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 5/1/25 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 poems in Victoria Chang’s book, The Trees Witness Everything, are hypnotically surreal, dreamy, ghostly apparitions wandering through the unconscious spreading seeds to sprout from the dusty ruins of an ancient temple. The way she writes makes me think she’s closer to her own mind than anybody I know. If you would like a delicious enigma, you have to read her; I mean, really read her: the way birds read sky; the way grass reads Earth. And then, to understand, at least for me, I had to nurse wounds I didn’t know I had. When I sat down to write this, I noticed, for the second time, that the second hand on my Tiffany inspired clock is stuck at half past, hanging like an arrow pointing to the ground, catching its breath. Nothing moves, not even dust. Dust—that is what I crumble into when she touches me— fertilizer for  seed. 

The poem, Marfa, Texas is from part two in the book, one of two sections devoted to longer poems. Most of the book is populated by poems written in the terse, Japanese syllabic form of a Waka: typically sequenced in lines of 5–7–5–7–7 syllables. Although she sticks to the syllable count of 5 and 7, she sometimes strays from the sentence sequence. Here is her Waka, In the Open, with the book’s title embedded in it:

Weather is wet, it
doesn’t have joints. How snow just
becomes rain, what’s that
change called? Trees witness everything,
but they always look away.

Her poetry does that: witnessing something and looking away; with the panache of casual depth, a then deer leaping out of the corner of your eye.

Marfa, Texas

Here, there are grasses rolled
into  dry  moons,  then carted
off on   trailers  to the edge of
the   rain.   Here,  there  is  so
much   sky   that   even  birds

get   lost.    Oh,   to  be   loved
the  way  the  day  loves   the
night.   See  how  slowly  they
separate?   All  day  long   the
trees  move,   each  leaf  in  a

different   direction,  as  if  by
the work of fingers on a body.
How  many times our  bodies
imagined  by  another   mind.
How   many   times  the   day

imagined  the  night.  Once  I
loved  a  man  so  much that
when he didn’t love me back,
I  closed  my  eyes and drank
a    whole   bottle    of    night.

How  I   felt   night   rush  into
my  body.  Then  out  through
my skin as envelopes.  At the
time I only felt pain, but years
later,   all  I  remember  is  joy,

the  kind  of  love  that seems
ground     off      of     a    moon.
Perhaps such love cannot ever
be   returned,   except  in   the
imagination.

—Victoria Chang, From The Trees Wintenss Everything
https://victoriachangpoet.com

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem using a place as your prompt as Victoria Chang does with Marfa, Texas. You can use the name of the place as the title and then open with, Here, there are…

  2. Pick any line or phrase from Chang’s poem and use it as your prompt. Can you see the dry moon on the face rolled hay in a field? What might become of you if you drank a whole bottle of night?

  3. Journal or write a poem celebrating the slow change of day into night or vice versa.

  4. Write about something that once was painful but you now remember is joy.

  5. Write 3 short poems using the Waka form of lines with 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, or some variation. They do not need to be related, but notice what happens when they are placed together on the page.

  6. Journal or write a poem about someone you loved that didn’t love you back.

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