Workshops
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One-Hundred Prayers
An Online Generative & Discursive Poetry Workshop:
Session One: Sundays Jan 3-31, 2027: 10am-12 est on zoom FILLED
Session Two: Tuesdays Jan 5-Feb 2, 2027:7-9pm est on zoom FILLED
In this workshop we’ll each write one-hundred prayers over five weeks.
Toward this, we’ll read varied examples of poetry of prayer & discuss them. We’ll each share things or texts that function as prayers for us, exploring how our writing can grow from these examples. The poets we’ll discuss will include Paul Celan, Lucille Cilfton, Larry Levis, Brandon Som, Olga Orozco, Anne Carson, Fred Moten, Dara Barrois/Dixon, Chukwuma Ndulue, Adam Clay, & Wong May.
We’ll share our newly written prayers with each other, all of em, the ones we’re proud of & the ones we’re not. Not for critical workshoppery, but with the goal of understanding more about how prayers work, & with the goal of producing more prayers. Which is to say, this is a discussion- & generation-based workshop, not a critical-feedback jam.
An alternate title for this workshop could be “Let’s Write a First Draft of a Manuscript in Four Weeks.” But think of how tiresome that would be?
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The workshops will take place Sundays at 10am to noon EST. The workshop will cap at eight participants. If there’s enough interest I might offer a second session. If you’d like to join, email me to reserve your spot.
If it matters, I’m not a religious person, but am a deep believer in prayer.
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To sign up for workshops email me at mathias.svalina@gmail
Sliding scale of 0-300.
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Some Core Questions for this Workshop:
What distinguishes a poem from a prayer? What can each do that the other can’t?
Who is being addressed in prayer? And how?
What must the speaker of your prayer believe? What must the prayer believe?
How do the goals of prayer relate to the goals of your poetry
In what ways are prayers private or public?
How is attention itself a form of prayer?
What is the limit to prayer? What lies on the other side?
If prayer is practice rather than genre, how does your poetic practice mirror it?
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Let’s Read All of Deborah Digges’s Books Together
A Five-Week Reading & Discussion Workshop: Mondays, 1/4-2/1, 7-9pm est, on Zoom
Deborah Digges’s poetry is intense & vulnerable. It has a tender alertness to the mysteries of the ordinary world, the particulars of daily life that open into questions of mortality, faith, suffering, & the dubious possibilities of transcendence. Her poems are propelled by startling imagery that pulls them beyond themselves into ecstatic lyric intensity. It’s poetry of faith & crisis, violence & protection. Amazing work
I came to Digges’s work late, in 2020, introduced to her writing by my friend Adam just after the COVID lockdowns began. She quickly became one of my favorite poets. I found myself wanting to talk about the poems, to read them aloud with friends, many of whom, like me, were encountering her work for the first time. Since then, I’ve kept meeting others who’ve been long-devoted to her work, intense sparks of love for this intense & searching poet. In this workshop I hope to bring together those already familiar with Digges’s work & those just discovering it. We’ll spend time with each of her four books & one posthumous book, talk deeply about the work of the poems, & share space together with this remarkable writer.
Week One 1/4: Vesper Sparrows, 1986
Week Two 1/11: Late in the Millenium, 1989
Week Three 1/18: Rough Music. 1997
Week Four 1/25: Trapeze, 2004
Week Five 2/1: The Wind Blows through the Doors of my Heart, 2010
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To sign up email me at mathias.svalina at gmail
Sliding scale: 0-200
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Let’s Read All of James Tate’s Poetry Books Together
A Sixteen-Week Reading & Discussion Workshop: Sundays Jan through April, 2027, 7-9pm est, on Zoom
When I was sixteen I read James Tate’s poem “Distance from Loved Ones.” The first poem of his I’d read. It confounded me & drew me in with its joining of psychological complexity & fable-like simplicity, how it avoids closure, avoids signaling if you’re supposed to laugh or cry or have some other, hitherto unknown reaction. Tate’s poem mesmerized me. It still does.
Distance from Loved Ones
After her husband died, Zita decided to get the face-lift she had always wanted. Half-way through the operation her blood pressure started to drop, and they had to stop. When Zita tried to fasten her seat-belt for her sad drive home, she threw-out her shoulder. Back at the hospital the doctor examined her and found cancer run rampant throughout her shoulder and arm and elsewhere. Radiation followed. And, now, Zita just sits there in her beauty parlor, bald, crying and crying.
My mother tells me all this on the phone, and I say: Mother, who is Zita?
And my mother says, I am Zita. All my life I have been Zita, bald and crying. And you, my son, who should have known me best, thought I was nothing but your mother.
But, Mother, I say, I am dying. . .
It’s a perfect poem, in my humble opinion, in the sense that no one but James Tate could have written it. Over his career, Tate fused the lyric with the surreal & comic & psychological, ignoring received or perceived divisions between serious & whimsical, real & imaginary, lyric & narrative. But perhaps most striking is how his poems make these dodges & weaves & swings & swerves seem so easy, how effortless & even inevitable his profundities & discoveries. He was, in my humble opinion, a maestro.
In this workshop we’ll read & discuss all sixteen of Tate’s full-length poetry collections. We’ll track on-going themes & development of styles, along with the shifts & movements. We’ll celebrate his already-celebrated poems & spend time with the overlooked deep cuts. We’ll inhabit his work for these months together & the engage in the joys of reading poetry deeply & unabashedly with others. We’ll each arrive at our own subjective lessons that Tate teaches about craft, vision, & humanity.
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This is a long workshop, covering six decades of a life’s work. Don’t feel like you must commit to each week. And if you only want to drop in on occasion, that’s also cool.
To sign up email me at mathias.svalina at gmail
Sliding scale: 0-300 for all sixteen weeks
or 0-30 for drop-ins
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Week One 1/3: Lost Pilot, 1967
Week Two 1/10: The Oblivion Ha-Ha, 1970
1/17: —No Workshop—
Week Three 1/24: Hints to Pilgrims, 1971
Week Four 1/31: Absences, 1972
Week Five 2/7: Viper Jazz, 1976
Week Six 2/14: Riven Doggeries, 1979
Week Seven 2/21: Constant Defender, 1983
Week Eight 2/28: Reckoner, 1986
Week Nine 3/7: Distance from Loved Ones, 1990
Week Ten 3/14: Worshipful Company of Fletchers, 1994
Week Eleven 3/21: Shroud of the Gnome, 1997
Week Twelve 3/28: Memoir of the Hawk, 2002
Week Thirteen 4/4: Return to the City of White Donkeys, 2004
Week Fourteen 4/11: The Ghost Soldiers, 2008
Week Fifteen 4/18: Dome of the Hidden Pavilion, 2015
Week Sixteen 4/25: The Government Lake, 2019
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