Attention in Its Highest Form Is the Same Thing as Prayer: Poetry as Receptivity and Effortless Effort with Farnoosh Fathi

What is attention? How do we create it? What does the language of your highest attention look like? What kinds of attention support, or obstruct, your process? In this one-day intensive, our class will function as an extended meditation; our work will be to create, combine and consider our attention, with the goal of seeing how this effort, rather than forced determination toward a particular outcome, can be the real work of writing. We will incorporate a variety of meditative practices that deepen our poems, drawing on Hui Neng’s Platform Sutra, Flannery O’ Connor’s A Prayer Journal and teachings by Corita Kent. Readings will form a base for our own meditation, beginning with selections from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva, and Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace. We’ll also read gathas, canticles and poems by Anchorites, Zoroastrians and the anonymous.

This class is now full

Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Great Guns (2013). She’s the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Poetry Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the MacDowell Colony, and her poems, translations, and prose have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, Everyday Genius, Poetry, Jacket2, and elsewhere.