Both Jon Kabat-Zinn and Thich Nhat Hanh offer meditation exercises in which novices are instructed to savor something--a raisin, a tangerine wedge while being fully mindful of every sensation until the last slowly fading taste. Reading poetry well is a similar exercise. For poetry is a slow art; poems are made to be savored.

As James Gleick's recently published book, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, tells anyone sufficiently sense-impaired not to have already noticed, we live in the fast lane, where there is no time for contemplation. No matter how much time we save with our labor-saving devices and instant cuisine, we are still, most of us, rushing around glancing at our wrist-watches and, like Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit, proclaiming that we are late.

A true product of the Zeitqeist, the poetry-slam movement offers us a quick and easy kind of poetry-experience. But poetry, both writing and reading it, asks us to stop, to sit down, to enter a quiet inner space. Lucky is the subway passenger who happens to find a poem, not an advertisement, posted to be pondered on the crowded ride to or from work.

One of the goals of this course is to teach you how to find the part of you to which poetry speaks. Poetry is one way we can enhance our ability to slow down, to silence some of our myriad internal voices, to let the mud settle. Meditation is another way. These are long, sometimes intersecting traditions.

Our Introduction to Meditation offers doorways to information about each of the great contemplative traditions. I shall not here take on the task of offering a thumbnail sketch of the histories of the world's poetry. Here, instead, are some links which will be useful to you: