Throughout time, we human beings have never quite been able to believe the depth, drama and the disappearances involved in even the average human life. Each one of us grows almost against our will into a steadily unfolding story where the horizon gets broader and more mysterious, the understanding of loss and mortality more keen, the sense of time more fleeting and the understanding of our own mistakes and omissions more apparent. In the midst of this deepening we have to shape a life that both makes sense and is also able to give its essential gift to others: there is no other life than the one that involves this constant beckoning, this invitation to the fiercer aspects of existence.

Through poetry and the insights of poetry – we will look at the way good poetry and the insights of poetry always asks us to be brave in both shaping a good individual life and an equally good society – while asking us to appreciate the daily possibilities for happiness amidst constant on-going calamity. Human beings have always lived in difficult times, there has rarely been a period of history where we have not felt the collective fears and possible losses that all human beings have feared since the beginning of conscious time.