Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Great Things Have Happened” by Alden Nowlan, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write your first thoughts in the shadow of this poem.”

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

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 October 11th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Great Things Have Happened by Alden Nowlan

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

"Great Things Have Happened" by Alden Nowlan, from What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread. © Nineties Press, 1993. Reprinted with permission

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “For What Binds Us” by Jane Hirshfield, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a small triumph.”

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

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 September 30th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

For What Binds Us by Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

Copyright Credit: Jane Hirshfield, "For What Binds Us" from Of Gravity & Angels. Copyright © 1988 by Jane Hirshfield and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: Of Gravity & Angels (Wesleyan University Press, 1988)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Stripping and Putting On” by May Swenson, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about putting on light, like clothes.”

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

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 September 27th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Stripping and Putting On by May Swenson

I always felt like a bird blown through the world.
I never felt like a tree.

I never wanted a patch of this earth to stand in,
that would stick to me.

I wanted to move by whatever throb my muscles
sent to me.

I never cared for cars, that crawled on land or
air or sea.

If I rode, I'd rather another animal: horse, camel,
or shrewd donkey.

Never needed a nest, unless for the night, or when
winter overtook me.

Never wanted an extra skin between mine and the sun,
for vanity or modesty.

Would rather not have parents, had no yen for a child,
and never felt brotherly.

But I'd borrow or lend love of friend. Let friend be
not stronger or weaker than me.

Never hankered for Heaven, or shield from a Hell,
or played with the puppets Devil and Deity.

I never felt proud as one of the crowd under
the flag of a country.

Or felt that my genes were worth more or less than beans,
by accident of ancestry.

Never wished to buy or sell. I would just as well
not touch money.

Never wanted to own a thing that wasn't I born with.
Or to act by a fact not discovered by me.

I always felt like a bird blown through the world.
But I would like to lay

the egg of a world in a nest of calm beyond
this world's storm and decay.

I would like to own such wings as light speeds on,
far from this globule of night and day.

I would like to be able to put on, like clothes,
the bodies of all those

creatures and things hatched under the wings
of that world.

"Stripping and Putting On" by May Swenson, from Nature: Poems Old and New. © Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. Reprinted with permission.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the piece “Attached to My Adhesion” by Eugenie Lee, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a scar.”

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

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 September 20th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Attached to My Adhesion by Eugenie Lee

Credit: Eugenie Lee

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Bone Appendix” by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write a letter about growing pains to your child self.”

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 September 13th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Bone Appendix by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

After Alexandra Petrova

Trace your son’s left hand
           against construction paper
                     with a nontoxic marker,

           teaching him the edges
of his bones. Then fill
            the space between

                     with what shines
           or powders, glitter,
crushed cheerios, flecks

           of skin even, teaching him
                     his bones remain
           in spite of it. Let him try

to fit his fingers in the contours,
           teaching him his bones
                      keep growing. And when

           he makes two fists, afraid
his body can’t keep up
           with what’s inside, clenching

                      hard as teeth to keep his bones
           just as they are, to keep them
from sprouting out, tell him

           of  Ukraine’s oldest apple tree
                      that grows its branches
           low into the ground

until they drink the soil—
           an indiscernible colony
                      of roots or eternally new trees.

           And when he falls
asleep pressed to your chest,
           trace his right hand

                      against the tree-house
           rib cage it first grew, teaching him
the endlessness of bones.

Source: Poetry (December 2019)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Blue Velvet” by Eileen Chong , posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about shoes to walk in another world.”

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 August 9th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Blue Velvet by Eileen Chong

I bought her those shoes. I was the only one
who ever bought her shoes. I knew her
size. I knew what she liked. She’d always
picked on me, but I was the only one
who ever bought her shoes
in her size that she liked.

She had told her oldest son
that when death called
for her, she wanted to be wearing
those shoes. He said
they were house slippers, too flimsy
for her walk in the other world.

Yet in the end, afraid, he gave me
the shoes – hand-embroidered
with phoenixes decked out
in sequins, gold thread, green
beads for eyes – I sheathed
the old lady’s cold, rigid feet.

Thank god I had bought them
in blue, not red. She would not
have been allowed to be buried
in anything red. Not unless we wanted her
to come back from the dead, shuffling
in those slippers, going to the courtyard
to beat the night’s blankets
in the dawning sun.

Credit: Eileen Chong

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the painting “The Smoke” by Matthew Wong, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about being lost in deep thought.”

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 July 29th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

The Smoke by Matthew Wong

Credit: Matthew Wong

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “When We Were Whales ” by Stan Heleva, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about turning suffering into song.”

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 July 26th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

When We Were Whales by Stan Heleva

We knew nothing of the legs we had shed
As we swam in the Peruvian desert
Nor how they had become unnecessary
Not an inkling of immanent return had we, nor again why.

We had only silent ballet, no music
Turning ourselves over in the murky sun
Only to dart in to tear more flesh from our fellows
Our tusks glinting dully, our beards stained with blood.

Our name, Leviathan Melvillei, was unknown to us
And might have remained so for all the good
It has done dead whale or dead poet: we had no tune I repeat
We taught them only to cry in pain; they made of it a song.

Credit: Stan Heleva & Michelle Paul
From Michelle Pauls’ Forthcoming play, “It’s Complicated….This Gift of Life.”