Morning at La Dolce Via

The immense wealth you have to give away–

Your beauty
Your contemplation
Your healing–

You’ve already started

With
Me
Today

Reply to Yüan Chen

You write out my poems, filling monastery walls,
and I crowd these door-screens here with yours.

Old friend, we never know where it is we’ll meet–
we two duckweed leaves adrift on such vast seas.

Po Chü-i
trans. D. Hinton

Writing at the CWE BC

Our Writing to Wake Up class is meeting next Thursday 19 April  to hold our weekly session at the Saint Louis Bread Company at 4561 Forest Park Avenue in the Central West End. We go from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.   For any friends and former students who fondly remember Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones and who kept an old-fashioned notebook, feel free to join us for being, breathing, sharing, writing, and smiling.

Namaste forever,   Mark

 

Sunday Morning 8 April 2012

Sunday morning 8 April 2012
Chouteau Avenue
photo by Andrew Wimmer

Introduction to Poets: Adrienne Rich (Wednesday 18 April)

For our fifth Introduction to Poets discussion, Becca Gorley will share with us her appreciation of Adrienne Rich.

We will meet  on Wednesday 18 April at 7:30 p.m. at the home of Katy Didden– 3538 A Humphrey Street, St Louis, MO 63118, near Pho Grand just off South Grand.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

On Adrienne Rich, see this and this.

Let me know if you will be able to join us and bring a friend if you want!

Mark

 

 

Laura Aranda, good luck in the Boston Marathon! We will miss you.

Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun (Arab Writers in Translation Reading Circle)

Join us for our second Arab Writers in Translation discussion: On Wednesday 25 April we will discuss Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, and Other  Palestinian Stories. Ms. Sharifa Barakat will facilitate the discussion.

Kanafani was killed in a  car-bomb explosion in Beirut in 1972 (Israel’s Mossad claimed credit).   An obituary  in The Daily Star read: “Ghassan was the commando who never fired a gun. His weapon was a ballpoint pen and his arena newspaper pages.”

Literary critic  Barbara Harlow observes: “The urgency with which Ghassan Kanafani’s work continues to speak to the social terms and political issues of the Arab world certainly, but in the global context as well, raises once again [the] question: If Ghassan Kanafani were alive today, are there not still those who would find it necessary to assassinate him?”

Potluck dinner begins at 6:00 p.m., discussion begins at 6:45 at the Center for Survivors of Torture  and War Trauma (1077 South Newstead).