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 7/25/2024 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

Some people wake up ready to go and jump out of bed into the day. For Most, however, waking up disoriented is relatively normal. There are degrees of it. The most common is the mild disorientation from waking with a foggy residue of sleep before wakeup rituals. Most everyone has experienced, on rare occassions, the moderate disorientation of waking up uncertain of time or place or both. This usually happens when traveling and sleeping in an unfamiliar place and passes quickly as we re-orient to where we are and re-assemble our memory of how we got there. Tomas Tranströmer’s poem, The Name, describes the most extreme form of disorientation: losing a sense of time and place and losing a sense of one’s self as well. Thankfully this extreme is rare and also passes quickly unless induced by trauma, drugs, or disease.

How do you make the transition from sleep to wake? Have you ever experienced times of moderate to extreme disorientation as mentioned above?

The Name

I got sleepy while driving and pulled in under a tree at the side of the road. Rolled up in the backseat and went to sleep. How long? Hours. Darkness had come.

All of a sudden I was awake, and didn’t know who I was. I’m fully conscious, but that doesn’t help. Where am I? WHO am I? Am I something that has just woken up in a backseat, throwing itself around in panic like a cat in a gunnysack. Who am I?

After a long while my life comes back to me. My name comes to me like an angel. Outside the castle walls there is a trumpet blast (as in Leonore  Overture) and the footsteps that will save me come quickly quickly down the long staircase. It’s me coming! It’s me!

But it is impossible to forget the fifteen-second battle in the hell of nothingness, a few feet away from a major highway where the cars slip past with their lights dimmed.

Tomas Tranströmer
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/tomas-transtromer
Loenore Overture #3 Beethovan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRhwyzJABvI

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem describing your transition from sleep to wake and wake up rituals.

  2. Describe a time, if you had one, when you slept in a car for whatever reason.

  3. Describe a time when you were too tired to stay awake and had to stop what you were doing to rest.

  4. Journal or write a poem about a time when you woke up and lost track of time or place or both. Describe the situation, the experience, and how you re-oriented.

  5. Our name is a very powerful anchor for ourselves. Journal or write a poem about your name. What does your name mean to you? How does the sound of your name affect you?

  6. Have you ever changed your name or had a different name, like a nickname, in a different context or were called differently by different people? How do those different names change your sense of self? Consider having a dialogue with the different versions of yourself based on the differing names.

  7. Journal or write a poem from an observer position about yourself. Pick some every day moment or activity and describe it in the third person (or whatever your preferred pronoun: He/him; she/her; they/them); or by reference to your name.

  8. Tranströmer describes the return of his name coming to him like an angel and the return of himself coming down a staircase declaring “It’s me coming! It’s me.” Journal or write poem about a time you lost yourself and how you returned.

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