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:

No read-around this week.
Next Read-Around is 9/7/23 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  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

My Thoughts

I know there are cowboy poets and hunters of game that write verse. Killing animals, especially for sport, strikes me as inhumane. Although I know poetry has strange bedfellows and can find a way into the aura of any human experience, I would not have considered gun shows, shooting ranges, and hunting trips as lessons in writing poetry before reading Elizabeth Knapp’s poem, Portrait of the Poet As A Child. I was also about 10 years old the one time my father took me hunting with his brothers. I had no lessons in the handling of a gun, they just handed me a rifle, as if I should know how to use it, and told me to walk with them fanned out across a wooded field searching for deer, rabbit, or any other “prey." That whole time, I recited to myself to “keep them safe." Fortunately, no animal appeared and I was relieved. Through Knapp's poetic eyes, I can re-imagine that experience by asking the question: what did they (my father and uncles) teach me that they did not know they were teaching me? And the answer is clear: They were not teaching me how to hunt. They were actually teaching me how to pray.

Portrait Of The Poet As A Child

What my father didn’t know when he drove
ten-year-old me in the bed of his pickup truck

to gun shows & shooting ranges, initiating me
into the art of the hunt, was that he was actually

teaching me how to write poems, how to sit
& wait patiently at dawn, scanning the frozen

landscape for the slightest rustle, a form
emerging from the brush, & then how to

move without moving, resting the long barrel
on the ledge of the blind’s dark window, sighting

through the scope that thing I wanted most —
his approval — then taking a deep breath

& holding it while squeezing the trigger. Oh,
the sound the animal makes when it falls.

Elizabeth Knapp
https://elizabeth-knapp.com/

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about a child hood experience that may have been your own lesson in writing.

  2. Use the prompt, “what my father (mother, parents, grandfather, grandmother, etc) didn’t know when (insert experience) was that he/she was actually teaching (Insert lesson).

  3. Journal or write poem about what you might be hunting for in life. How has that changed over time? What were you hunting for as a child, a teenager, a young adult, or adult?

  4. Describe a recurring experience with your family from childhood and how the ingredients in that serve you now.

  5. Journal or write poem about what you did as a child to gain your parents approval.

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