“Life is a spell so exquisite,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “that everything conspires to break it.”

Life can so easily lose the magic that is its meaning; when illness strikes, when the mind reels, when we lose love, when work engulfs us, when we forget the world and the beauty of our place within it. And yet, poetry recasts life’s spell. Poetry—an ancient discourse, a wild music—is uniquely gifted, a kind of undogmatic prayer, at catching the lyric of lived experience again, and of the places we inhabit.

In this pandemic we find ourselves forced deeper into an isolation that was already the signature experience of modern times. Poetry, an enactment of tough love, is one of the best ways to close the distances down that yawn between us—between ourselves and each other and our inner lives and the rest of creation. Poetry, then, is most needed now, when we are forced farther apart, deeper into exile from what is real. Poetry makes a hearth in which what is most human in us can join in fellowship again with all that is most human—vulnerable, glorious, broken, true—in all the rest of us. Making it, reading it, we make again a fellowship of all souls.

This presentation, replete with poems, reflections and discussion, invites you to share your favourite lines and join the conversation about how to recharge your own life and the lives of those you love with what it is that poetry teaches.

Come join poet Mark Tredinnick as he invites you, in these distant times, back into intimacy with self and the world.

No prior poetry experience or skill necessary.