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 9/12/2024 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

The rhythm of human life is marked by calendar days and seasonal changes, by the lock-step of habits and routines, by things we count on and expect to come around again and again: like mornings and mid-days and afternoons and evenings and days on and days off and so on it goes. How easy it is to slip into the haze of days and lose the subtle sense of life slipping by us. Then, one day, perhaps in the hollow of a fading summer afternoon when trees begin to shed their colored leaves, we are struck with a bittersweet sense that we are being pushed to the side of our own lives. Philip Larkin’s Poem, Afternoons, captures the sentiment beautifully.   First published in 1959, the poem catches a moment in the lives of every day people back in an era when gender roles and life stages were more clearly defined; when you could generally predict the lifestyle of many everyday people. Larkin uses those details to paint standard scenes from the 50’s/60’s as if in still life: mothers assembled at swing and sandpit, husbands standing in skilled trades, photo albums lying near TV’s. We may live in looser times but our lives are just as embedded in rhythms that sweep us along slowly pushing us to the side of our own lives.

Afternoons

Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons,
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husband in skilled trades,
An estate full of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places
(but the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

—Phillip Larkin
https://www.thepoetryhour.com/poems/afternoons

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about afternoons (or mornings or evenings, etc.). You can use the prompt, In the hollows of the afternoon… and write what follows for you

  2. Pick some public location (a park, a coffee shop, a gym, etc.) and journal or write a poem about the location and the people in it. Consider making up lives for the people you see there.

  3. Journal or write a poem about a change of seasons (summer fading into fall, fall hardening into winter, winter birthing the spring, spring blossoming into summer…)

  4. Journal or write a poem about the typical life as you might imagine it. Follow Larkin’s lead and use typical objects (like the wedding album), activities (estate of washing) or images (wind ruing the courting-places) to convey the life.

  5. Journal or write a poem about the sense of being pushed to the side of your own life (or someone else who is being pushed to the side of their life).

  6. Larkin talks about children intent on finding unripe acorns. What do you recall being intent on doing as a child? Or describe some typical outdoor activity that you did as a child.

  7. Journal or write a poem about the rhythm of human life as marked by calendar days and seasonal changes, by the lock-step of habits and routines, by things we count on and expect to come around again and again. How does that rhythm and those routines support or hinder your thriving?

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