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 4/3/25 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 poetry anthology, What the House Knows, edited by Diane Lockwood, is a collection of poems written about houses: childhood houses, abandoned houses, houses of hurt and healing, houses of love and loss. Marjorie Maddox’s Still Life Of House In Late March, in which the narrator views a house through the lens of an artist painting a still-life, is in the collection. Houses often have a stoic quality, standing still through the years, picturesque even when plain or in decay. In addtion to the artist’s view, Maddox personifies the house, adds a thrd perspective of the "us” inside, and it is all told from a fourth position: the outside narrator-observer, who is also a member of  the “us” inside.

A house offers many “takes.” Consider your house: the place you go in and out of; the place in which you cook, eat, clean, and recline; in which you laugh, learn, argue, drink, and be merry; in which you love and hide and feel lonely in the night; the place in which you sleep and dream and wake to a new day. Stand outside of it, as if you were looking at with a life of its own, both with you and without you, since you and before you. Look at its face, whether smooth and fresh or wrinkled and riddled with age spots. Consider how it has and has not lived up to its promise, how it has been treated and mistreated, used and abused, neglected, taken for granted, cursed, praised, trusted, and loved. Ponder it from different angles, from the breadth and depth of its own livelihood; from the zeitgeist of its origins, from the the stamp of its occupants. Consider what it has hosted, held, and contained; the secrets in its walls, the stories in its wear, and the view from inside and out of its windows. Then gather your observations and intuitions about what the house knows onto the page. And write!

Still Life Of House In Late March

A century old, she knows
how to pose, shutters not even twitching
in natural light as the artist tinkers
with perception, vandalizes the stark air
with voyeurism. She is naked
of snow, leaves, flowers,
but beautiful in her simple stance
among curved hills.

Maybe her weathered
boards will creek onto canvas
or a swallow peep through the brushstrokes
where a nest clogs a slanting chimney.
She is not saying, obedient
to the solemn man now sketching
wrinkles across her face,
reconstructing shadows
of memory,

While beyond his vision
I’m sure she day dreams of us
who are watching inside,
forever waiting to see
what she will tell of our lives still
moving and moving.

—Marjorie Maddox
https://verse-virtual.org/2023/March/maddox-marjorie-2023-march.html

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about a house from the perspective of an artist painting a picture of it. What style of art would suit the house (abstract, realism, impressionism, classic, surreal, etc.)

  2. Give the house a gender with preferred pronouns and a personality and write about the house using the pronoun.

  3. Consider the house in different seasons or different circumstances. Does it change its face or mood with the weather?

  4. Journal or write about the house from a variety of perspectives: teenager, neighbor, dog, police officer, tree, evangelist, bird on a wire; occupant, etc.

  5. Maddox's opening line describes the house posing for the artist. In what way does the house you choose pose for you as you write? How is it “obedient” to your sketching of it?

  6. Maddox ends the poem with the house day dreaming of its occupants, the “us” inside. What might your house day dream?

  7. Take any one or any combination of the above for inspiration. Or think beyond the human and describe the “house” of an animal or the den of a mythic creature.

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