Welcome to my e-world!
I have an exciting vision for this site and hope you'll keep coming back to see what's up with:
Curious? Feel free to contact me.- Can be tailored to a single- or multiple-session workshop
- Writing-intensive rather than critique-based
So You Say You Can’t Write Poetry?
As children we were natural poets, but by adulthood, we likely suppressed some of the sensibilities that enliven our reading and writing of poetry: (1) a fascination with wordplay and the infinite possibilities of language, (2) an alert sensory perception, (3) recognition and acceptance of our unique voice, and (4) patience with our learning process. Designed for the beginning or tentative poet (although practiced poets will find it enriching, too!), this educational and fun workshop will present accessible poetic forms, sample poems, and prompts as structures that allow for the possibility of poetry as we uncover or recover our individual poetic voices. We will create a safe space for generating lots of original writing while attending to the particulars of craft: language choices, the poem’s shape, and various poetic devices.
Poet as Architect
Li-Young Lee says that poetry has two mediums—language and silence—and that language (the material) inflects silence (the immaterial) so that we can experience (hear) our inner space. In this workshop, we will step outside our familiar poetic homes and build new dwellings (temples andtaverns!), utilizing such timber as sound patterns, found text, and invented forms. We will explore the structural possibilities of language to ultimately answer the question: How does form serve content? Both beginning and practiced poets will generate lots of original writing from this language play and experimentation, and will bring home a fresh eye with which to revisit old poems stuck in the draft stage.
Poem=Sound=Body
Ezra Pound said that poetry begins to atrophy when it departs too far from music, and music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance. How do we source our poems from our own body’s rhythms, so that our poems are bodies of sound—sound bodies—durable because they are built from the language’s meaning and music? In this workshop, for beginning and practiced poets, we will generate lots of new writing while attending to sound, with sample poems selected for their musicality. Memorable poems are often those that get inside and move both our brain (what’s said is heard) and our body (what’s unsaid is felt).
eKpHrAsIs: Visual Art as Spaces for Poetry (can be conducted in an art gallery)
John Berger said, "Seeing comes before words.” How may we see, that is, experience a painting, a sculpture, an artist’s body of work, such that we can locate our unrealized poems and build them beyond mere description of the visual art? During this workshop, we will look at examples of ekphrastic poems, then move freely through the gallery spaces (or supplied art books) to generate our own.
What Is a Prose Poem?
"What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose,” Gertrude Stein states rather than asks, suggesting that the distinction is either unknowable or unessential. Is the prose poem a hybrid, elegant and inventive, or a mongrel, unrefined and unharmonious? We will read sample poems representing the various strains of prose poetry to investigate the sentence as a structural unit, prose as a movement of language, and the prose poem as a vehicle of subject matter. We will then use those poems as launching pads for our own prose poems.
Poem as Map
T.S. Eliot wrote, "You shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our journeying / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Poems: relentless navigations of self that return us more recognizable to ourselves—and wonderfully less so. We will engage, both individually and collaboratively, in inventive exercises designed to have us write—content- and form-wise—beyond what we already know. And we will inquire into the map/poem as an instrument of communication, persuasion, and power, and the possibility (or desirability) of a poem’s being an impartial reference object—what we assume a map is.
Poet as Witness of a Moment
Paul Eluard wrote, "There is another world, and it is in this one.” Poems we remember, poems we return to, likely presence for us what it means to be human, or spirit incarnate. How do we write poems that transcend mere description of our visible world? Conversely, how do we write poems about the invisible world, without weighty abstractions, and instead with the sensory details of our earthbound lives? In this workshop, we will look at poems by other poets to discuss whether they successfully or unsuccessfully bear witness to human experience. We will then generate our own poems while attending to aspects of poem-making that establish the poet as credible witness.
If A Million People Were Listening
Macrima Wiederkher said, "If it doesn’t improve on the silence, don’t say it.” What language would we speak, what poems would we write, if an entire world were listening? So much of our language is received from our communities and the larger culture. How do we identify clichés, easy solutions, habitual ways of articulation, and vague generalities in our writing, so that we can begin to invent language that powerfully communicates the personal and the universal simultaneously? This workshop will present accessible poetic forms, sample poems, and prompts as structures that allow for the possibility of poetry generated outside our predictable expression. We will create a safe space for the sharing of work and guided group feedback in service to what the poem wants to say.
A poem is a poem is a poem . . .
List poem. Acrostic. Concrete poem. Haiku. Chant poem. Limerick. Partner poem. Ode. So many fun ways to write a poem! In this workshop, we will work, stretch, roll, and mold language into crazy and not-so-crazy wordart that can stand alone or be illustrated with pictures.
Poetry of Place
"Is it certain that a true poet occupies a place? Is the poet not that
which, in the eminent sense of the term, loses place, ceases occupation,
precisely, and is thus the very opening of space?" queries Emmanuel Lewis.
Via sample poems and the composition of our own poems, we will investigate
how poets construct place as both a literal and an ontological location,
asking these questions: How do we locate ourselves? How do we dislocate and
relocate ourselves? Is a poem a means of placement-or displacement-for its
writer and its reader/listener?
Can you say "onomatopoeia"? Contact me.
Creativity as a Way of Being
CreatiQuest is an inquiry-based exploration, a holistic approach to creativity as a way of being in the world. CreatiQuest is ideal for teacher inservice training, corporate team building, and salon-style gatherings.
I know artists whose medium is life itself, and who express the inexpressible without brush, pencil, chisel or guitar.
They neither paint, nor dance. Their medium is Being. Whatever their hand touches has increased Life.
They see and don’t have to draw. They are the artists of being alive.
— Frederick Franck, artist and writerToo often we talk about creativity as if it were a quality that we were either given or denied.
It’s not a talent or a personality quirk; it’s the fundamental fact of human nature.
— Joyce Wycoff, Transformation ThinkingLife isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
— George Bernard Shaw
(1) We will distinguish prejudgments/preconceptions about self, others, and "creativity,” and investigate how language (what we believe/think/say) constructs our experience and hinders or heightens creativity and learning.
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make our world.
— The BuddhaMost barriers to creativity are self-imposed. You can’t expect to think outside the box if you constantly put yourself back in the box.
— Elaine Dundon, The Seeds of Innovation[L]ove the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language . . .
the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young PoetThe important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.
It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
— Albert Einstein
(2) What this training is not:
A battery of how-to techniques and tools for idea generation and problem solving
A motivational pep talk
What this training is:
An experiential inquiry (a creation itself) that will provide breakthroughs in personal creativity (that will naturally extend into the professional realm, because creativity is a holistic way of being and thinking, not an application)
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
— Marc ChagallLearning emerges from discovery, not directives; reflection, not rules; possibilities, not prescriptions; diversity, not dogma; creativity and curiosity, not conformity and certainty; and meaning, not mandates.
— Stephanie Pace Marshall, Ph.D.
(3) We will participate in several solo and collaborative activities that promise immediate results, creating with language, image, and mixed media, with conscious attention paid to our resistances and self-talk.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
— Carl JungCreativity is not a noun or even a verb — it is a place, a space, a gathering, a union, a where — wherein the Divine powers of creativity and the human power of imagination join forces, Where the two come together is where beauty and grace happens and, indeed, explodes. Creativity constitutes the ultimate in intimacy, for it is the place where the Divine and the human are most destined to interact.
— Matthew Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet
(4) We will do a wrap-up reflection (in addition to ongoing reflection on our discoveries throughout the day), and I will offer suggestions for at-home activities/exercises that can further distinguish and dismantle our creative blocks.
Fee: $500 half-day / $1000 full-day (negotiable)
If you want to be more creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.
— Jean PiagetCreative geniuses tend to return to the conceptual world of childhood and are able to wed the most advanced understandings of a field with the sensibilities of a wonder-filled child.
— Michael Michalko, Cracking CreativityGenius is no more than childhood recaptured at will.
— Frank Lloyd WrightDeath is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
— Norman Cousins, essayist and editorDon’t just ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and then go and do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
— Howard Thurman, theologian and educator
Marj Hahne is an educator who has taught children and adults, in various settings, the subjects of poetry writing, mathematics, English-as-a-Second-Language, Business English, and arts and crafts. Formally educated as an engineer and self-educated as a poet and artist, Marj is committed to facilitating for others the self-discovery that can return us to the natural expressions of creativity and play we experienced as children.
travel to yourself
inTraVerse: where poetry meets travel, and you meet yourself.
You and 7-10 other women writers will travel for a week with poet-guide Marj Hahne to destinations valued for their cultural and/or natural offerings. Marj will deliver a multi-session poetry-writing workshop and provide all the resources you need to experience the destination during your unstructured leisure time. International destinations will include attendance at a concurrently scheduled local poetry festival.
Destinations under first consideration:
San Francisco
Utah (southern)
British Isles
Netherlands
Are we there yet? Contact me.
Coffee Folk is my whim that won’t go away. What I mean is that I have wanted to own a coffeehouse since I first stepped into The Connection on College Avenue in Ithaca, NY, while a student there in the mid- to late '80s. The Connection wasn’t a coffeehouse; it was a bar. But it was a bar that had sunk-in-the-floor round-table seating and bottomless bowls of popcorn that encouraged conversation . . . and laughter — intimate communities of four to six forgetting about the books for a while.
I didn’t know that the community space of my vision would be a coffeehouse until Café Decadence showed up just off College Avenue a year after I’d graduated. Coffee Folk won’t be just a coffeehouse, though. It will also be an acoustic-music venue featuring nationally touring singer-songwriters, with a rotating wine and microbrew menu. It will also be an artspace. And a literary place. And above all, a learning space, with activities and workshops that cultivate the arts and the spirit. Lots of facetime at Coffee Folk (that’s what we called socializing in college).
But coffeehouses take big bucks to create, and even though all my wildly divergent professional pursuits have, in their composite, trained me exactly for this, I’m not financially prepared for this venture yet.
In the meantime, CoffeeFolk.com will be a virtual meeting space, maybe even (yikes!) a blog, featuring all those things I’d want to share with you at Coffee Folk.
Believing,
Caf or decaf? Contact me.