Into the Dragon's Stomach: Eclipse Poetics
2 hours, via Zoom
$35

The greek word ekleipsis, where we get the word eclipse from means to abandon. Eclipses arrive in pairs every six months (although sometimes we will get three) ushering in great beginnings and great endings. One is always a solar eclipse, occurring at the new moon and another is always a lunar eclipse occurring at the full moon. It is a celestial power outage that astrologers and poets for more than 5000 years have been observing. We’ll start in the first hour with the astrological omen tablets in Mesopotamia and work our way thru Medieval poets to more recent work to observe how people have thought through eclipses across the ages. Eclipses bring a strange light and strange sensations, how will each of us respond when the "OFF AIR" sign abruptly turns on? This workshop takes place fresh off the end of the Taurus-Scorpio eclipse cycle of 2022 so it'll be a good time to reflect on your own major endings and beginnings with a couple of writing prompts in the second hour.

Óscar Moisés Díaz is a astrologer-poet, film curator, and poet. They are a member of Tierra Narrative and serve as a Translation editor at Fence as well as a contributing editor at ASPHALTE magazine. They were a 2020-2021 Inaugural Curatorial Fellow at the Poetry Project. Recently they completed a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and also read their poems at the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Recent poems can be found in the September issue of Brooklyn Rail, the tiny and Schlag Magazine.