Memorial Day Nostalgia
Bittersweet Re-Memberings, with Gregory Pardlo & Maggie Smith
Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of summer, the season of childhood nostalgia. Remembering implies loss - the root of nostalgia is "homesickness" (from the Greek root nostos, to return home, and algos, pain.) This movement sequence is about the bittersweetness of memory, exploring somatically the gestural language of remembering: how we hold on to and push against our stories, how our childhood self is attached to us, and where memory lives in the body.
Includes:
-a link to the poetry, and a short reflection capturing the most striking phrases, themes, and imagery.
-a 60-minute accessible practice guiding students through an embodied experience of poetic language
-a music playlist lovingly chosen to capture the poem's ambiance (crafted to match the arc of the physical practice)
-a distilled skeleton of the sequence (poses, breath exercises, and visualizations) for reference
In an embodied approach to language, the goal is to generate a spontaneous, authentic experience of a poem that you can hold on to. When we linger with poetry not with our rational, cerebral forebrain, but with a more primal gut layer of our being, we can absorb their truth and beauty deeper into the psyche. When poems live there, they pop up more regularly in our everyday lives, suffusing our days with new meaning and fullness.
Your Instructor
Katy Hawkins, PhD, is a somatics teacher based in Philadelphia. This course is an experiment she undertook during the pandemic, a romp through what she calls "Moving Poetics," exploring poems somatically. In her teaching, Katy uses poems as spells, whose magic holds change-making capacity to alter our reality. In bypassing the rational brain, poetic language drops deeper into our beings, where more subtle transformation can happen. These classes provided fodder for her recent book, called Thinking Feelingly: Somatic Approaches to Poetry. For more on Katy, check out katyhawkins.com and movingpoetics.com.