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NO READ-AROUND THIS WEEK!
Next Read-Around is 9/26/2024 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

This week I offer two short poems for inspiration that share the theme of encountering strangeness. The first, Czeslaw Milosz’ Encounter concerns the strangeness of memory in a fragment offered out of context but with surprising details. The title suggests there was something special about the moment with a red wing in the darkness, the hare dashing suddenly across the road, the man pointing. The moment is depicted like a still life painting. Could the hare be running for its life from a hawk? The narrator never says what happened, except that it happened long ago and both the rabbit and the man are no longer alive. Milosz leaves the red wing in the darkness hanging in the air. Is there soemthing in our memory fragments to run from or to catch? The second poem, Self-Portrait by A. K. Romanujan, offers an encounter with the strangeness of oneself from an oblique glimpse passing by a mirrored shop-window. If you stop to look at the reflection, you will see yourself embedded in the window display with goods clamoring for your pocketbook as you peer out from the surrounding see-through world. I have a practice of taking shop window reflection photos. I love the superimposition of the world outside and the world inside as if crossing the optical divide that separates me from life. I love to capture such scenes, especially when there is a wild mix of things in the display appearing as if inside of me and spreading out around my reflected self. It symbolizes life flowing through my veins and a dazzling array of inner resources.

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at
dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today, neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movements, rustle of
pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

—Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by Lilian Vallee
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49457/encounter-56d22b901521b

Self-Portrait

I resemble everyone
but myself, and sometimes see
in shop-windows,
despite the well known laws
of optics,
the portrait of a stranger,
date unknown,
often signed in a corner
by my father

—A. K. Romanujan
https://allpoetry.com/poem/8613975-Self-Portrait-by-A.K.-Ramanujan

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about a strange encounter.

  2. follow Milosz’ structure by describing a few details from a past incident without specifying the context.

  3. Journal or write a poemwith a question or questions that might follow the stem sentence, “I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder….”

  4. Journal or write a poem about some little things that are now gone from your life. One way to do this is to recall your room (or the room you slept in as a child) and describe objects that were there. Pick some forgotten objest as the subject of your writing.

  5. Journal or write a poem about encounteringyourself as as granger, either through a mirrored refelction or in some behavior that is “not like you.”

  6. In what way might you”resemble everyone but yourself?” In what way might your iner world be a dazzlig array of disparate things and a jumble of resources?

  7. Journal or write a poem offering a portrait of you from the perspective of your mother or father or a sibling or someone else who knew you or knows you well.

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