What Poetry Can Teach Us About Being Human

We’re so excited to bring one of our favorite recent lectures to one of our favorite new cafés in the city, Double Black! Join us for a night of connection, tasty drinks, big cookies, poetry, and reflection. ♥️ 📖 What can poems teach us about living through wreckage and wonder? We spend our lives shuttling between mundane duties and the biggest questions of existence: how to love, how to grieve, how to stay curious in a difficult world. For centuries, poets have turned to verse to sit with those questions rather than rush past them, and in this talk, poet and critic Dean Rader argues that poetry is not a luxury but a way of paying attention to what it means to be alive. Dean Rader is a San Francisco based poet, essayist, and professor at the University of San Francisco, whose debut collection won the T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize and who later received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. He is also the creator of the popular web series Poems that Changed Me. In this talk, Dean will guide us through accessible poems from the 20th and 21st centuries that explore love, death, doubt, belief, regret, and awe. You do not need any background in literature to follow along. He will show how poems can help us live inside hard questions instead of chasing tidy answers, and why the biggest ideas in life often arrive in just a few lines. ✨ ​🕰 Event Details ​What should I expect? 6:30-7:30 --> arrival & chats 7:30-8:10 --> lecture 8:10-9:00 --> q&a and more chatting ​Who's invited?