Our First Meeting in 2024!

“Winter Scene in the Seaside Village Kambara, Japan” / private collection

February 3, 2024

Dear Friends:

Here is a summary of the recent Section for the Literary Arts & Humanities meeting of the School for Spiritual Science in North America that occurred on Saturday, February 3, 2024 on Zoom.

Our next scheduled Zoom meeting for friends and members of the Section is Saturday, February 10, 7-8 pm Pacific. This meeting will be a Poetry Night. I’ll send the credentials on Friday, February 9 to interested persons.

“What’s Happening in the Section?”

Well, funny you should ask! That’s exactly what we discussed at our meeting on Saturday! Conversation ranged over a variety of topics. Scroll down for details. We welcomed a new poet to our group; we discussed the upcoming Section Conference in September 2024; we shared news of a recent visit to Tor House at Big Sur, home of modernist poet Robinson Jeffers . . . and a variety of other topics, including a progress report on the planned English-language edition of Stil magazine and reports on Section-sponsored research projects for the School for Spiritual Science. It was a full evening!

Next week is a Poetry Night to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which is the Year of the Dragon.

Here’s how the Poetry Night works:

Poets are asked to prepare two original poems. Poetry lovers may offer one poem by a favorite poet, but original poems go first. The meeting only lasts an hour, so poets are asked to keep any introductory comments extremely short and to focus on reading their poetry. If there is time at the end of the meeting, we’ll have some conversation, and poets can use that time to share personal information about the poems they have read. (Keep in mind: we only have an hour . . . so . . . long narrative or epic poems are (umm) “discouraged” . . . for the Time Being. 🙂

“The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.”

— Kenneth Patchen, from The Snow is Deep on the Ground

O tell me, poet, what do you do?
“I praise.”

— R. M. Rilke (Sämtliche Werke, II, 249; 20 Dezember 1921)

“In winter
all the singing is in
the tops of the trees”

— Mary Oliver, from White-Eyes

All Best Wishes,

Bruce