Ah – the Sea first appeared on the web in the fall of 2022, with the first class beginning in January 2023. The site’s goal is to open people (both writers and readers) to all kinds of poetry, and to explore how poems achieve their effects (as opposed to what meaning they serve). Poetry can teach a way of being that is slower, more thoughtful, and more resonant than our day-to-day experience (especially in our current faster-than-ever digital world), and can perhaps be an antidote to our marketing-saturated culture. The hope is that this site will foster more truly respectful relationships, patience, and openness among those who come across it. This may be a vain hope. (Can poetry better us? Should it?) But when we engage with a poem, we enter a different space, one that’s often at odds with our regular experience.
There’s a secondary goal of experimenting with what’s possible for more challenging poetry and for deep reading outside of academia and its support structures.
The name of this site comes from a line in the Emily Dickinson poem “Wild Nights – Wild Nights!”
Ah – the Sea is run by Meg Hartmann, who has almost ten years of experience as a writing teacher and holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A longer bio is here or you can also see my LinkedIn profile.