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:

Next Read-Around is 11/30/23 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 below

  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

Of all our five senses, taste is the most immediate. To taste something, we must literally take it in.  We use idioms like “a taste for something,” to mean a preference or to indicate liking; and “acquired taste“  to mean a liking for something we had to develop usually by overcoming an initial distaste. Taste is such a primal sense that it serves as a metaphor for testing out any experience in a small dose, like a beginning painting class to “get a taste of it.” And we describe experiences in terms of primary tastes, sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory. In Ellen Rowland’s poem, The Way The Sky Might Taste, she uses taste as a metaphor to “eat" the sky and take it in more deeply than we might with sight, sound, smell, and touch. It is a delicious poem and an inspiration to consider how other things might tast as a prompt for writing.

The Way The Sky Might Taste

The bite a of softened cardamom pod
in a spoonful of Tikka Masala.
Tang of copper, caperberry
other berries, too:
a rasp, a blue, lingon, elder
lit with lemon, thin slice of moon.
The breath of a first kiss
sweet and deeply surprising.
Dirt on the youngest tongue, the red
flesh of a torn fig eaten
straight from the tree,
the constellation of wings
as champagne leaves the flute.

Ellen Rowland
https://www.instagram.com/rowland.ellen/?hl=en

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write you own reply to the title: the way the sky might taste.

  2. Replace sky with another intagible thing. What is the taste of the night, of longing, of jazz; of freedom; of everyday miracles?

  3. Describe a time when you wanted to test out some kind of experienct to “get a taste of it.” Or consider what is on your “sampler” list of things you still want to get a taste of or try out in life. Or write about something that you have developed a taste for—you had to overcome an initial dislike orgetused to for a while before you started really enjoying it.

  4. What imagery and sensory experience comes to mind with a “thin slice of the moon?”

  5. Take your favorite dish and describe every nuance of taste you can extract from it. Caution, you may have to write while eating!

  6. Journal or write a poem contrasting tastes like the taste of different berries.

  7. Describe your first kiss in sensory terms, including the actual taste of lips and the metaphoric taste of that kiss. Branch out and include other senses.

  8. What is the first thing you remember ever having on your tongue?

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