Growing older is a unique "tell" of our character. Its soul-searching grief work invites greater integrity as we come to relinquish previous certainties in exchange for questions about life's meaning and direction. Pulitzer poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019) braved the thickets of her own existence to uncover depth and purpose residing alongside uncertainty and the threat of impermanence. We'll explore how her lyric poetry might help us to reimagine ourselves as we journey into the future. Poems will be handed out in class and read aloud before we talk about them.

Moderator: Cecil Albright has led 12 previous poetry discussion groups for OLLI. He uses a reader-centered approach in which participants put forward subjective understandings of the poem by sharing personal associations evoked by the text. The group discussion process makes the poet's voice a contemporary one and yields a collaborative sense of the poem's meaning.