Poetry on the Farm with Arro Mandell: Attention, Relationship, and Association
On September 14th, there will be a poetry workshop on Common Ground Farm. It will be a chance to spend mindful time on the farm, read poetry by farmers and gardeners, drink tea with other writers in the area, and generate new poems. Everyone will leave the workshop with a mini-book made in collaboration with another workshop member. No poetry experience is required. Register at: https://www.
About the Workshop:
A poem, like a farm, is a means of creating and maintaining relations with the world around us. Through a poem, we interchange with our environment, taking in the surprises our attention brings, receiving and retrieving the associations it takes us towards, and then returning to the object of our attention itself. In this generative workshop on the farm, we will practice paying deep attention to our surroundings and learn about where that looking can lead us. Through a series of exercises, we will approach the poem as gatherers, collecting together what our attention brings us. We will leap across time, through memories in order to fashion together a ‘happening,’ something that diverts, subverts, or completely thwarts our intentions, something that becomes ‘more’ than what we put into it (just as plants on the farm have done!). We will read poetry written by gardeners and farmers that weaves between attention to the present and to memories and consider how the poems are made. We will collaborate together to create new poems that map the crossings between our selves, our pasts, each other, and the farm. We will drink tea, work on the farm, read poems, write, and share them. Every participant will leave with a mini book consisting of one poem they’ve written and one poem written in collaboration with someone else.
Arro Mandell (they/he) currently works at Common Ground on the farm crew. They recently graduated with their MFA from the Helen Zell Writer’s Program at the University of Michigan where they taught creative writing courses for undergraduates. While there, they were one of the winners of the Theodore Roethke Hopwood Poetry Prize. They previously graduated from Sarah Lawrence where they won The Stanley and Evelyn Lipkin Prize for Poetry. Their work is published in the Southeast Review, the Georgia Review, and the Massachusetts Review.
