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Poetry and the Awakened Life

A Poetry Workshop

In this workshop, poet Jomil Ebro offers accessible tools for writing poems that reimagine the ordinary and invite both writer and reader into deeper awareness.

To some extent, all poetry, however lashing, grief-stricken, painful, or “negative” its particular content, is ultimately celebratory. The manifestation that is the poem—the artifact that represents the response to and shaping of the private jabberer, the inner critic, the incessant fretter, and irrepressible dreamer in all of us—is an awakened experience: the world is inexplicably and vividly rearranged before us, and we are not the same person who was there before we wrote the poem. Do we not seek this feeling when encountering all art?

In this workshop, we will learn some everyday yet sustainable ways to compose poetry that awakens both us and our readers into the ordinary miracles of our lives. We will address topics that are often challenging and rarely explored, but essential in not just writing poetry that awakens, but in living through and as that poetry. These topics include defamiliarization, the unconscious as gold mine, the metaphysics of the small, and the poetics of desire. As Bertolt Brecht has written, “In these dark times, will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times.”

Speaker Bio: Jomil lives in Golden with his wife, Nancy Stohlman, and his 12-year-old son. Trained at the Writer’s Workshop, University of Iowa, Jomil is a poet, scholar, and associate professor at Arapahoe Community College. Jomil thinks that poetry, as the creative remembrance and presencing of consciousness, can save the world.

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