Gleaners

: to gather or collect (something) in a gradual way. : to search (something) carefully. : to gather grain or other material that is left after the main crop has been gathered.

The world is too much with us these days, to paraphrase the poet Wordsworth, and we dare not look away. Flight nor fight seem possible.

And yet when I look to poetry being written now I read poets digging into history and ordinary life, searching as if they know there is meaning right before us. I’m reminded of a group on Facebook taking this poetic tack by simply posting images from windows, connecting people across the globe during the pandemic. Power lives in the ordinary and the looking.

In these poetry experiments we will follow this path and work like gleaners to gather and collect the grain of ordinary experience so often left after the media and cultural telling of what is happening to us. As a poetics, this attention to the ordinary—the gathering and collecting and searching carefully through our lives— links, sparks, bridges and inspires quantum leaps.

We will read examples of the poetics we are practicing and the experiments will be with formal structures that help us gather and collect and search. This is a poetics of contiguity, or sequential relationships. We’ll put things next to each other and then we’ll see what happens! All gleaners welcome, beginners and advanced.

Week one: a list

Week two: a walk

Week three: a bridge

Week four: a bowl

Week five: a table

Week six: a nest