November 2022 Haifa Workshop

“Dreams and Other Paradoxes”

Half a year after the much-enjoyed Netanya Residential Workshop in May, we gathered in Haifa at the home of our workshop coordinator, Elana Dorfman. After over-registration followed by cancellations, including several last-minute ones due to illness, there were 17 attendees plus the two presenters. That proved to be an excellent number for an enjoyable work-shop with time for everyone to be heard!

Elana provided us with a warm-up exercise, which was followed by two longer-than-usual presentations, each of course with a writing exercise and time for participants to read the poems written during the exercise period:

“Fearful Symmetry: Poetic Expressions of the Coexistence of Opposites in the Mind,” presented by Iris Dan, of the Haifa group.

Iris led us on an examination of examples of this “Fearful Symmetry” in the Biblical text and in later religious thought, in the poetry of William Blake, Pablo Neruda, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Yehuda Amihai, and the Romanian poet Nicolae Labiş, as prelude to an exercise on examining it in our own minds.
“The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of: the play within a play,” presented by Wendy Blumfield, also of the Haifa group.

After a brief introduction to Jungian dream theory, Wendy presented examples of “dream poetry” by Lord Byron, John Donne, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, followed by a writing exercise.

As usual following in-person workshops, we produced a printed chapbook of poems written during the workshop, or edited versions of them, which may be ordered directly from this website (20 NIS + 5 NIS for postage, per copy), using our PayPal Me account, by clicking on the following button:

If you don’t see the button, click on this link: PayPal.me/VoicesIsrael.

You will be asked to log in to your PayPal account and then fill in the amount to send Voices Israel and a note saying what the payment is for. Please also send an email to whoever is distributing them (currently, our President, Judy Koren) giving your current postal address.

We sorely missed our “resident photographer,” Judith Fineberg, who had to cancel; but here are a few photos taken by cellphone to give an idea of the occasion: