With Evan Craig Reardon and friends. Saturdays, 9:30 AM - 11:30 AM: 10/10, 11/14, 12/12, 1/9, 2/20, 3/13. Sliding scale: $90 — $150. Please pay what you can afford.

We have decided to hold this group on Zoom as long as social distancing restrictions are in place. Due to a shared focus on the text, we find we are able to share poetry with a sense of community using this format. We will use writing to explore our response to the poems. Please write a little about yourself and why you would like to participate and send it to poetry@cathedralofallsaints.org

Bearing in mind Auden’s concern with articulating a public poetics of grace and salvation, we will read several of his long poems where Christ is, and sometimes is, present and heralding salvation.

Responding to these poems contemplatively, we will seek to incorporate them into our religious and spiritual sensibility, and explore how they present problems and opportunities for the public proclamation of Christ’s saving grace.

We will begin with Auden’s masterpiece The Age of Anxiety, then move to his celebration of Christ’s incarnation and nativity in For the Time Being, and then explore some of his later lyrics where Christ is, and is not, present.

Click HERE for a book of collected works that contains both poems.

Classes are non-refundable.

Evan Craig Reardon, poetry consultant of The Cathedral of All Saints

Evan Craig Reardon is a graduate student at SUNY Albany, where he is currently completing a MS in Library Science and an MA in English. He graduated from the University of Connecticut in 2017 where he studied philosophy, English, and classical languages. He is an experimental poet working at the intersection of poetry, philosophy, and theology. His current project is a free translation and adaptation of Euripides’ Medea with a theological commentary.