We do a monthly “mini workshop” online using zoom before the Lehigh valley Poetry Salon, on the first Monday of the month from 8:00 PM EST-8:30 PM EST. These are typically short prompts, reflections, techniques, and generative exercises. For more information and some background, please check out this page. Facilitator: E. Lynn Alexander. Please check out the Lehigh Valley Poetry Facebook pages, events, and Instagram. There is also a group on Facebook, Lehigh Valley Poets. IG #lehighvalleypoetry #lehighvalleypoetryvirtualsalon
Mini Workshop May 2021: Examining The Drive To Write: Poetic Eudaimonia
This is a different kind of poetry exercise, less focused on generating and producing, and more about the drive to produce poems in the first place. Connecting with the “why”, and this can do a few things:
*It can help us make time to read and write poetry, writing as enjoyable vs becoming a “chore”
*It can help us examine how we lose the joy- what are we responding to in ourselves when we write to produce? (Sense of what success looks like, wanting a poet identity, feeling like you need a book, comparisons to other poets and wanting to keep up, wanting to practice and improve, discipline, push through, ego, self imposed rules about progress, etc. )
*It can motivate us to continue, by revisiting what we like about writing, bringing us back to our creative bottom line.
Why is it important to have activities that bring us joy, and to nourish those things even when it is difficult?
Eudaimonia is a big concept to discuss in a thirty minute mini workshop. For the sake of simplicity, we will use common summaries: A life worth living, happiness, flourishing, highest human good.
We do more than eat, sleep, and stay warm. We write, or enjoy writing, or we probably wouldn’t be here.
It is rewarding on some level, and hopefully contributes to the “happiness” piece.
So the exercise this week is simple reflection, which is a good thing to do to stay grounded in the things that bring us joy.
- Three things that I like about writing or reading poetry
- Think about a poem that you ENJOYED writing. It might not be your “best”. It might even make you cringe. But you enjoyed the craft, doing it.
- What was enjoyable about it?
