“Poetry of the Cosmic All” with Mónica Gomery

“Poetry of the Cosmic All” with Mónica Gomery

Daniela Naomi Molnar calls it “a generosity too large for us to know.” Tracy K Smith refers to “the universe [as] a house party.” And Joy Ladin dubs it an “infinity thick/ as star-sparked honey.”

In this workshop, we’ll explore poems as a portal to enormity, interconnectedness, wonder and clutter. Poems wide as the universe, populated with galaxies and star systems, great bodies of water, mycelial networks, biodiversity, mystery and contradiction. How do poets harness the epic, the scientific, the micro and the macro, and draw it all together into something bigger than the sum of its parts? How do poems help us connect the self to the infinite? In a fractured world, this writing can be political, spiritual, a source of comfort or of agitation. How might these poems inch us toward an expansive understanding of divinity or transcendence?

We’ll read work by Aracelis Girmay, Etel Adnan, Juliana Spahr, Mahmoud Darwish, Joy Harjo, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ocean Vuong, Wislawa Szymborska, and others. We’ll read Jewish poets Rosebud ben Oni, Aurora Levins-Morales, Hila Ratzabi, Gloria Gervitz, Victoria Redel, and Jared Harél. We’ll consider liturgical poetry from psalms and the siddur, and an S. Ansky folk tale.

We’ll marvel at these ambitious poems, wrestle with the known and unknowable, and discover together how we want to approach this “Cosmic All” in our own writing lives.

Spiritual experience often feels private, isolating, uncommunicable. Spiritual autobiographies, from anecdotes to full-blown memoirs, use storytelling techniques to break down this sense of isolation, offering others glimpses of our own struggles and exaltations, and, more importantly, because readers interpret narratives by identifying with characters and projecting our own lives onto events in stories, turning our private experiences into stories through which others can recognize, reflect on, and be inspired in their own spiritual journeys. In this generative writing workshop we will look at examples of spiritual anecdote and autobiography, discuss the communicability and incommunicability of spiritual experience, and practice using midrash, haiku, and self-inventory to develop our own spiritual narratives.

Workshop Cost

• 3 recorded classes, followed by recorded Q&As
• handouts with representative texts and prompts to guide your writing

$72—standard registration

$59—discounted registration for Yetzirah Members (you can become a member here)

*As we want our offerings to be accessible to all, there is a pay-what-you-can option if this pricing is a hardship.

About Mónica

Mónica Gomery is a writer and rabbi. Her second poetry collection, Might Kindred, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2022. She is also the author of the poetry collection Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her poems have been awarded the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize and the Sappho Prize for Women Poets, and have been featured on Ours Poetica and The Slowdown podcast. Recent poems appear in The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Massachusetts Review, and West Branch, among other journals. Mónica was ordained by Hebrew College in 2017 and serves as Rabbi and Music Director at Kol Tzedek Synagogue in Philadelphia. Visit Mónica’s profile in our Discover Jewish Poets database.