Special Programs

Forrest Hamer, PhD and Alice Jones, MD – distinguished poets and SFCP members – offer an event where they each speak for a few minutes about their writing on listening and on muses. They will then engage the group in an interactive listening experience which will involve observing and thinking about how we receive language, tone, music and presence of another. What is generated inside the analyst/listener/writer by way of response? How does the muse give rise to a creative impulse to respond? How do we take in another’s being across differences of self and other, culture, race, age, gender etc. How do we make use of ourselves in response? We will then read some poems together, engaging in noticing how we listen, what we hear, and how we respond in feelings and in words. Together, we will engage as a group in the experience of sending and receiving (call and response) as a basis for how we respond to one another, and how a space can open between us and inside each of us.