If you wish to attend the \ read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email.

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Please note, due to my travel schedule: the next read-around is March 30, 2023

My Thoughts

Although poetry uses all the senses in its expression, it is primarily an auditory craft, a compilation of words and sounds that sing to the heart. Nepo’s poem could be considered a methodology for writing poetry through the act of listening people open, listening things open, and listening the world open. In this way, poetry is a genuine conversation with life that puts us on equal footing with all of the “otherness” around us, whether it be a person, a tree, a passing cloud, or an invisible virus. The real challenge is to listen beyond ourselves, to get out of our own chatter, and hear the poetry of life speaking to us.  I know the tendency to impose my ideas on the world, to make my interaction with life a one-way monologue, often either claiming it should be a certain way or arguing against the injustice when it isn’t, rather than dropping my agenda and listening it open so that it can teach me, sometimes chastise me, often amuse me, and frequently touch me.

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts in the column on the right

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Self-Employment
by Mark Nepo: The Way Under The Way

Everyone we meet is a friend 
carrying a gift. Our job, to listen 
the friend open, the way the sun 
listens a stalk into a peony.

Every day has a gift, a piece of food 
to keep you going, a truth hidden 
in the corner to remind you of your life 
about to be lived, a cloth someone 
discarded that will keep you warm. 
Our job, to love the piece 
of gift we find.

The hardest thing is to keep 
looking when your heart is broken, 
to keep listening when your body is 
hurting and violence is all around. 
But this is when the gifts are closest, 
in the warmth of soup that finds 
you coming out of the cold.

Prompt Ideas

  1. Write about a time when a friend, or someone you know, "listened you open?”  

  2.  What allows you to step into a kind of “invitational presence” where you are able to listen people and things open?

  3. Write about a time when you had a difficult and honest conversation with someone. What gave you the courage to engage honestly or to listen openly? What stirs you to "listen yourself open" to your own truth or "listen the other open" to hear their truth.

  4. What truths are hidden in the corner that hint at the life you are about to live? 

  5. Aside from the work you do for a living, what is your job in life? What are you employing yourself for, or to do, in life?

  6. If every day has a gift, what is today’s gift? You can use the prompt: Today's gift is… or, as a stretch, write about a gift that came in the form of a hurt, or violence around you, or a broken heart. 

  7. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.