June 6th & 7th at 12pm to 3 pm (Eastern)

“No such thing / as innocent / bystanding” – so writes Seamus Heaney in his poem, “Mycenae Lookout.” Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past,” as the Nobel Committee noted, is a poet of profound introspection and moral awareness, framing religious, political, and social bodies within the tactile, brick-and-mortar solidity of words and observation. His poems turn inward, weighing past and present, balancing sensory richness with ethical scrutiny, inviting readers to consider and question our own place in a moral landscape.

In this weekend intensive, we will use Heaney’s poetry as a launching point for our own creative work, drawing from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, through to Clearances, his meditative sequence exploring love and loss, and their location in the spectrum of everyday life. Participants will carve out a model to write with—and against—drafting their own morally conscious poems that cultivate a strong sense of place, including the body as both a literal and metaphorical site where the self, memory, and the wider social or political world intersect.