Why would someone, in their final days, spend their time writing poetry? What can poetry do for a person writing in the hospital, between MRIs and surgeries, experiencing great amounts of pain, taking medications, and while suffering from diagnosed and undiagnosed illnesses? Join poet and Berl’s co-founder Farrah Field as we respectfully gather in class to read works by poets writing through and into illness and pain. We will look at poetry as catharsis, as a way to generate understanding, a way to ponder the unponderable. As we rethink of the way time unfolds, we will look at poetry is an art form, fueled by study, dedication, and love.

How do poets address physical and bodily pain in their poetry? Do they write through it, past it, in spite of it, to understand it, to embody it, to overcome it? Does the pain of the body write into a poet’s form and structure? How do we as readers read their illnesses into their work? Why is it, despite all odds, poets find a way to write poetry?

Throughout our study we will workshop our own poems and respond to each other’s work. Illness and pain can be a repressed reality of everyone’s truth and we will explore how spaces and communities include the voices of those living with and expressing illness, how it makes us confront avoided feelings, visibility and invisibility, and connectivity or isolation. We will reflect on the gift of five poets’ work, the body of their craft, and poetry as a life record and an act of tending to the body.