Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem “Song for the Turtles in the Gulf” by Linda Hogan, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about secret importance.”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday June 4th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

“Song for the Turtles in the Gulf” by Linda Hogan

We had been together so very long,
you willing to swim with me
just last month, myself merely small
in the ocean of splendor and light,
the reflections and distortions of us,
and now when I see the man from British Petroleum
lift you up dead from the plastic
bin of death,
he with a smile, you burned
and covered with red-black oil, torched
and pained, all I can think is that I loved your life,
the very air you exhaled when you rose,
old great mother, the beautiful swimmer,
the mosaic growth of shell
so detailed, no part of you
simple, meaningless,
or able to be created
by any human,
only destroyed.
How can they learn
the secret importance
of your beaten heart,
the eyes of another intelligence
than ours, maybe greater,
with claws, flippers, plastron.
Forgive us for being thrown off true,
for our trespasses,
in the eddies of the water
where we first walked.


Copyright © 2014 by Linda Hogan. 
From Dark. Sweet.: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2014). 

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem “Nothing Wants to Suffer” by Danusha Laméris, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write what the stars see while looking down.”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday May 28th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

“Nothing Wants to Suffer” by Danusha Laméris

Nothing wants to suffer. Not the wind
as it scrapes itself against the cliff. Not the cliff

being eaten, slowly, by the sea. The earth does not want
to suffer the rough tread of those who do not notice it.

The trees do not want to suffer the axe, nor see
their sisters felled by root rot, mildew, rust. 

The coyote in its den. The puma stalking its prey.
These, too, want ease and a tender animal in the mouth

to take their hunger. An offering, one hopes, 
made quickly, and without much suffering.

The chair mourns an angry sitter. The lamp, a scalded moth.
A table, the weight of years of argument.

We know this, though we forget.

Not the shark nor the tiger, fanged as they are.
Nor the worm, content in its windowless world

of soil and stone. Not the stone, resting in its riverbed.
The riverbed, gazing up at the stars.

Least of all, the stars, ensconced in their canopy,
looking down at all of us— their offspring—

scattered so far beyond reach.



Copyright © 2021 by Danusha Laméris. 
Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 9, 2021, 
by the Academy of American Poets.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem “They Don’t Love You Like I Love You” by Natalie Diaz, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about wait or weight.”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday May 24th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

They Don't Love You Like I Love You
by Natalie Diaz

My mother said this to me
long before Beyoncé lifted the lyrics
from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,

and what my mother meant by
Don’t stray was that she knew
all about it—the way it feels to need

someone to love you, someone
not your kind, someone white,
some one some many who live

because so many of mine
have not, and further, live on top of
those of ours who don’t.

I’ll say, say, say,
I’ll say, say, say,
What is the United States if not a clot

of clouds? If not spilled milk? Or blood?
If not the place we once were
in the millions? America is Maps—

Maps are ghosts: white and 
layered with people and places I see through.
My mother has always known best,

knew that I’d been begging for them,
to lay my face against their white
laps, to be held in something more

than the loud light of their projectors
of themselves they flicker—sepia
or blue—all over my body.

All this time,
I thought my mother said, Wait,
as in, Give them a little more time

to know your worth,
when really, she said, Weight,
meaning heft, preparing me

for the yoke of myself,
the beast of my country’s burdens,
which is less worse than

my country’s plow. Yes,
when my mother said,
They don’t love you like I love you,

she meant,
Natalie, that doesn’t mean
you aren’t good.

 

 


*The italicized words, 
with the exception of the final stanza, 
come from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song "Maps."

Copyright © 2019 by Natalie Diaz. 
Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 20, 2019, 
by the Academy of American Poets.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session we gathered to observe the visual art piece “Swiss Made (Edition 2)” by Vaclac Pozarek, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about seeking balance.”

Vaclac Pozarek is a Czech-born artist who has been living and working in Switzerland since the late 1960s. The richness and diversity of his body of work is evident in the various media he chooses to work with: primarily drawing and sculpture, but also collaging, photography, scenography and exhibition design, and book design. In his visual artwork and installations, Pozarek tries to find points of contact between art and everyday objects; ceaselessly querying the ways in which art is presented to us. His graphic work underlines his fascination with typography and architecture, calling to mind building plans and architectural façade embellishments. His research combines the principles of Constructivism, concrete art, and Minimalism; creating a unique synthesis of these distinctive movements.

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday May 17th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem “Breakage” by Mary Oliver, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about the tattered or the whole.”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Wednesday May 12th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

“Breakage” by Mary Oliver,

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
       full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.


Source: Poetry (Poetry Foundation, 2003)

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem “In Search of an Umbrella in NYC” by Juan Felipe Herrera, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was to begin your writing with the phrase “In search of…”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday May 10th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

In Search of an Umbrella in NYC” by Juan Felipe Herrera

You were having a stroke - i
did not grasp what was going on you
standing almost half ways up half
ways down the colors what were they
i was frozen both us us staring
woman with parasol behind me
are you drunk she said facing
you and the deli behind you      you
leaned shivered dropped your coat
parasol
white
reddish flowers
brain    sweat eyes your eyes moving
seeing me behind me what
black man brown man no man   no
colors you
pushed something away  i was
in a rush  en route to big time
poetry Biz  duded up ironed shirt
the rain was in my way i was not
breathing    you were losing   yourself i
was gaining something   you
stumbled out of your coat  unrolled
a stranger’s language from your lips
pushed your      feet down to
the depths  of the tiny sidewalk even
though it was infinite  burning
ahead of me  to
the food truck at the corner yellow chips
corn violet green sugar drops
fiery torn packs flaring down   and
across the street under the cement i
was moving silent alone a crooked line
going nowhere a woman
touched your hand you were lying
on the dirty shoe ground swimming
up to her i      wanted you
            i was a man
running for cover from the waters
i could not                    lift your suffering
it was too late              the current pulled
i was floating away  (i noticed it)
              you
were rising