Whidbey Island Writers Association - Classes, Workshops & Writers Groups

Classes		Instructor Biographies
Workshops	Writers Groups	Form a New Writers Group

WIWA Sponsored Workshops

Shimmering sunset Take advantage of these WIWA sponsored workshops to improve your writing craft, find new inspiration and meet other local writers. For more information, contact wiwa@whidbey.com or call (360) 331-6714. To register, send your name, address, phone number, e-mail, and check for tuition to:

WIWA

PO Box 1289

Langley, WA 98260

"This Bunch of Flowers and Horseshoes ..." What Neruda's Odes can teach poets.

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s three books of odes are an extravagant catalog of praise to the simplest things of this world. The atom, a tuna, laziness, love—the everyday elements and essences of human experience glow in the translucent language of these poems. Nothing is “beneath” the poet’s perception: the odes praise ordinary objects as well as the struggle of those who are marginalized.What can we, as poets, learn from Neruda’s Odes, which he offered up as “this bunch of flowers and horseshoes”? What can these songs of joy and abandon, of pain and compassion for sufferers, teach us, fifty years after they were first published?

the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.

Ode to the tomato (fragment)

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

Ode to the lemon (fragment)

This salt
in the saltcellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won't
believe me,
but
it sings,
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.

Ode to salt (fragment)

This seven-hour class will explore the range of Neruda’s topics in the three books of the Odas Elementales, talk about the vision of the world that stands behind them, and discuss the ways in which we can “unleash ourselves” upon the simplest objects and artifacts that surround us, and start writing our own poems of praise.

Location:	Mukilteo Garage, 807 - 2nd St., Mukilteo
Time:	.9 a.m. - 5 p.m. with a one-hour lunch break
Date:	Saturday, August 2
Instructor:	Lorraine Healy, MFA
Cost:	$80 WIWA member or teacher, $100 nonmember

photo by Bob Richardson