From our Partner, Engaging the Senses Foundation
On bringing unique and vital programs into being
Engaging the Senses Foundation (ETSF) is honored to partner with the California Arts Council on the premier publication of DREAM magazine. Focusing as we do on collaborative partnerships, as well as our own film projects and outreach that bring the visual arts, music, literature, and poetry to the public in innovative, impactful ways, we are excited to witness the influence we know DREAM will have in California and beyond.
In this first edition, we want to highlight another one of our partnerships that exudes the same quality of excellence. ETSF is in its second year of a flourishing collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Arts & Humanities / College of Letters & Science and the Arts Research Center in the development of a new program entitled Poetry and the Senses. This is a multi-year initiative established under the leadership of Anthony Cascardi, Dean of Arts & Humanities, in which poetry — including poetic and mindful modes of engaging with the world — becomes a central focus of creative investigation. About the partnership, Dean Cascardi said, “Engaging the Senses Foundation has been a most generous partner and collaborator with UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. Our shared commitment to the value of poetry in its broadest scope and to the importance of embodied knowledge has made for what I hope will be an enduring relationship.”
The program was launched in August 2019 under the direction of the ARC’s Interim Director Natalia Brizuela. In 2020, ARC Director Julia Bryan-Wilson, ARC Associate Director Lauren Pearson, and ARC Program Director Laurie Macfee did a remarkable job of growing the initiative under exigent circumstances. According to Professor Bryan-Wilson, “The Arts Research Center’s Poetry and the Senses program for 2020 could not have been more timely and relevant — with its emphasis on emergency, our events and our fellows collectively grappled with the pandemic, wildfires, and an overdue reckoning around racism. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Engaging the Senses Foundation as we build on this dynamic initiative which models new ways of writing, creating, and caring within and beyond UC Berkeley.”
Throughout 2020, the eight multidisciplinary fellows chosen for the year were tasked with holding the space of poetry and resilience in virtual meetings serendipitously focused on the theme of emerge/ncy, with the concept of “emergence” as a focal emphasis. Working apart yet as one, they crafted unique personal projects, explored a range of artistic responses to crisis, participated in provocative readings with thought leaders such as U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, and created a chapbook of work written while on fellowship, due in 2021. Their work was shared in person and online with the public, and published in the New River Journal and the Poetry Foundation blog.
In January 2021, the initiative welcomed another group of exciting new fellows. Each Poetry and the Senses cohort is made up of undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and community poets, a uniquely horizontal format providing equal footing across age and experience level. During spring 2021, ARC celebrated poetr and explored the theme of emerge/ncy: voices to carry with us in times of crisis, with group readings every month, including, most recently, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Natalie Diaz, and Aja Monet, followed by the 2021 Spring Fellows final reading, and flash readings by two dozen Bay Area poets, released online. In the fall of 2021, a third set of fellows will be welcomed on board around the theme of coexistence: exploring mutuality, synchronicity, interdependence, and care — from enlivening exchanges between beings, to the porous line between animate and inanimate, to the challenges of living together on our planet, to the uncanny shivers of coincidence. For further information on ARC’s website, visit https://arts.berkeley.edu/poetry-and-the-senses-2/.
“We are thrilled to partner with California Arts Council and UC Berkeley / ARC as they bring unique and vital arts and humanities programs into being,” said Mona Abadir, Chief Executive Officer of Engaging the Senses Foundation and UC Berkeley alumna.
“We hope to expand the links between the concentric energies of creative thought leaders by working together to turn shared dreams into a powerful reality.”
Engaging the Senses Foundation is an educationally oriented nonprofit created to support and sustain people in utilizing their senses — sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing — to create a consciously lived life. Its primary emphasis is on “waking up” through the arts, with a particular focus on poetry, the “universal language that the heart holds with nature and itself,” which through storytelling can fulfill our primal human need for beauty and serve as a portal to mindfulness, inspiration, connection, and transformation.
ETSF serves this mandate by creating events, films, and series based on the lives of great poets, poetry documentaries, and mindfulness teachings that prepare us for the truths contained in the arts and poetry. The foundation partners with literary organizations, art councils, universities, and other culture and art-based institutions and nonprofits to bring literature, poetry, mindfulness training, and art to underserved communities, schools, and the public at large.
Through the creation of programs and events that illuminate the intersection of art, awareness, and compassion, Engaging the Senses Foundation honors the indivisibility of the human spirit and nature, and attends to the nurturing of both.
Learn more at www.engagingthesensesfoundation.com.
DREAM is California’s newest arts and culture magazine, published by the California Arts Council, the state’s arts agency.
The annual publication features voices and stories from across the state, sharing a glimpse into the depth of impact of creativity and cultural expression in a region as large and diverse as California. The premier issue explores what it means to dream, introducing artists and culture bearers from communities throughout the state.
Visit www.arts.ca.gov/dream for more information.
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