Dates/Times: Friday, January 10 (1:00 pm – 6:00 pm) – Saturday, January 11 (9:00 am – 5:00 pm EST)
Location: In Person
Instructor: Pádraig Ó Tuama
Registration Deadline: December 27, 2024

Register Now

In both prayer and poetry, the lyric address of you constitutes an intimate communication. From Paul Celan’s “Blessed are you, No One” to Lorna Goodison’s “This is a hymn / may it renew / what passes for your heart” the address of speech makes a line of desire between a speaker and a spoken-to. Doubt, rage, devotion, accusation, eros, lament and yearning can all be encapsulated in this simple word. Education too: James Baldwin’s untitled poem states “Lord / when you said the rain / think about it, please/ a little?” And Mahmoud Darwish employs the “you” as a way to bring complexity to the question of identity “You are you and not you at the same time.” Poetry and prayer share territory in this realm of address. This course will explore how “you” can be employed, with explorations of poems, prayers of the Christian and Jewish traditions, creative writing exercises and group discussion.

Pádraig Ó Tuama

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet from Ireland with interests in conflict, religion and language. He presents Poetry Unbound from On Being, and his current publications are Kitchen Hymns (Copper Canyon Press) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (WW Norton). He holds a Pontifical undergraduate, a masters in literary approaches to the gospels from Queen’s University Belfast, and a PhD in Critical Studies, focused on poetry and creative approaches to theology from the University of Glasgow.