WRITING THE CATASTROPHE: SINGING IN DARK TIMES — A Workshop with Donna Hilbert

WRITING THE CATASTROPHE: SINGING IN DARK TIMES

“Redemption depends on the tiny fissure in continuous catastrophe.” – Walter Benjamin

“I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.” – William Stafford

“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.” – Bertolt Brecht

About his own work, Stanley Kunitz has said: “The poem comes in the form of a blessing— ‘like rapture breaking on the mind,’ as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years, I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.”

“As more and more of contemporary life is forced into the present moment, there seem to be fewer mechanisms which allow the past to be fully absorbed and lived once it has
happened. It has become harder to experience grief since it is a retroactive emotion which requires subsequent returns to the loss over a period of time. Only through such returns
may one hope for the very real gain of transforming losses of various kinds into meaningful contributions to our own becoming . . . . Here I am speaking not only of the loss one experiences in the death of a loved one, but also of those diminishments of being which become known gradually, as when child or parent or lover discovers piecemeal the signs of neglect and lost trust.
Poems have long been a place where one count on being able to feel, in a bodily sense, our connection to loss. I say bodily to emphasize the way poems act not only upon the mind and spirit, but also upon the emotions which release the bodily signs of feeling—so that we weep, laugh, are brought to anger, feel loneliness, or the comfort of companionship . . . .”
– Tess Gallagher from “The Poem as a Reservoir for Grief” The American Poetry Review

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About The Workshop Instructor

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella from Moon Tide Press, following Threnody, Moon Tide, 2022. A second edition of Gravity: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Moon Tide in early 2025.Work has appeared in numerous journals and broadcasts including Cultural Daily, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, Lyric Life, and anthologies including The Poetry of Presence volumes I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing. www.donnahilbert.com

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Tickets & Registration

WRITING THE CATASTROPHE: SINGING IN DARK TIMES
Instructor: Donna Hilbert
Date: Thursday, March 20, 2025
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern (3:00-5:00pm Pacific) via Zoom
Price: $25 (payment options – Stripe / PayPal / Venmo / CashApp)

To register for this workshop, please email Mark Danowsky (ONE ART’s Editor-in-Chief) —  oneartpoetry@gmail.com