No one creates in a vacuum. This space is dedicated to sharing pieces that are shaping our practices and deepening our understanding of each cycle’s theme. It will be updated bi-monthly with new readings during this active cycle of practice.

The Role of the Poet: An Interview with Solmaz Sharif by Zinzi Clemmons

Thinking about language as a means to know, language as a means to obscure; “the truth beneath the terms”; personal as political, poetry as political, what isn’t political?; war, wartime, historically gendered lines of war; undercurrents of violence; surveillance states; to resist calcification; exilic states of being; generational rifts; moments, movements, the momentum to keep moving; the body, the frame, looking; learning from living poets, from each other; learning to teach; conceptual practices; all-caps as power, as imprint; creative influences; “what our nearnesses are”

“Interactive :: House Saints” by Hala Alyan

Thinking about form / format; what the eyes do on the page; prayer; what’s passed down; ancestral portals; bodies of land, bodies of water, bodies of being; the multiplicities of meaning; time, and return; transformation / transmutation; “The dead are not dead.”; the spirit; the door; the movement of all things, the blue in all things; what home sounds like in the mouth

“Lines Composed While Watching My Mother Buy Tomatoes” by Bee Morris

Thinking about the private / the public / the private in public; mortality, the mortality of everything; a closeness in kinship; to savor the simple; the mystery, blue mystery, the mystery of aliveness; how time becomes visible around us, in us; preparing, (preparing what?), preparing together

“Moving at the Speed of Trust” by Sun Ho Lee

Thinking about: ways to visualize; ways to interact with writing, with art; ways to have a conversation with something / pieces have a conversation amongst themselves; reading in different ways / reading for when we can’t read; slowing down to the speed we need; kinship and kindreds; creating within community; trusting the in-between, the margins, the not quite there…yet?; the intimacies of spaces where we share our work; guideposts; reassurances; showing up; what connects us to each other?; what connections are wiry and strong, what connections snap?; attention to detail, attention to each other; to ask, to keep asking, to forever ask so that we continue to learn

“Meditations in an Emergency” by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Thinking about: the value of slow practice; how a poem changes over time, how the way we read a poem changes over time; how it hits, how it hurts; the lines that echo across years; “I wake up & it breaks my heart.”; the multiplicity of feeling, to break and be broken while striving to heal; humanity, humanity in the details; to keep feeling, feeling in the heart; the dream, our dream, of collective care

“Remedy for Social Overexposure” by Sandra Cisneros

Thinking about: balance / finding the balance; being in nature, with nature; being without expectation / being in our senses; stillness, quiet; regulating the nervous system; seeking what heals us; a remedy, a salve; to move against the harshness of the world; to ground and reground; allowing a slow down; our affinities; crisp white, soft white; the moonlight, the moon, the moon in a bowl sleeping beside us

“In the Garden with Ocean Vuong” from The Pink House with Sam Smith

Thinking about: truth in simplicity; the places that ground us; the places we’re witnessed / the places where we’re seen; “writing is the art of misunderstanding”; what is finished work? / the life work has once it’s left the writer’s hand; “you can be vulnerable and still survive”; vulnerability as a natural state; the intimacy of conversation, of being in conversation; food / music / language as a collage of connection; houses as homes; creating a community space for creation; learning outside of institutions; "survival is not an aftermath", "survival is a creative act"; the vulnerabilities of deep appreciation, of saying it, sharing it; types of intimacies; soft prompts; gateways to memory;  moods and musicality; framing your work on your own terms; women elders, queer elders; surviving with yourself intact 

All Fours by Miranda July

Thinking about: doing what we want / judgements about doing what we want; freedom - floaty and frothy; the vulnerability of dance, of movement; moving however one wants; the mundanity and morose characterlessness of meal planning for children - extra protein waffles; plush wool carpeting; pressing our fingers against a vintage coverlet filled with flowers, birds, all things “feminine”; what it means to be a multi-hyphenate; having a sense of humor about it; how we engage with our own curiosities; how we choose to communicate; engineering private escape(s); types of loneliness and/or aloneness; types of intimacy and/or intimacies; feasts of sumptuous detail; emotional honesty; sheer possibility; the exquisiteness of surprise

“The World Has Need of You” by Ellen Bass

Thinking about: “What if you felt the invisible / tug between you and everything?”; (we do); our instincts; legacy or lineage?; what follows; what we can or can’t imagine; spaces on the edge; a light when we can’t make out what’s around us; embodiment; what’s learned through the body, what’s passed down through the body; “It’s a hard time to be human.”; prayer; prayer as motion, as action, as liberated of language; the liminal; the thinning veil; the aliveness of the world; the rawness of feeling, of articulating the feeling, of staying with the moment; attentiveness / attention; porousness; freedom in the wind, the grounding of gravity; what connect us — to each other and to everything; what’s visible; what’s invisible; the value of the invisible; the invisible hands at work

Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, Edited by Branden W. Joseph and Drew Sawyer

Thinking about: the archive; what’s transferred through paper, through the physicality of paper; print as a portal through time; collaborators; artists and artists groups; context / contextualizing; wells of inspiration; dreaming into a space; making art for ourselves, making art in community, making art for each other

“Vulnerability Study” by Solmaz Sharif (again)

Thinking about: what it means to stay present in a poem for a week / a month / a year?; what lines do we keep coming back to?; what images call to our attention?; what happens when we share the poem again–with each other, with you, within different circles of closeness?; what does vulnerability mean to you?; shared with others, what does that connection feel like?; the proximity of our faces; types of intimacies; the color of a bowl, the gift of water, of access to water; how do our imaginations add more to the scene?; how is this a kind of porousness?; love, as action, as promise; undercurrents of violence; war; what’s left?; the skeleton of a building; a sediment; how histories move through us, how stories move through us, how the past moves through us; “a wall cleared of nails / for the ghosts to walk through”

“Revolutionary Letter #68: Life Chant” by Diane Di Prima

Thinking about: continuance, continuity; moments of clarity; spell casting, ritual; reciting poems aloud as spell casting, ritual; repetition / the comfort of repetition / repetition without redundancy; humanity in the details; poetry everywhere, alive, in the turquoise ocean, in sisterhood, in our own simple breath; poetry as balm; the multitudinousness of life; the richness of life; the details!; reciprocity; relationality; bell hooks’ All About Love; looking up at the night sky: the stars, the planet-like stars, the moon as it changes; writing, gathering, making something; “we begin the work / may it continue”; may it continue

I Saw a Beautiful Woodpecker by Michał Skibiński

Thinking about: assignments; the archive; humanity in the details; mapping the subtle shifts / the not-so-subtle shifts around us; attentiveness; the practice of handwriting / the impact of the handwritten; handwriting as image; image as image; what an image can provoke; truth in simplicity; histories held and continued on the page