To read an introduction to a prior poetry retreat, click here
(For any inquiries about Patrick Lane’s Honeymoon Bay Poetry Retreats please contact lizlmcnally@gmail.com.)
Upcoming Recovering Words Poetry Retreats led by
Richard Osler
But Still We Sing
Sept. 5th to 8th, 2013
Seton House Retreat Centre, Kelowna, B.C., Canada
All-In Cost – Single – $525.00
(maximum 14 retreatants)
What Eye Is Wide Enough
Nov. 28th to Dec. 1st, 2013
Honeymoon Bay Lodge, Honeymoon Bay, Vancouver Island, B.C.
All-In Cost – Single $550.00; Double $450.00
(maximum 12 retreatants)
For further information on Richard’s Upcoming
Recovering Words retreats see below:
The safe space Richard Osler creates in his Recovering Words Poetry Retreats revitalizes and expands the creative spirit. People write beautiful poems and share them with each other. They vow to stay in touch, to continue writing. They leave reluctantly.” Heidi Garnett, April 2012
Heidi, who lives in Kelowna, is a nationally-recognized Canadian poet through her numerous honours in recent poetry contests including: Winner: Winston Collins Prize (Descant – The Journal) for Best Canadian Poem of the Year 2012; Second : Freefall 2012 Poetry Contest; Third: Rattle Poetry Contest 2010 (6000 entries); Shortlisted : Arvon Prize in theU.K. (6000 entries) Adjudicated by Carol Ann Duffy; Runner-up. She has also taught creative writing at The University of British Columbia – Okanagan.
“Richard Osler makes poetry an integral part of his life. He is exceptionally well-read and brings to a retreat a vast reservoir of poetic knowledge regarding modern and classical poets, their poetry and their craft. These hip-pocket skills from years of practice and reading will make your experience working with him inspirational and productive. From the very first afternoon at a Richard Osler retreat, you will be brought together as a community of poets who through his guidance and your own writing practice will find pathways to possibilities that are rich and valuable.” David Fraser, 2012
David is a much-published Canadian poet and founder and editor of Ascent Aspirations Magazine, since 1997. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in 65 print journals, ezines and anthologies. He founded the Wordstorm poetry series in Nanaimo in 2006.
Richard Osler – Recovering Words Poetry Retreats
Seton House Retreat Centre, Kelowna, B.C.
Sept. 5th to Sept. 8th, 2013
But Still We Sing
Retreat Introduction and Details
from Beyond Pleasure
………………………………………………..Poetry registers
feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches
out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.
Not the passion so much as what the fervour can be
an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world
part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux
to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.
The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward
to know its merit with attention.
Jack Gilbert in Refusing Heaven, Alfred A. Knoff, New York 2005
In the wonderful setting of the hills overlooking Lake Okanagan, in B.C. come and be “fished by poetry”. Come and be astonished for four days in a supportive community of poets as the words of master poets inspire you to write in ways you might not think possible. Whether or not you are starting out, beginning again or an established poet with lots of published poems these four days will inspire you to explore new poetic territories in your writing. Come and bust out! Open yourself to go past old writing boundaries and expectations. Learn to go past the eye as Patrick Lane, one of Canada’s true master poets, says below:
BOXWOOD
The child splitting kindling in the cold shed at dawn
is learning how to trust the eye, not the hand,
and not the hatchet, for these last go where the eye wills.
Still, the child will cut himself more than once
until he learns to go past the eye, the kindling falling
like music, sprung notes clear in the morning.
Patrick Lane, Boxwood, unpublished
To go past the eyes To trust that inner eye to guide your own words, to let them be the axe that finds the places within you where you open along your truest grain, and sing your own sprung notes. That is the possibility that is fostered with such care at a Recovering Words four day retreat. And for this inaugural Kelowna retreat the theme But Still We Sing is inspired by another Patrick Lane poem, The Beauty. Here is an excerpt:
This too, the beauty
of the antellope in snow.
Is it enough to say we will
imagine this and nothing more?
Who understands that, failing,
falters at the song.
But still we sing.
That is beauty.
The mystery. We witness a transcendent moment of beauty and we can’t stop and become it. It will pass. Because it is not enough to say we will imagine this and nothing more. As Lane said to me recently: Beauty like all abstractions is an unnamable quality but still we sense it. There is an incapacity of words to contain a moment but still we write. Still we go on. Yes.
The former U.S. Poet Laureate, Phillip Levine echoes Lane when he says: The poem is about what cannot be said. Ah, and in that place of trying we make our poems! And I invite you to experience this “singing” for four days in the hills above Kelowna.
Retreat Details
The retreat is designed for you to write new poems! During the retreat there will be at least four writing sessions that will offer six opportunities to create poems that will explore certain themes and aspects of poetic craft. Before the retreat each retreatant will receive a comprehensive introduction and each retreatant will receive handouts to support each writing “adventure” during the retreat. Between sessions there will be ample time for quiet, reflection and lots of writing.
Structure
Check in on Thursday, Sept. 5th by 2 PM and start at 3 PM with a one and a half hour introduction including an in-class writing writing adventure followed by a short craft talk on Thursday evening. Three hour morning sessions will follow on Friday and Saturday and a shorter session will wrap-up the retreat by 11 AM Sunday morning. On Friday and Saturday evening there will be time to share favorite poems and some of your own writing. At least three poems are written and shared during the writing sessions and retreatants also write three poems outside of session time.
Retreat facilitator
Richard Osler, 61. Poet, workshop facilitator and specialty money manager. Richard is an experienced writing facilitator who has conducted numerous four-day writing retreats during the past 7 years. See endorsements below. He has studied with many master poets including Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, Tony Hoagland, Gregory Orr, Terrance Hayes, Carl Phillips and B.H. “Pete” Fairchild. His poems have been published in literary journals in the U.S. and Canada including The Malahat Review, Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, CV2 (feature) and Ruminate.
In addition, Richard conducts 40 to 50 poetry workshops per year ( two to three hours per workshop) at addiction recovery centres in B.C.
Retreat Centre
Seton House Retreat Center is located at 5819 Chute Lake Road, Kelowna, B.C. For further information see www.spbc.org/seton_house. Each room has a private bathroom and two twin beds.
Cost
$525 per person single occupancy. This all-in cost for room, board and tuition includes eight meals. A deposit of $100.00 is required to secure a place. With the deposit should be a cheque post dated July 15th, 2013. The deposit is non-refundable unless the retreat is cancelled. The post-dated cheque will be refundable only if the cancelled space is filled by another retreatant. There will be spaces available for fifteen participants including the facilitator. Cheques should be made payable to Richard Osler and sent to1584 Stamps Rd.,Duncan, B.C. V9L 5W2.
Who should come?
Anyone who wants to sharpen their writing skills and explore the mysterious ways their own words can reveal unexplored areas of their lives. Come and be “fished” by poetry as Jack Gilbert says. Discover what Kay Ryan, former poet laureate of the US, means when she says, “What keeps me writing is that I can only know through writing my major sense organ is apparently a pencil.” from The Writer’s Almanac, September 27, 2007.
Who to Contact:
Email or phone Richard Osler
(250) 597-7875
richard@recoveringwords.com
Recovering Words
Honeymoon Bay Poetry Retreat
with Richard Osler
Nov. 28th to Dec. 1st, 2013
What Eye Is Wide Enough
Retreat Introduction and Details
The best poets don’t simply look, they see. The British spiritual writer and contemplative Esther de Waal calls this intense seeing of the poet a “seeing beyond . It is a seeing with the eyes of the heart; it is seeing with the inner eye which recognizes inward beauty; it is seeing with ‘rinsed eyes’ – eyes washed clear by contemplation…”.
De Waal reminds us of what the great Christian mystic and writer Thomas Merton said often in many ways. “Open your eyes and see.” She adds: “ Time and time again the writer, the artist, the poet will remind us that we are living in a transparent world, and that all we have to do is to open our eyes and see and to see – as they see. Sometimes they jolt us with a shock of surprise which forces us to look anew at something which we had failed to see … .”
May Sarton, the 20th century American poetry expresses this thought aptly in one of her journals:
If one looks long enough at almost anything,
looks with absolute attention at a flower,
a stone,
the bark of a tree,
grass, snow, a cloud,
something like revelation takes place.
Something is ‘given’,
and perhaps that something
is always a reality outside the self.
May Sarton from Journal of Solitude, Norton, 1973
What we fail to see. Not just a thing itself but something beyond. Often I find myself not seeing either. It’s how poetry, its need for silence, for attention, saves me. Not only, as Jane Hirshfield says, do the objects of my life draw near when I pay attention but I draw near when I turn my deepest seeing into poetry. But as American poet Gregory Orr asks Oh the world, the world,/What eye is wide enough?
Here’s the full poem:
Whitman’s list of the things he could see
As he sat, half paralyzed,
An old man by a woodland pond.
The names of the different trees trees.
The birds he glimpsed or only heard
Yet recognized their songs.
The bushes and grasses that grew there.
How happy those lists made him:
Tamarack, birch, maple, larch…
Gazing from where he loafed
On the bank, or from the pond itself
where he floated naked
in the round pool of it:
As if he were the pupil
in a wide-open eye,
And the trees around it
Delicate and strong as lashes.
Oh, the world, the world,
What eye is wide enough?
What pupil sufficiently diligent.
Gregory Orr from CONCERNING THE BOOK THAT IS THE BODY OF THE BELOVED, Copper Canyon Press, 2005
What a question. And it’s the question that is the title and focus of this retreat. The retreat will use poems by master poets as triggers to inspire your own wide-eyed seeing. The poets I chose try and see double wide! But can we ever see wide enough? Thank god, no. And that’s why we keep writing, hoping our eyes and poetry will find an ultimate wideness. And in that failure find success!
I hope you can join me on November 28th, 2013 for some wide-eyed seeing and writing!
Retreat Structure
Check in on Thursday, Nov. 28th by 2 PM and start at 3 PM with a one and a half hour introduction including an in-class writing writing adventure followed by a short craft talk on Thursday evening. Three hour morning sessions will follow on Friday and Saturday and a shorter session will wrap-up the retreat by 11 AM Sunday morning. On Friday and Saturday evening there will be time to share favorite poems and some of your own writing. At least three poems are written and shared during the writing sessions and retreatants also write three poems outside of session time.
Retreat facilitator
Richard Osler, 61. Poet, workshop facilitator and specialty money manager. Richard is an experienced writing facilitator who has conducted numerous four-day writing retreats during the past 7 years. See endorsements below. He has studied with many master poets including Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, Tony Hoagland, Gregory Orr, Terrance Hayes, Carl Phillips and B.H. “Pete” Fairchild. His poems have been published in literary journals in the U.S. and Canada including The Malahat Review, Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, CV2 (feature) and Ruminate.
In addition, Richard conducts 40 to 50 poetry workshops per year ( two to three hours per workshop) at addiction recovery centres in B.C.
Retreat Centre
The Honeymoon Bay Lodge and Retreat Centre near Cowichan Bay on Vancouver Island (90 minutes from either Victoria or Nanaimo) This centre is a five star facility with an executive chef. All meals are provided ( high quality!) and each room has two queen-sized beds and a three-piece bathroom. Please check out this link: www.honeymoonbayretreat.com for a virtual tour.
Cost
$475 double occupancy. $575 single occupancy. This all-in cost includes eight meals prepared by staff at the lodge and selected by the participants beforehand (lunches and dinners. A non-refundable deposit of $100.00 is required to secure a place. With the deposit should be a cheque post dated 45 days prior to the retreat for the balance owing. The post-dated cheque will be refundable only if the cancelled space is filled by another retreatant. There will be spaces available for twelve participants including the facilitator. Cheques should be made payable to Richard Osler and sent to1584 Stamps Rd.,Duncan, B.C. V9L 5W2.
Who should come?
Anyone who wants to sharpen their writing skills and explore the mysterious ways their own words can reveal unexplored areas of their lives. Come and be “fished” by poetry as Jack Gilbert says. Discover what Kay Ryan, former poet laureate of the US, means when she says, “What keeps me writing is that I can only know through writing my major sense organ is apparently a pencil.” from The Writer’s Almanac, September 27, 2007.
Who to Contact:
Email or phone Richard Osler
(250) 597-7875
richard@recoveringwords.com
from A Tao of Poetry
In the ecology of
the poem, the fish is not
prey, but the surprise
catch of the day, a diamond
in the coal, a way
of awakening to something
just beyond what words can say.
Sam Hamill
“Most people…think that writing means writing down ideas, insights, visions. They feel that they must first have something to say before they can put it on paper. For them writing is little more than recording a pre-existent thought. But with this approach true writing is impossible. Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals what is alive…The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, writing requires a real act of trust. We have to say to ourselves, ‘I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust that it will emerge as I write.’ Writing is like giving away the few loaves and fishes one has, trusting that they will multiply in the giving. Once we dare “to give” away on paper the few thoughts that come to us, we start discovering how much is hidden underneath…and gradually come in touch with our own riches.”
Henri Noewen
Endorsements:
Richard Osler knows poetry the way most of us know food—he smells it, tastes it and swallows it whole. He cooks up another batch and shares it with those of us hungry for words. Judy Mayhew – October 2012
Judy is the author of the e-book The Relativesand she posts a daily poem on her blog at www.judymayhew.com
Richard provides support and encouragement for poetry lovers at all levels of experience. His warm, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable approach is contagious; he provides exercises that challenge participants without discouraging them, and all were fully engaged throughout the retreat. Wendy Donawa, Oct. 2012
Wendy is a Ph’D and writer who currently teaches at Royal Roads Universityand the University of Lethbridge