link that says to register for Wednesday!

The more we understand how poetry works, the more playful we can be in our practice.

In this five-week writing workshop, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer offers strategies to help you wrestle more intimately, more proficiently with language. By increasing your knowledge of poetry’s hows, you can better serve your poems as they emerge.

Topics will be:

• The Muscle of Metaphor
• What’s in a Line?
• The Joys of a Cage: Playing with Form
• The Delight’s in the Details
• The End: Ways a Poem Might Finish

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poems have appeared in O Magazine, TEDx, Rattle.com, in back alleys, on A Prairie Home Companion and on river rocks she leaves around town. She’s taught and performed poetry for Deepak Chopra, Think 360, Craig Hospital, Ah Haa School for the Arts, Weehawken Arts, Camp Coca Cola, meditation retreats, addiction recovery programs, hospice, universities, libraries, scientists and more. She’s won the Fischer Prize, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, the Dwell Press Solstice Prize, the Writer’s Studio Literary Contest, and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. She served as Colorado’s Western Slope Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and co-hosts Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process. She earned her MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison. Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day. One word-mantra: Adjust.

Hi Friends,

I hope you can join me for two upcoming classes, The Practical Poet–a five-week writing class five Mondays in June, 1-3 p.m. MDT, and Poetry of Presence, a five-week poetry discussion series five Tuesdays in June, 3-5 p.m. MDT

The Practical Poet: Attending to Craft

The more we understand how poetry works, the more playful we can be in our practice. In this five-week writing workshop (June 1-29), Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer offers strategies to help you wrestle more intimately, more proficiently with language. By increasing your knowledge of poetry’s hows, you can better serve your poems as they emerge. Topics will be:

The Muscle of Metaphor
What’s in a Line?
The Joys of a Cage: Playing with Form
The Delight’s in the Details
The End: Ways a Poem Might Finish

Register Here.

Poetry of Presence: A Five-Week Discussion Class

For five weeks (June 2-30), we’ll immerse ourselves in mindfulness poems from the recently published collection Poetry of Presence (Grayson Books, 2017). Poets in the collection include Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Wendell Berry, Li-Young Lee, Raymond Carver, Ellen Bass, Lucille Clifton, Octavio Paz, Nikki Giovanni, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, Billy Collins, Charles Bukowski, Marge Piercy, and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. As the editors say, these are poems that “inspire us to live better, and to make our world better; at the same time, they grant us a taste of being good enough, just as we are, in this world, just as it is.”

Each week, we’ll read and discuss these writings that, according to Fr. Richard Rohr, invite us to live undefended, poems that lead us into a deeper communion with the world.

Participants will need to purchase a book prior to the class, available for $21.95 online at poetryofpresencebook.com, through your local bookseller, or through Amazon.

Register Here.

An evening celebrating new books of poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, James Crews and Danusha Laméris

Friday, May 29, 5 pm (EDT), 6 p.m (MDT), 7 p.m. (CDT), 8 p.m (EDT)

Invite yourself to an evening of poetry that wholly meets the moment, its losses and fears, and helps us also to see small kindnesses, stubborn blessings, and renegade beauty. After the readings will be conversation harvested from questions and comments in Zoom chat.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Hush, Middle Creek Publishing (available for pre-order)

James Crews, Bluebird, Green Writer’s Press

Danusha Laméris, Bonfire Opera, University of Pittsburgh Press

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Register in advance for this webinar:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BfRfnWWkQqe417F_QPQPiw

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

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Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives in Placerville, Colorado, on the banks of the San Miguel River. She served as San Miguel County’s first poet laureate and as Western Slope Poet Laureate. She teaches poetry for addiction recovery programs, hospice, mindfulness retreats, scientists, women’s retreats, teachers and private students. She believes in the power of practice and has been writing a poem a day since 2006. She has 12 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine and on A Prairie Home Companion. Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon Prize, and Naked for Tea, was a finalist for the Able Music Book Award. She is the co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process, and co-founder of Secret Agents of Change, a group devoted to surreptitious acts of kindness. One-word mantra: Adjust

James Crews’ work has appeared in Ploughshares, Raleigh Review, Crab Orchard Review and The New Republic, as well as on Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in Writing & Literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The author of three collections of poetry, The Book of What Stays (Prairie Schooner Prize and Foreword Book of the Year Citation, 2011), Telling My Father (Cowles Prize, 2017), and Bluebird, Crews is also editor of Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection. He leads Mindfulness & Writing workshops and retreats throughout the country and works as a writing coach with groups and individuals. He lives with his husband, Brad Peacock, in Shaftsbury, Vermont.

Danusha Lamérisis the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her poems have been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The SUN Magazine, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Her second book is Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press), and she is the 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She teaches poetry independently, and is the current Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.