Planting Seeds of Mindfulness & Poetry: Edna St. Vincent Mallay

Join Jerrice Baptiste in the Beatrix Farrand Garden for a short guided visualization for stillness and engaging the senses, then a reading of two poems from well-known poets for inspiration and discussion to start a conversation about how practicing mindfulness can help us arrive at writing poetry. Jerrice will provide the prompts for creative writing and the opportunity for the participants to share their work. We will place emphasis Edna St. Vincent Mallay who made her mark on New York state coming to fame in the Roaring Twenties as a poet and activist. Vincent, as she liked to be called, read to sold-out houses, immensely admired for her sensuous beauty, for her intense imagination. She bucked society’s oppression of women, at 23, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, a moving tribute to her mother. In 1925, she married. Vincent and her husband Eugen bought a 700-acre rolling farm in upstate New York, and the couple reveled in country life at Steepletop and Vincent died on October 19, 1950.