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 12/21/23 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

Snow covers the ground here in Normal, Illinois and temperatures have been hovering in the single digits for days. Times like these make me long for days wamr enough to sit outside out on the porch.  Once it was a favorite pastime, almost all over America: sitting on the front porch with friends, shooting the breeze and chatting with neighbors as they passed by. It was a time when you knew your neighbors, knew the strays that roam the streets, knew the patterns and rhythms of the neighborhood. Travis Mossotti captures a bit of that neighborhood feeling in the poem, On Being Here. Massotti’s poem also has contrast. Two homebodies contrasted against a stray dog. The casual sense of time on the porch contrasted against the phrase “you and I know time is valuable.” The notion that even a poem is not enough knowing in every moment we give up a little of what makes us us; but isn’t that exactly what makes those moments so precious? Clinging to what we have left of ourselves as time and weather steal our bodies and our vitality. Why not then celebrate being here, whether on the porch with friends or inside next to the fire?

On Being Here

Let’s move out to the twin rockers
on the porch. I’ll give you the one
facing west, and we can watch together
the yellow lab as he trots down the street;
no longer rambunctiously lean, he wears
the solid form that old, well fed dogs possess.

We are but minor rockings to him, somewhere
in the periphery, barely extant, like any
confident neighborhood stray, he keeps
his nose up, his pace steady and fixed,
on his way, perhaps, to a memorable hydrant.
You and I know time is valuable, and a poem

can only give so much, but if you’ve got
a minute, wait here with me that much.
I promise you any moment now a breeze
will cross over the porch to steal a little
of the stuff that makes us us, and in this way
we’ll both be giving ourselves up to the wind.

—Travis Mossotti
https://www.travismossotti.com

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about the experience of being with people on the porch, especially the front porch. Or choose some other open social context in your family of origin or your past experience.

  2. Journal write a poem about a stray dog or feral cat, noting its habits and considerhow itsees the world.

  3. Massotti switches Perceptual Positions, by commenting on the dogs peripheral view of the two humans rocking. Journal write a poem that includes a switch of perceptual positions. Stretch yourself and consider how some other species might see a situation—for isntance, how do bees, with their multiple eyes, see the situation?

  4. Journal  it write a poem using contrasting experiences

  5. Use the title, On Being Here, as your prompt and riff on that idea.

  6. Mossotti uses the phrase: the stuff that makes us us. What is the stuff that makes us us? The “us” could be all humans or a subgroup (as Americans, what makes us us?) or a particualr group of friends.

  7. What does it mean to give yourself to the wind? Journal or write a poem using that as the prompt idea.

  8. Journal of write a poem celebrating “being here.”

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