Love and Other Poems: A One-Day Workshop with Nathalie Handal

In this workshop, we will explore love, and its lyrical parts—lustful and passionate, sexual and erotic, romantic and religious, spiritual and sinful—through writing exercises inspired by love poems written by poets from different periods and places. Readings will include excerpts from Egyptian, Greek and Roman erotic poems; Sufi, Chinese and Japanese elegies; poetry by Sappho, Catullus, Ono no Komachi, Nizar Qabbani, Pablo Neruda, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Emily Dickinson, and others. For centuries we’ve gone to love poems because we need them. This workshop, then, will explore age-old questions that continue to grip us: What is love? How much can we love and endure love? What does it ask of us? What is the role of poetry? What can it do? Is a love poem the closest voice to the heart, and can it resist violence? How do love poems that traverse the body, spirit, nature, and home inform us about our world and self, our heart and poetry? We will have the opportunity to write new poems, workshop our poem drafts, and journey to the heart of our poems—engaging in the ultimate act of resistance.

Nathalie Handal is the author of several books of poetry, including The Republics (2015), which received a 2016 Arab American Book Award; Poet in Andalucía (2012); and Love and Strange Horses (2010), which received a Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is the editor of The Poetry of Arab Women (2001) and, with Tina Chang, the coeditor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (2008). Also a playwright, Nathalie Handal is the author of plays produced at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Westminter Abbey, and elsewhere. She lectures internationally and currently teaches at Columbia University and in the low-residency MFA at Sierra Nevada College.

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