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SDI Seattle Event – “Desire the Change”: Radiance and Resilience in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
An evening on Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus with Mark S. Burrows
Wednesday, August 7th at 7pm. Interfaith Community Sanctuary – 1763 NW 62nd St, Seattle WA 98107
August 7 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm PDT
This evening talk explores Rilke’s remarkable Sonnets to Orpheus, a celebrated poem cycle written just over a century ago (1922). It includes poems that look with unflinching courage at the difficulties and losses we face, and yet invite us to live into the abundances that are always present to us. He calls us to “dance the orange,” to taste how its “glowing…unveils fragrance upon fragrance” for us. And he reminds—“despite fate”—of the ”exquisite abundances” we always carry within us. Is this mere poetic hyperbole? Or is it the voice of a courageous imagination, one that calls us to live what the poet described simply but memorably as “the Open”? And to find the meaning of our lives not in our achievements, whether “outer” or “inner,” but rather in how we belong to “the Whole”?
Come to explore poems that one of Rilke’s early readers, J. B. Leishman, described as a new “dawn of consciousness, where language is in the making, and where myth and symbol must often supply the place of not yet thinkable thoughts.” Come ready to be startled by Rilke’s invitation to be those who “sing the heart born into the whole” and, perhaps, to dare to answer his reminder that “if drinking is bitter to you, become wine.”
Join us for an evening with Mark S. Burrows, PhD, poet, popular speaker, and prize-winning translator of Rilke’s poems, in celebration of his new translation of the Sonnets to Orpheus (Monkfish, 2024).
All are welcome to attend! A suggested donation of $5 is appreciated to help cover our costs. You can donate to SDI here.
Event is being held at the Interfaith Community Sanctuary, at 1763 NW 62nd St, Seattle, WA 98107. Google Map link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ha4LzbYtydBdvKeb8
Watch a two minute preview of Mark reading from Sonnets to Orpheus here:
