[This is a Virtual Ruby* event, taking place over Zoom. Join us: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82938403994?pwd=RVgySVhUY0RMandzUXBFUFpwN3VSUT09. Nonmembers are welcome to join; please donate if you are able!]

What might poetry provide for us in times of immense uncertainty and brokenness? How might certain poetic/aesthetic concepts help us not only to tolerate but to integrate the state of unknowing, precarity, and vulnerability into our daily lives? This gathering is for anyone—poets and non-poets—who would like to explore how poetry can also be a way of entering the day and navigating our world. We will introduce and discuss concepts like negative capability, bewilderment, wabi sabi, and kintsugi; we will read poems together; and we will participate in a guided poetic ritual.

About Jennifer S. Cheng

Jennifer S. Cheng is the author of MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS, selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018”; HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize; and INVOCATION: AN ESSAY, an image-text chapbook. She received awards and fellowships from Brown University, the University of Iowa, the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, and the Academy of American Poets. She is currently teaching a hybrid craft course, rooted in bewilderment, at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. www.jenniferscheng.com