Bread & Poetry featuring Radha Marcum

Even the stars 
give up some of their secrets
to the trees—
—Radha Marcum

This month’s Bread & Poetry will feature Radha Marcum, a Boulder-based poet whose work explores changing landscapes, personal loss, and the wonder that accompanies us across the threshold of grief. Radha will share some of her recent poems, take part in a dynamic Q & A, and lead us all in a writing exercise, with bonus tips on how to turn a “source draft” into a poem. Radha will focus on the tradition of ekphrasis poetry—the practice of using one form of art to describe another, such as a poem that describes and responds to a piece of art, photograph, or landscape. Ekphrasis allows us to enlarge our lens: The encounter with works of art, says poet Christine Stewart, is like a form of the ancient practice of lectio divina, or sacred reading and contemplation.

Radha Marcum won the 2023 Washington Prize for her collection Pine Soot Tendon Bone (2024). Her poems appear frequently in journals including Bennington Review, EcoTheo, FIELD, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She is the founder of Poet to Poet and teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop and privately.

"Poetry, like bread, is for everyone." -Roque Dalton

Bread & Poetry is for people interested in language, particularly poetry, as a doorway to something sacred inside themselves. Mixing experiential writing exercises with lively Q & A and a range of featured poets, Bread & Poetry serves up language that dissolves borders between self and Self; self and other. It is a way to hold space for a community of undefended hearts, each speaking a love language at once personal and universal. As the poet David Whyte says, “Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.”