The Great Mother Conference has met for over 30 years, and each spring we welcome a good number of new participants, who bring their poems, music, and art. We will have the opportunity to share in workshops and in small groups, and to learn from the children and young people whose courage always shines in these gatherings. The inspired Gioia Timpanelli will do a full evening of stories. Caroline Casey, the visionary activist, will open each morning with her take on the day’s possibilities. Ruth Bly will give a talk on the fragrance of the heart. Coleman Barks and Robert Bly will read the ecstatic poems of Hafez and Rumi with Marcus Wise on tabla, David Whetstone on sitar, and Reza Derakshani on traditional Persian instruments. We are honored to host a reading by the renowned poet Galway Kinnell. It is an honor to have Jane Hirshfield with her tender complicated poems. Doug Von Koss will lead early morning singing and chanting, and Carl Big Heart will hold the ceremonial space of the conference. Danny Deardorff will again entertain us with his storytelling and songs.
This year we will do some work with theater. Ibsen, in his brilliant play Peer Gynt, talks of a mistaken longing for the spirit that has been typical of western culture. The Guthrie Theatre has commissioned Robert Bly to do a new translation of Peer Gynt, and this conference will have the advantage of hearing some scenes prior to its production. We will need actors and actresses for the reading of parts.
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We have the honor this year to host Robert Sardello whose subject is the heart. One of his fine books is Love In the World: A Conscious Guide to Soul Practice. His talks will concentrate on the image of the heart in Medieval and Renaissance paintings. He describes two streams coming toward us: the stream we receive from the past, and the stream of Sophia coming to us from the future..
This conference has always paid attention to the soul of the world. It has always stood up for the wildness of nature, for the creation and performance of ecstatic music, for making art with our own hands, for writing and reciting one’s own poetry, and for honoring translation, particularly of of Islamic, Indian, and European poets.
We always have a rich group of older and younger poets with us. This year we will also hear from the Blue Sofa poets, conference participants whose books have been published by the conference press. Peggy Steele, Myra Shapiro, Frank Steele, and Nils Peterson will be joined by Fran Quinn, whose new book The Golden Sun of Faithfulness, will be published by the Blue Sofa Press in 2006.
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