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Note: Next Read-Around is June 15, 2023 at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Poetry is a wonderful tool for articulating experience, transforming language into an invitation-only VIP event for the reader by detailing simple acts, by mining the depths of sensory observation, and by tugging at the heart strings we share in common. Francis Ponge was known as a “poet of things” —his poems typically anchored in objects, breathing life into things, exploring the inner world of objects, or expressing the depth and breadth of an encounter with them. Something as simple as opening a door becomes an intimate dance, a partner in passage, a choreograph of martial artistry, a step into a new world.

His poem, The Delights of The Door, expands that tiny fraction of time between the reach and the release of a doorknob in the process of stepping through, elevating a common moment in the lives of common people into a realm beyond royalty. We commoners, unlike kings and queens, who always have doors opened for them, must grapple with barriers they never encounter. Ponge’s poem implies, to me, that those of us born without silver spoons must find the abdominal fortitude, the guts, to make our own entry and exit into new surroundings. And we can do so with pleasure, having practiced the push against tall barriers so often in our daily life, learning all the while without knowing it, that we can take life in our for own hands and make our own way.

  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

The Delights of The Door

Kings don’t touch doors.

They don’t know this joy: to push affectionately or
fiercely before us one of those huge panels we know so well,
then, to turn back in order to replace it — holding a door in
our arms.

The pleasure of grabbing one of those tall barriers to a
room abdominally, by its porcelain knot; of this swift fight-
ing, body to body, when, the forward motion for an instant
halted, the eye opens and the whole body adjust to its new
surroundings.

But the body still keeps one friendly hand on the door,
holding it open, then decisively pushes the door away, clos-
ing itself in – which the click of the powerful but well oiled
spring pleasantly confirms.

—Francis Ponge
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/francis-ponge
Translated by Robert Bly

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem detailing the experience of opening a door.

  2. Write a list of joys that “kings” or the privileged might consider beneath them or the would fail to experience because others take care of it for them.

  3. Journal or write a poem contrasting the conditions that would get you to open a door affectiionaltely versus fiercely.

  4. Consider a time when you grappled with a barrier—some thing in life or society that you had to find the abdominal fortitude (the guts) to get through.

  5. Journal or write a poem about encoutering something new, that particular moment when “the eye opens and the whole body adjusts to its new surroundings.”

  6. Ponge invites us to linger in the last moment, as “the body still keeps one friendly hand on the door, holding it open, then decisively pushes the door away,” before stepping into the new. Write about what you might hold on to and what you might let go of as you make a transition in life.

  7. Journal or write a poem describing something (Ponge’s click of the door shutting) that confirmed that you had had successfully completed a transition.

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