Collaborative Peace Poetry Workshop
An activity guide for your enjoyment and delight
Welcome to today’s collaborative peace poetry workshop! I invite you to grab some friends, some paper and markers, open minds and hearts, and settle in…
I love to share teaching activities with you, in the hopes that whether you find yourself in an educational or facilitation role, the questions and activities still might be relevant, inspiring, and useful, whether you do them on your own or with a friend (stay tuned for my upcoming post on the power of friendship). It is in this spirit that I offer my workshop plan for our collaborative peace poetry workshop. (You can find other activity guides under the tab on my Enchantable home page - check it out!).
This workshop is something I initially developed as part of an Introduction to Peace Studies and Peace Education workshop I gave to the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterrey last January when they were visiting UPEACE campus as part of a study abroad program. Rather than lecture them on what peace was, I wanted to harvest from the group what they thought about peace, and then we used peace studies framings of positive and negative peace to analyze the poem we created. I have used it with other groups since in my intro workshops and classes.
The activity came full circle in December when I received a call for submissions invitation from my colleagues at Middlebury for their peace poetry anthology. Upon receiving the invitation, I had the idea of trying a modified version of the activity on campus, for any students and faculty who wanted to come, with the idea that maybe we would have something to submit at the end of the workshop, and if we didn’t, worst case scenario was having spent the afternoon meditating and writing poetry together, and that was ok! Six beautiful souls showed up, and we made magic together in the bamboo hut.
We are called to birth new worlds, and I believe these worlds will honor and value poetry as a way of knowing, as indispensable for the worlds we are birthing and creating. Modernity overvalues linear rationality as the only worthy path of knowledge and understanding. Poetry offers us another way of knowing the world, and allows us to understand things at embodied and emotional levels, especially things that are hard to say or comprehend directly or literally. We need poetry to help us see things we otherwise couldn’t. We need poetry to feel. We need poetry to add beauty to our world, to decorate our minds and hearts. Poetry is disruptive. Poetry is healing - especially for those of us who were told in our educational journeys that we weren’t poets, artists, or creative (hint: you are). Creating spaces for transrational - beyond rational - ways of knowing is essential for world-building and for creating the re-imagined, re-enchanted, healing educational spaces we so desperately need. This was one such small but mighty space.
Collaborative Peace Poetry Workshop Guide
Here’s the plan! Feel free to adapt as needed. You could do it with any topic. The whole process took us just under two hours. I recommend having at least that much time, adjusting depending on group size, and leaving room for the creative process to unfold with spaciousness and so you don’t have to rush (in our case, everyone caught the 3 pm bus with ease :).
Mindful movement and music: We started with a little free movement to Trevor Hall’s blue sky mind, whose chorus is “in and through the body.” Most of us had been sitting in class all morning, so the purpose was to get us into our bodies and move in ways that felt good so that we could then write from our bodies.
Opening circle: We briefly shared names and how we were feeling as a way to bring all our voices and how we were feeling into the room. Short and sweet. An opening circle doesn’t need to be long to be powerful and meaningful.
Introduction: I introduced the purpose of the gathering, the story of relationships behind it as described above, and the overall flow so folks knew roughly what to expect, even though the process itself was very emergent. I believe that sharing the purpose of any gathering is important, even if it is very broad and organic.1
Meditation: I led a guided meditation that focused on connecting with our bodies, breath, senses, and the land around us, as well as the community that was present and the wider communities we are a part of and connected to.
Free writing #1 (5 min.): From there we rolled right into a 5-minute timed free write, in the spirit of Julia Cameron’s morning pages (a practice I cannot recommend enough). This was a chance to put down anything that came up in the meditation, or any busyness in the mind (in the spirit of a “brain dump”), and to make space for our creativity to come through.
Free writing #2 (10 min.): We wrote to the prompt “Peace is…” and let it flow from there. I also had other words from the call for papers on the board: healing, social change, restorative justice, and conflict transformation. I encouraged folks to keep writing and try to avoid self-editing.
Harvesting #1: We went back through our writing and highlighted or circled words, phrases, or stanzas that we loved or that stood out to us.
Harvest sharing: We read our harvest aloud to the group.
Harvesting #2: After reading them, we wrote down what was still sticking with us on big flipchart pieces of paper (one phrase or stanza per paper). In a room, I would have had us do this on sticky notes on a wall or white board, but we were in the bamboo hut and it was windy, and sticky notes wouldn’t have worked. Big paper didn’t really work either (lol :) - we had to search for heavy objects to hold it down, and honestly this became a hilarious, playful, joyful, and creative part of the process!
Harvest gallery walk: We placed all the big pieces of paper around the circle, and walked around.
Circle gallery walk Putting it together: Then we started moving pieces around. Someone suggested a starting line, and we all went with it. We moved the big paper to the table and had a double-table-length poem at the end.
A collaborative peace poem was born!
This was such a joyful, inspiring process and I can’t recommend trying it enough. You could even do some version of it by yourself, or even with just one other person, but I can’t encourage you enough to do it with a group. It was such a sweet way to spend the afternoon, to build community, and to tap into our creative energies. To build peace, dare I say, in our little corner of campus.
If you are wondering if we ended up with a poem…YES, we did!! I will be submitting it on our behalf tomorrow so will keep it under wraps for now, but you can be sure I will be sharing it with you and updating this post accordingly when I can. Stay tuned!
If you try it out, let me know how it goes! I would love to hear about it :)
With love and care,
See The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker for more on this. If you don’t have a purpose for your meeting, perhaps reconsider having your meeting…food for thought :)