Workshop #1

On April 27, at 14:00, Rainis and Aspazija House invite you to the text workshop "Workshop #1", where poet Linda Mence (Gabarajeva) will explore, examine, and focus on the smallest details of a particular poem together with the workshop participants.

In the text workshop "Workshop", visitors, along with poet Linda Mence (Gabarajeva), will examine the branching of the poem, explore the associations created by individual words and their combinations, focus on the smallest details found in the text - they will view the poem in magnification. And they will explore how it is possible to read, allowing the poem to take time, inspiring to speak, write, or draw - they will view the poem in slow motion.

The workshop on April 27 will be the first session of the text workshop. Each time, one text will be examined. This time, workshop participants will work with a contemporary author's poem that has recently been translated into Latvian. Poetry readers, writers, and those who want to find new ways to engage with the text are invited to the workshop. Please bring a notepad or sketchbook and a pen.

The workshop will be led by poet Linda Mence (formerly Gabarajeva). Linda writes poetry for adults and children, translates from English, and also writes essays and prose. In her free time, she learns to weave baskets. About the workshop, she says: "To immerse oneself in poetry, one must trust. Sometimes a poem convinces me from the first line that it will be good for me. Sometimes it's the author about whom I've heard good things, and therefore I trust that the poem will be kind to me. And sometimes the poem surprises somewhere in the middle or only on the third reading. The reading is influenced by everything I know about the text and its author, as well as what the poem is not responsible for - whether I've slept well and had coffee, or I'm on a train or waiting in line at the dentist's office. While reading, the world of the poem transforms from a closed space into an open, but by no means transparent environment. Although the text unfolds in time and its reading can be perceived as a similar journey or river, it is a river, it is a path that branches out. Words and their combinations evoke associations, they push and scratch, surprise and frighten. The paths the poem takes lead to confusion and disappearance, and that's the magic - to wander, not to arrive."

Admission fee: 2.00 euros; for students, seniors: 1.50 euros.