The Roaring Stillness across Open Ground (Redux): How to Make Your Writing Speak to the Troubled World Around You. with John Macker: Sept 6, 2025
Saturday, September 6, 2025
Come explore how to make your poetry writing speak to the troubled world around you.
Instructor: John Macker
Hosts: Jules Nyquist & John Roche
in-person at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse - Placitas, New Mexico
10 am - 3 pm (with one hour on-site writing lunch break)
$100 - all materials included
Your words used your
way will generate your meanings.
your obsessions lead you to your
vocabulary. your way of writing locates,
even creates, your inner life.
-Richard Hugo
This writing-intensive class will propose several strategies for approaching the poem/prose. We will be like forensics experts examining the scene of the written word. We’ll decide whether or not we live and write in a post-truth world. We will discuss how to make the ordinary sacramental. We will decide how to shape-shift our emotional priorities into a poem. We will explore how “truth” should conform to music, not the other way around. We will discuss “triggering” images or emotions and how they act as retrieval mechanisms for the ultimate realization of our creative acts. We’ll respond in writing to several short poems and prose pieces by other authors (Terry Tempest Williams, James Joyce, Chief Joseph, Richard Hugo, Diane DiPrima etc.), examine the role of inspiration in our lives and perhaps, how to survive and even prosper outside of our language comfort zones. How do we speak/write truth to power? Is it even necessary?
If we could choose one place, one piece of ground (or population center) on the planet upon which to write a poem or piece of prose that would change the world, where would it be?
Saturday, September 6, 2025
Come explore how to make your poetry writing speak to the troubled world around you.
Instructor: John Macker
Hosts: Jules Nyquist & John Roche
in-person at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse - Placitas, New Mexico
10 am - 3 pm (with one hour on-site writing lunch break)
$100 - all materials included
Your words used your
way will generate your meanings.
your obsessions lead you to your
vocabulary. your way of writing locates,
even creates, your inner life.
-Richard Hugo
This writing-intensive class will propose several strategies for approaching the poem/prose. We will be like forensics experts examining the scene of the written word. We’ll decide whether or not we live and write in a post-truth world. We will discuss how to make the ordinary sacramental. We will decide how to shape-shift our emotional priorities into a poem. We will explore how “truth” should conform to music, not the other way around. We will discuss “triggering” images or emotions and how they act as retrieval mechanisms for the ultimate realization of our creative acts. We’ll respond in writing to several short poems and prose pieces by other authors (Terry Tempest Williams, James Joyce, Chief Joseph, Richard Hugo, Diane DiPrima etc.), examine the role of inspiration in our lives and perhaps, how to survive and even prosper outside of our language comfort zones. How do we speak/write truth to power? Is it even necessary?
If we could choose one place, one piece of ground (or population center) on the planet upon which to write a poem or piece of prose that would change the world, where would it be?
Saturday, September 6, 2025
Come explore how to make your poetry writing speak to the troubled world around you.
Instructor: John Macker
Hosts: Jules Nyquist & John Roche
in-person at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse - Placitas, New Mexico
10 am - 3 pm (with one hour on-site writing lunch break)
$100 - all materials included
Your words used your
way will generate your meanings.
your obsessions lead you to your
vocabulary. your way of writing locates,
even creates, your inner life.
-Richard Hugo
This writing-intensive class will propose several strategies for approaching the poem/prose. We will be like forensics experts examining the scene of the written word. We’ll decide whether or not we live and write in a post-truth world. We will discuss how to make the ordinary sacramental. We will decide how to shape-shift our emotional priorities into a poem. We will explore how “truth” should conform to music, not the other way around. We will discuss “triggering” images or emotions and how they act as retrieval mechanisms for the ultimate realization of our creative acts. We’ll respond in writing to several short poems and prose pieces by other authors (Terry Tempest Williams, James Joyce, Chief Joseph, Richard Hugo, Diane DiPrima etc.), examine the role of inspiration in our lives and perhaps, how to survive and even prosper outside of our language comfort zones. How do we speak/write truth to power? Is it even necessary?
If we could choose one place, one piece of ground (or population center) on the planet upon which to write a poem or piece of prose that would change the world, where would it be?
Class limit 10 students.
Writing lunch break at noon at Jules Poetry Playhouse. Bring your own lunch if desired. Plentiful snacks and beverages provided (coffee, tea, water, scones and/or bagels, chips, salsa, cookies). Ample time to explore the grounds of Jules’ Poetry Playhouse and walk the labyrinth.
Bring writing materials, free wi-fi if needed.
Hosted by Jules Nyquist and John Roche.
Author books will be for sale, along with Poetry Playhouse Publications books and art.
Directions and contact info sent with registration. Questions? Email jules@poetryplayhouse.com.
Poet, playwright and essayist John Macker grew up in Colorado (Denver and Glenwood Springs) and has lived in northern New Mexico for 30 years. He attended the Univ. of Missouri and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute. He has published 14 full-length books and chapbooks of poetry, 2 audio recordings, an anthology of fiction and essays, and several broadsides over 35 years. His most recent are Belated Mornings, Atlas of Wolves, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, (a 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards finalist), Desert Threnody, essays and short fiction, (winner of the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards fiction anthology prize) and Chaco Sojourn, short stories, (illustrated by Leon Loughridge and published in limited edition by Dry Creek Art Press.) In 2019 he received a Fischer Poetry Prize finalist award, sponsored by the Telluride Institute. For several years, he was contributor to Albuquerque’s Malpais Review. His most recent work can be found in Main Street Rag, New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023, Solstice, Cholla Needles, The Midwest Quarterly, Chiron Review and Contemporary Haibun Online. His trilogy of one-acts, Black Range, was produced by Teatro Paraguas in Santa Fe in 2023. His full-length play, Death of El Chapultepec Bar will be produced by Teatro Paraguas in 2025. He lives in Santa Fe with his artist wife, Anne and two rescue mutts. Over the last 20 years, he has taught writing workshops and poetry classes throughout the West. Photo credit: Jennifer Cartright from Taos.
Epilogue
John Macker
A pair of Cooper’s hawks
dive and explode the air
cleave the sky into uncharted territories
a frenzied cincture
a momentary communion that
admits the ground to the heavens
this first fresh autumn day has dissent
written all over it ⸺
wildflowers retreat defeated colors
fade into the middle of the earth again.
Looking up, grace is just myth rewired
silence broken into a million feathers
the practical hours and tamed
rivers lay beyond us just over
the Jemez mountains, I’m sure.
As swiftly and immodestly as they arrive
they vanish, their rhythms survive them
standing here in endangered open space
lone unknown interlocutor
their aromatic wind still in my face.
The words we say to each other now
are spirits in freefall, they search my
mind for place a holding pattern
how can the human heart remain sedentary?
Abandoned fabric of the sky they once
nuanced unravels they won’t share the secrets
of being in the mystery lizard bivouacked near
my boot, blinks away the sun’s engorged sparks
harvest moon rises like oblivious burning desire
over our very ruins, ecstasies & confessions
an insatiable eye
