Planting Seeds of Mindfulness & Poetry

Join Jerrice Baptiste in the Beatrix Farrand Garden for a short guided visualization for stillness and engaging the senses, then a reading of two poems from well-known poets for inspiration and discussion to start a conversation about how practicing mindfulness can help us arrive at writing poetry. Jerrice will provide the prompts for creative writing and the opportunity for the participants to share their work.

We will place emphasis Edna St. Vincent Millay who made her mark on New York state coming to fame in the Roaring Twenties as a poet and activist. Vincent, as she liked to be called, read to sold-out houses, immensely admired for her sensuous beauty, for her intense imagination. She knew the naked value of words and could breathe immense power into a few lines, or a lot of lines. She could take a traditional form and turn it into an original and powerful work of art. She created magic out of thin air.

Growing up in poverty with a determined single mother, she kept house, took care of two sisters, played piano, learned several languages & acted in plays. She bucked society’s oppression of women, at 23, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, a moving tribute to her mother. In 1925, she married. Vincent and her husband Eugen bought a 700-acre rolling farm in upstate New York, and the couple reveled in country life at Steepletop. She was passionate about gardening, horses and they bought the island as a summer home in 1933, there Vincent died on October 19, 1950.

Jerrice J. Baptiste has authored seven children’s books and a book of poems for adults, Wintry Mix. Her writing has appeared in The Yale Review, Mantis, The Minetta Review, The Caribbean Writer, Claw & Blossom, and numerous others. Her poetry in Haitian Creole and English and collaborative songwriting are featured on the Grammy Award winning album Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti. Jerrice teaches poetry where she lives in NY. Visit her at Guanabanabooks.com.

This event is free and all-ages. Materials will be provided.