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. Register Here:

Note: Next Read-Around is Thursday, May 18, 2023
at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Almost every new age thinker and self-improvement guru promotes designing your life by creating a vision of what you want and who you wish to become. One big side-effect of this way of planning is the creation of a wide, and often disheartening, gap between where you are now and where you want to be or should be. Lucille Clifton offers a kinesthetic alternative in her poem, Won’t You Celebrate With Me, inviting the reader to celebrate what she has “shaped into a kind of life.” Unlike the target of a distant vision, shaping is more immediate, requires contact with what is, and puts the work of our becoming into our own hands. Rather than working toward a model, we work from what we have, shaping our lives out of the clay from which we are made into the life we embody. Perhaps this is the source of her resilience against the forces that thwart us, which, when living in the gap of a distant vision, might well kill us.

  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

Won’t You Celebrate With Me

Won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
Born in Babylon,
both non-white and woman
what did I see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that every day
something has tried to kill me
and has failed

—Lucille Clifton
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50974/wont-you-celebrate-with-me

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem describing the “shape” of your life

  2. Clifton notes she shaped a “kind of life.” What kind of life have you shaped for yourself?

  3. Do you have model for your life? Journal or write a poem about your model (or lack of one) and how it helps and hinders you.

  4. “Being born non-white and a woman,” Clifton had no model she could look to except to be herself. In what way might you be a model for yourself?

  5. Journal or write a poem about being on the bridge between starshine and clay. You can use the stem sentence ‘Here on the bridge between starshine and clay, I… “ Or consider what the bridge of your life goes between.

  6. Who would you want to celebrate your life with you? Clifton also uses the contraction won’t (will not) you rather than will you.. Journal or write poem using the prompt, “Won’t you…: and follow where it leads.

  7. Clifton describes a small gesture or posture of “one hand holding tight my other hand.” When might you use such a posture? What might it mean? Or pick some small physical habit, like the way you curl your fingers when walking or how you hold a pen when writing and let that be your prompt. Or notice this in another and describe it.

  8. Journal or write about what has tried to kill you, or thwart you in some way, and failed.

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