Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at a scene/song Across the Universe – I Want You She’s So Heavy by Joe Anderson, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write about a heavy burden.”

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 August 8th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Across the Universe – I Want You She’s So Heavy by Joe Anderson

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem How to Be a Poet by Wendell Berry, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “What comes from the silence…”

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 August 5th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions

How to Be a Poet by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)
i   

Make a place to sit down.   
Sit down. Be quiet.   
You must depend upon   
affection, reading, knowledge,   
skill—more of each   
than you have—inspiration,   
work, growing older, patience,   
for patience joins time   
to eternity. Any readers   
who like your poems,   
doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   
the unconditioned air.   
Shun electric wire.   
Communicate slowly. Live   
a three-dimensioned life;   
stay away from screens.   
Stay away from anything   
that obscures the place it is in.   
There are no unsacred places;   
there are only sacred places   
and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   
Make the best you can of it.   
Of the little words that come   
out of the silence, like prayers   
prayed back to the one who prays,   
make a poem that does not disturb   
the silence from which it came.

Source: Poetry (Poetry)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Twenty-five participants gathered from various locations to read and discuss “The First Fish” from Ada Limón’s 2022 collection The Hurting Kind. We discussed how the word “[f]irst” (appearing in the title) indicates an important event. The poem’s speaker, calling herself “a barbarous girl”, recounts catching a fish with a gold circled black eye and “terrible mouth” in order to be called brave. Participants saw the situation as one in which the girl lacks power; the narrator now as a woman reflecting on the experience with regret.   

Later, four participants read aloud their responses to the prompt “Write about a first catch” and captured the group’s attention with accounts of: refusing to accept the doctor who her father saw as a “catch” and catching a theoretical physicist instead; catching a cold, which was feared to be COVID and being “voted off the island”; witnessing one’s self as being “the first catch”; and fishing as a child and wishing to ride away on the back of the fish that got away.   

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 29th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

The First Fish from The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón

When I pulled that great fish up out of Lake Skinner’s
		mirrored-double surface, I wanted to release 
	the tugging beast immediately. Disaster on the rod,
		it seemed he might yank the whole aluminum skiff
	down toward the bottom of his breathless world.
		The old tree of a man yelled to hang on and would
	not help me as I reeled and reeled, finally seeing 
		the black carp come up to meet me, black eye 
	to black eye. In the white cooler it looked so impossible.
		Is this where I am supposed to apologize? Not 
	only to the fish, but to the whole lake, land, not only for me
		but for the generations of plunder and vanish.
	I remember his terrible mouth opening as if to swallow
		the barbarous girl he’d lose his life to. The gold-ringed
	eye did not pardon me, no absolution, no reprieve.
		I wanted to catch something; it wanted to live.
	We never are the bottom-feeder, buried by the rosebush
		where my ancestors swore the roses bloomed
	twice as big that year, the year I killed a thing because
		I was told to, the year I met my twin and buried
	him without weeping so I could be called brave.   

Credit: Limón, Ada. “The First Fish.” The Hurting Kind. (2022) Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem Stars by Marjorie Pickthall, and took a close look at a James Webb image Cosmic Cliffs, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write about looking up.”

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 July 25th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

 Stars by Marjorie Pickthall

Now in the West the slender moon lies low, 
And now Orion glimmers through the trees, 
Clearing the earth with even pace and slow, 
And now the stately-moving Pleiades, 
In that soft infinite darkness overhead 
Hang jewel-wise upon a silver thread. 

And all the lonelier stars that have their place, 
Calm lamps within the distant southern sky, 
And planet-dust upon the edge of space, 
Look down upon the fretful world, and I 
Look up to outer vastness unafraid 
And see the stars which sang when earth was made. 

James Webb image Cosmic Cliffs

Credit: NASA.gov

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem The Dog Star by Tom Billsborough, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write about a ceremony of renewal.”

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

The Dog Star by Tom Billsborough

Sirius rising, seed of power..

Wind rode or tide rode
A reed boat sways the whole night,
Straining at anchor.

The papyrus dawn stretches.
The pale East trembles.
The priest too. Who knows.

Red sails tether

The dawn breeze.
The Nile renews her annual surrender.

Sirius rising, seed of power..
In this man's soul
What joy to compose its shell,
The hollow ritual! 

Credit: www.poemhunter.com

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Thirty-two participants engaged with The Artist by William Carlos Williams, posted below. We noticed first the form of the poem, which evokes Mr. T’s sudden movement—an entrechat—a performance on the page. In the discussion that followed we wondered not only “[w]hat goes on here?” (a line in the poem) but also: who does the title name? Is it Mr. T, the woman in the wheelchair who sees and applauds his scissored leap, the poet who performs the movement with words, or we readers, who bring our puzzle pieces from close reading and see all these possibilities?

Our prompt was: “ Write about a moment of unexpected beauty. or Write about a leap.” The prompted writing brought moments of beauty: traveling and asking where we are going; arrivals and departures, dogs and hummingbirds, the leap of a trout, a series of movements in ballet before a move to hospital corridors, a last kiss, and the generation of more than one unanswered question.

Thank you everyone for your participation in this evening’s narrative choreography!

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 15th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

 The Artist by William Carlos Williams

Mr. T.
          bareheaded
                    in a soiled undershirt
his hair standing out
          on all sides
                    stood on his toes
heels together
           arms gracefully
                    for the moment
curled above his head.
            Then he whirled about
                     bounded
into the air
             and with an entrechat
                     perfectly achieved
completed the figure.
             My mother
                     taken by surprise
where she sat
             in her invalid’s chair
                      was left speechless.
Bravo! she cried at last
             and clapped her hands.
                       The man’s wife
came from the kitchen:
            What goes on here? she said.
                        But the show was over.

Credit: allpoetry.com 
© by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we look a close look at the painting The Janitor Who Paints by Palmer Hayden, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write about two sides of yourself. ”

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 July 11th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

The Janitor Who Paints by Palmer Hayden

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem A Poem for Pulse by Jameson Fitzpatrick, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Where will we go?”

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 July 8th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

A Poem for Pulse by Jameson Fitzpatrick

Last night, I went to a gay bar
with a man I love a little.
After dinner, we had a drink.
We sat in the far-back of the big backyard
and he asked, What will we do when this place closes?
I don't think it's going anywhere any time soon, I said,
though the crowd was slow for a Saturday,
and he said—Yes, but one day. Where will we go?
He walked me the half-block home
and kissed me goodnight on my stoop—
properly: not too quick, close enough
our stomachs pressed together
in a second sort of kiss.
I live next to a bar that's not a gay bar
—we just call those bars, I guess—
and because it is popular
and because I live on a busy street,
there are always people who aren't queer people
on the sidewalk on weekend nights.
Just people, I guess.
They were there last night.
As I kissed this man I was aware of them watching
and of myself wondering whether or not they were just.
But I didn't let myself feel scared, I kissed him
exactly as I wanted to, as I would have without an audience,
because I decided many years ago to refuse this fear—
an act of resistance. I left
the idea of hate out on the stoop and went inside,
to sleep, early and drunk and happy.
While I slept, a man went to a gay club
with two guns and killed forty-nine people.
Today in an interview, his father said he had been disturbed
recently by the sight of two men kissing.
What a strange power to be cursed with:
for the proof of men's desire to move men to violence.
What's a single kiss? I've had kisses
no one has ever known about, so many
kisses without consequence—
but there is a place you can't outrun,
whoever you are.
There will be a time when.
It might be a bullet, suddenly.
The sound of it. Many.
One man, two guns, fifty dead—
Two men kissing. Last night
I can't get away from, imagining it, them,
the people there to dance and laugh and drink,
who didn't believe they'd die, who couldn't have.
How else can you have a good time?
How else can you live?
There must have been two men kissing
for the first time last night, and for the last,
and two women, too, and two people who were neither.
Brown people, which cannot be a coincidence in this country
which is a racist country, which is gun country.
Today I'm thinking of the Bernie Boston photograph
Flower Power, of the Vietnam protestor placing carnations
in the rifles of the National Guard,
and wishing for a gesture as queer and simple.
The protester in the photo was gay, you know,
he went by Hibiscus and died of AIDS,
which I am also thinking about today because
(the government's response to) AIDS was a hate crime.
Now we have a president who names us,
the big and imperfectly lettered us, and here we are
getting kissed on stoops, getting married some of us,
some of us getting killed.
We must love one another whether or not we die.
Love can't block a bullet
but neither can it be shot down,
and love is, for the most part, what makes us—
in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul.
We will be everywhere, always;
there's nowhere else for us, or you, to go.
Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you.
Around any corner, there might be two men. Kissing.

 Copyright © 2017 by Jameson Fitzpatrick.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Twenty-eight participants gathered to read and discuss Ada Limón’s “I Have Wanted Clarity in Light of my Lack of Light” from her 2022 collection The Hurting Kind.

After reading the poem I Have Wanted Clarity In Light Of My Lack Of Light from The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón (poem posted below), we commented on “the attack of the poem” with its barrage of sounds and images that echoed our experiences of the world’s “too much-ness.” The narrator’s references to “knocking in the blood”, “a sound that undoes me” and becoming “More sense, shake, and nerve” (i.e. more like a dog than a human) suggested an experience of post-traumatic stress disorder, perhaps that of a veteran. We questioned what it means to be brave in the face of the many current challenges that worry and wear us down.

Before we were prompted, “Write about a time you were brave” one among us offered a glimpse of light to the group with the words, “Look up” as a strategy that is both a physical act and a metaphor that can change our perspective. Several people read aloud accounts of bravery in the face of grave illness, grief, and a kidnapping. One participant shared a drawing of flowers and a gun’s trigger and double barrels, which reminded people of anti-war protest emblems in the 1960s.

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 June 29th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

I Have Wanted Clarity In Light Of My Lack Of Light by Ada Limón

Fireworks in the background like an incongruous soundtrack,
	either celebratory or ominous, a veil of smoke behind

a neighbor’s house, the air askew with booms.

The silver suitcase is dragged down the stairs, a clunk, another clunk,
	awkward wheels where wheels aren’t any use. Uselessness of invention.

There is a knocking in the blood that is used to absences but hates this part
	the most. The sudden buried hope of illusion.

Lose my number, sadness. Lose my address, my storm door, my skull.

Am I stronger or weaker than when the year began, a lie
	that joins two selves like a hinge. Sawdust in the neighbor’s garage

that smells of the men who raised me. What is the other world
	that others live in? Unknown to me. The ease of grin and good times. 

Once I loved fireworks so much that they made me weep without warning.
	I smoked too much pot one young summer and almost missed them

	until I simply remembered to look up. Gold valley crackling in chaos. 

Now, it is a sound that undoes me, too much violence in the sky.
	In this way, I have become more dog. More sense, shake, and nerve.

Better now when the etches in the night’s edges are just bats,
	Erratic and avoiding the fireflies. How much more drama

can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams.
	I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness.

Once I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger.
	I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

Pp.48-49. The Hurting Kind. (2022) Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.