Teacher Feature: Suzanne Underwood Rhodes
Suzanne Rhodes, the Never-Ending Apprentice of Poetry and Prose, learning and ever loving her art.
This semester, Suzanne Rhodes is teaching the class, “Writing the Light in a Dark Time” beginning on Saturday, February 13 at 10am EST.
Take Suzanne’s class to explore the core of human experience – relationship: your relationship to words and to worlds, both inner and outer, but also the relationships we build as a community to become better poets and keener critics. In this particular class, we are asking, where can we find the light? Being in the grips of an unending global pandemic and with economic and social instability, it’s important to remember that we’re not alone (think the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and Great Depression, the Spanish flu, various wars and persecutions like the Falun Gong, not to mention our own personal losses and difficulties).
We desperately need to find the light of meaning and hope. So, in this class, you will ask, how can literature, nature, art and spiritual experience provide illumination? How can creating a poem crack open a stone? You’ll look to both traditional and contemporary poets for ideas and answers, and to provide models of form and subjects for the poems written for the class. You’ll also do some writing during class meetings. The workshop is the ideal environment for growing in craft and learning to gently cut what’s needed from the poems of peers while affirming what’s compelling.
Suzanne’s favorite authors:
- T. R. Hummer
- Jane Kenyon
- Scott Cairns
- Scott Fitzgerald
- David the Psalmist
- Shakespeare
- Li Young-Lee
- Mary Karr
- Louise Gluck
- Chaim Potok
Read more about Suzanne Rhodes here or on Facebook. You can read Suzanne’s work here and here.
