Workshops

CAM-14 ~ "Poetry and the Truth of Imagination: A Workshop" with Malcolm Guite

For lovers and makers of poetry at all levels, these sessions will be illustrated with some “classic” poems, poems of Guite’s and those that participants bring as well as those they begin to compose.   This series of three sessions will consist of the following:

• Form and Freedom.  Exploring the rich diversity of forms available to the poet – how far do they restrict, how far do they enhance expression? A discussion of this artistic issue in light of the parallel issue of discipline and freedom in Christian living, looking specifically at the sonnet, the villanelle and terza rima as poetic forms.
• The “I” of the beholder.  A session exploring the poet’s freedom to be self or another in his/her verse, to make the first person voice entirely personal or use it to explore other perspectives, with reflections on the use of poetic personae by Eliot, Browning, Seamus Heaney and others, and some work on how one might open up the “I”s of one’s poetry.
• “Shapes and sounds of that eternal language” – Reading God’s poem before we write our own.  This session looks at Coleridge’s insight that the world is itself a poem composed by the Logos whose images we must learn to read in light of His love before we can turn them into images for poetry of our own. We will explore the way in which human imagination can be baptized and participate in the divine creative process of which our own creation is a part.

Malcolm Guite is the Chaplain and Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, and teacher of Literature and Pastoral Theology for the Cambridge Federation of Theological Colleges. Trained for the Priesthood at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, he was ordained in 1990. His doctoral thesis focused on the links between the theology of Lancelot Andrewes and the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Guite is involved with a number of projects linking theology and the arts, and has published poetry, literary criticism and theology in various journals. His book, What do Christians Believe?, was published by Granta in 2006. As founder of the rock band, Mystery Train, Guite writes lyrics and performs on guitar and vocals.

 

 

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