Vital Forms: Healing and the Arts of Crisis

Save the date: Friday and Saturday, APRIL 19 & 20, a two-day symposium in downtown Berkeley @ the remarkable Subterranean Arthouse featuring Eleni Stecopoulos and special guests: Melissa Buzzeo, Thom Donovan, Margit Galanter, Bhanu Kapil, Beth Murray, Pavlos Stavropoulos, David Wolach.

The Poetics of Healing began with a desire to re-examine the therapeutic dimensions of poetry and other art, and to explore the uses of poetic language, sound, and imagery in a wide range of medical and somatic practices, across different cultural traditions. Through the diversity of our participants — who include poets, physicians, ethnographers, historians, psychotherapists, diviners, disability activists, visual and performance artists — the series has evolved to ask questions about how healing is imagined, created, and performed on multiple levels, from the subtle body to the body politic. Our intention is to foster a public forum where different perspectives and practices can be put into conversation, to make possible an interdisciplinary exploration of method, scientific and creative, somatic and scholarly, in ways that might be unexpected and mutually generative.

For more information, visit the SF State Poetry Center.