Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar 2

Movement Language Nature Art explores the inherently aesthetic organization of human first perception—movement-sound. Organized in utero as one perception movement-sound constitutes primary language—the kinship language we humans share with the many intelligences of the Natural World. Through guided imagery mediation, movement-sound explorations, and art-making through perceptual sequencing, participants follow an experiential pathway discovering the inner processes of primary language. This gives experience for participants to independently direct their own Nature immersion primary languaging session. From this experience participants make art—poetry, prose, and/or visual—through the immediacy of primary languaging processes.

Rebecca R Burrill is an ecocentric dancer, artistic director, and movement-based child developmentalist-educator. Her work focuses on the aesthetics of first perceptions—movement-sound—as primary language, the language of human kinship with Nature. She engages people of all ages in the experience of these deep psycho-biological processes, culminating in community ceremonial site-specific dance performance. $25

A presentation from 2023–2024 Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow Marcus Wicker

At Radcliffe, Wicker is completing “Dear Mothership,” a book of poetry that uses speculative narrative, empathy, and a hip hop aesthetic to explore reparations and examine the confounding ways humans treat one another when empowered by history and inheritance.

Free and open to the public.
To view this event online, individuals will need to register via Zoom.
For instructions on how to join online, see the How to Attend a Radcliffe Event on Zoom webpage.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation e-mail containing a link and password for this meeting.

Click here to join today’s poetry session.

Dennis James Sweeney is the author of You’re the Woods Too and In the Antarctic Circle, as well as four chapbooks of poetry and prose, including Ghost/Home: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted. His first book, In the Antarctic Circle, won the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize and was a Debut Poetry Book of 2021 in Poets & Writers, as well as a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Big Other Book Award. His second book, You’re the Woods Too, is a Small Press Distribution bestseller and a finalist for the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Prize.
His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, The New York Times, The Southern Review, and Witness, among others. Formerly a Small Press Editor at Entropy and Assistant Editor at Denver Quarterly, he has an MFA from Oregon State University and a PhD from the University of Denver. His writing has been supported by residencies from Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, I-Park Foundation, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Malta.
Originally from Cincinnati, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he teaches at Amherst College.