Bread & Poetry with Michele Battiste: Divinatory Poetics

Join us for a special session of Bread & Poetry featuring poet Michele Battiste, author of The Elsewhere Oracle. Michele will begin our workshop with a craft talk on how poetry can be used as a vehicle for assessing our own deepest truths. This will be followed by an interactive reading of her poems and card interpretations based on whatever cards participants have pulled from her deck. With set and setting skillfully established, Michele will lead us in a generative writing exercise, with prompts designed to elicit our own personal access to symbols and how we might write own version of divinatory poetics. 

Michele Battiste is the author of four poetry collections, including Waiting for the Wreck to Burn, which won the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press (2019). Her most recent collection, The Elsewhere Oracle (Black Lawrence Press), doubles as an oracle deck and tells the story of a mountain town lost to time. Michele lives in Lafayette, CO, where she works for The Nature Conservancy, raising money to save the planet. She loves space buns, parlor games, and the bear cam at Katmai National Park.

About Bread & Poetry

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

Hosted by the Lyons Community Library, in partnership with Elizabeth Marglin, 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.”