Writing From The Inside Out: Week 8 Prompts
The Thing Is by Ellen Bass
Please join in for the May 2020 Writing From The Inside Out read-around sessions on Friday afternoons (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). If you have not registered, click the button below; and if you have registered, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email.
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Read the poem
Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you
Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…
Use the selection of prompts below the poem
Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…
Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes
Final Class starts Friday, May 29, 2020 at 4:00 PM,
My Thoughts
Ellen bass’ poem, “The Thing Is’…” offers a great prompt for our final session of writing from the inside out for two reasons. First, she will be appearing at our very own Sacramento Poetry Center on the Monday night June 8 reading. Second, her theme of loving life in the midst of its cruelty and turmoil is perfectly suited to this moment in time. It’s challenging to find the courage to love life when so much of our world has been rent asunder by the virus, when there is such gaping polarization in the world around us, and when catastrophic “acts of God” appear on the news nightly. So, there’s every reason to shrink into our shells and feel the whole world is going to hell in a hand basket. If anything can provide solace in such times, it is poetry, which offers a language that truly can hold opposites and give us a sense of dignity in the face of disaster. We may not always “go placidly amid the noise and haste,“ in these trying times, but poetry can restore us to our own desiderata (Latin for “things desired”) and, as Ellen Bass points out, even beyond to integrate the loss of what we hold dear into our lives.
The Thing Is…
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, it’s tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
—Ellen Bass
Week 8 Prompt Menu
Write a poem starting from the stem sentence: The thing is…
Write about the things (people, places, events, objects, etc.) you hold dear. What does it mean to hold them dear? How do you hold things dear inside of you?
How do you try to protect the things you hold dear? How you have endured the loss of them?
Write an ode to grief
Write about your way of loving life. What is it like to, or what allows you to, love life even when it is seemingly cruel, unjust, and frightening?
Write an ode to love. Or use the title of my poem below as a writing prompt, and write about something you love using the stem: What I love, more than anything, is…
Write from whatever else in the poem inspires you or from elsewhere in your life.
More Than Anything
To love,
not a little or lightly,
not in passing,
not like the love
of marmalade on toast
or the delight
in a clear view
out a window stripped
of its winter skin
and polished squeaky clean
but to love something
more than anything,
more than spring
loves the first blossoms,
more than ocean waves
love the shore, coming again
and again, without fail
day in and day out;
to love after love has died
and only the burnt edges
of our vows remain,
all the words gone to ash,
to love when we have become
a discarded thing,
our once beheld beauty
now a monarch on the peg
collecting dust,
and yet to love, again,
not a little or lightly,
but spread like marmalade
across our lifetime
because we finally have
that clear view
and we see the blossoms
in each other
instead of the wrinkles
on our winter skin.
© Nick LeForce,
All Rights Reserved
Previously published in:
Bearing Witness