If you wish to attend the April 2020 Friday 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.

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My Thoughts

Although poetry uses all the senses in its expression, it is primarily an auditory craft, a compilation of words and sounds that sing to the heart. Nepo’s poem could be considered a methodology for writing poetry through the act of listening people open, listening things open, and listening the world open. In this way, poetry is a genuine conversation with life that puts us on equal footing with all of the “otherness” around us, whether it be a person, a tree, a passing cloud, or an invisible virus. The real challenge is to listen beyond ourselves, to get out of our own chatter, and hear the poetry of life speaking to us.  I know the tendency to impose my ideas on the world, to make my interaction with life a one-way monologue, often either claiming it should be a certain way or arguing against the injustice when it isn’t, rather than dropping my agenda and listening it open so that it can teach me, sometimes chastise me, often amuse me, and frequently touch me.

  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 in the column on the right

  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

Self-Employment
by Mark Nepo: The Way Under The Way

Everyone we meet is a friend 
carrying a gift. Our job, to listen 
the friend open, the way the sun 
listens a stalk into a peony.

Every day has a gift, a piece of food 
to keep you going, a truth hidden 
in the corner to remind you of your life 
about to be lived, a cloth someone 
discarded that will keep you warm. 
Our job, to love the piece 
of gift we find.

The hardest thing is to keep 
looking when your heart is broken, 
to keep listening when your body is 
hurting and violence is all around. 
But this is when the gifts are closest, 
in the warmth of soup that finds 
you coming out of the cold.

Prompt Ideas

  1. Write about a time when a friend, or someone you know, "listened you open?”  

  2.  What allows you to step into a kind of “invitational presence” where you are able to listen people and things open?

  3. Write about a time when you had a difficult and honest conversation with someone. What gave you the courage to engage honestly or to listen openly? What stirs you to "listen yourself open" to your own truth or "listen the other open" to hear their truth.

  4. What truths are hidden in the corner that hint at the life you are about to live? 

  5. Aside from the work you do for a living, what is your job in life? What are you employing yourself for, or to do, in life?

  6. If every day has a gift, what is today’s gift? You can use the prompt: Today's gift is… or, as a stretch, write about a gift that came in the form of a hurt, or violence around you, or a broken heart. 

  7. Research the vocabulary of COVID: the language used around it (like “bend the curve,” “flatten the curve;” “confirmed positive cases,” “lockdown,” “shelter in place,” etc.) and use those phrases to inspire a poem (that may or may not relate to covid).

Here is an example of my own effort to listen COVID open:
A Candid Conversation With COVID

I was struck by how alike we are,
blinded by our desire, working
to shape the world for our own purpose
and how love's demand for a sacrifice
gets flipped around, twisted into
a mistaken act of consuming another
rather than risking our own disappearance
in the emptying of all need, which
is the only way to answer the question
I thought was for the other.

I left the interview, shaken to the core,
by what I saw in the mirror and
by the answer that shattered the glass. 

© Nick LeForce, All Rights Reserved

I had to walk for days through bewilderment,
until I was saturated in it, until every ounce
of my heart was laden with curiosity,
before I could sit and face the alien
with only a longing to learn its desire,
to honestly ask the simplest of questions:
“What do you really want?"  

We spoke through the glass wall, and
even then, the creature needed the mouth
of a host to speak through and a machine
to vent the breath it syphoned off.  

I gasped with a sudden sense
of deep sorrow at living a half life
and this unspeakable yearning
to complete oneself through another
even if it meant going down with the ship.