“The surest, and quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object.” (Cesar Pavese, Dialogues with Leuco)

“Something unquenched, something unquenchable, is in me.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“Imagine.” (Samuel Beckett)

There is a particular joy in getting to work with poets and writers across the world, across time, touching the parts of language that aspire to eternity and community, and so I share this with that joy tucked in my pocket, invisible to the reader, yet present somehow in the effort of communicating it. This, too, is the labor of poetry: to describe what feels incommunicable, and to imagine a world in which hope and vision are communicated. We of the 21st century are fluent in the art of the take-down but often afraid to express what we value or dream. “Perhaps” is my favorite country, the terrain of my fidelities, and the space from which I extend this invitation made possible by the brilliant Maya Popa —

In the darker moments of the 20th century, writers congregated around a notion conveyed in correspondence, lectures, and poetry—namely, the Flaschenpost, or "message in bottle," described by Paul Celan via Osip Mandelstam, who imagined the poet as “the shipwrecked sailor who throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment,” leaving the poem as a “testament of the deceased” that would find “its secret addressee." This workshop will explore poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, Pasternak, and Rilke. Poets will be invited to develop their own Flaschenpost.

Ten tickets exist for those who aren’t already members of Maya Popa’s Conscious Writers Collective. One of those tickets imagines your name on it.

Dear humans, may we recognize one another in the clouds and all impossible things.