Beauty and Crisis: Exploring Feelings and Poetic Form

Live from California, United States

We're delighted to have VAWAA guest artist, the acclaimed writer Prageeta Sharma, joining us to help us explore beauty and crisis through writing and poetic form on Saturday 28th August at 1PM EDT.

“As Alexander Baumgarten put it in his Meditationes of 1735 (the text that introduced the term aesthetics into the modern lexicon), aesthetic experience is a blend of sensation and knowledge such that we may almost feel thought itself (“ scientiam sensitive quod cognoscendi”). 4 Understanding”  

— Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (The MIT Press) by G. Gabrielle Starr 

How can we bring aesthetic experience, a blend of sensation and knowledge, to difficult subjects? Ones that have unknowable qualities that leave us struggling to express key emotions. In this session, we will experiment with our ideas, connecting them to writing about crisis and grief. Ideally, we will land on the idea that our poems and writings can help us develop and inhabit ways to “feel our thoughts” as vividly as we can. This session will be a place where you can feel safe to write, share, and examine the poetic form as it relates to your respective struggles, concerns, and what we may all invariably face in our daily lives.

At the end of this session, we will have the foundation for a poem you can continue to work on and relish in the experience of the words and sentiments you find there. 

All levels are welcome and there is no prior experience required. There will be plenty of time to share, get feedback and meet other participants from around the world.

If you are not in EDT time zone, be sure to convert the time.

How to join

We'll be hosting this VAWAA Online on Zoom. We'll send the link and details to join via email 1 day and again 1 hour before it begins.

About Prageeta

Prageeta Sharma's recent poetry collection is Grief Sequence out from Wave Books. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence, an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award and a finalist for the 2020 Four Quartets Prize, she taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College.

Photo by Richard Jaimes on Unsplash

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