read with us
This cycle’s theme poem is “Ode to Friendship” by Noor Hindi.
Where do we turn when we are grief-laden, when our structures have failed and we must create our own systems of support? How can we learn to value and nourish intimacy—within ourselves, with each other, within larger community? How can our creative practice attune our senses to these meaningful connections?
“Identity Politic Confessional: How we read (or don’t read) work by marginalized identities” by Noor Hindi
Thinking about collective resistance; (mis)reading / (un)reading; crying while reading as release, as recognition, as processing grief; the (im)precision of language, of translation; how we grant ourselves permission to write, visibly; visibility; the beauty of being in conversation with living poets; the importance of persistent questioning; “It’s all political”; the distance between our lived realities; acts of joy and survival “rooted in deep seeing”; the grass and the grass’ meaning, growing
“Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” by Ross Gay featuring Bon Iver
Thinking about thank you, thank you, as chorus, thank you; gratitude as an elixir for loneliness; tender devotional lists; reading aloud to one another, holding each other through it; adding music to the scene; driving off into a sunrise and smiling; soundscapes; birds in the springtime / the act of close listening for birds in the springtime; slow drip of honey, curve of a goose’s neck – all smooth and sweet; allowing emotions to water through us, weeping – take from this cup and drink
“The Lion Speaks: On the Potency of the Epistolary Form” by Daniel Black
Thinking about the song and rhythm of conversation; the musicality of language; the freedom of the epistolary form; to speak unabashedly, to write without pretense; the letter: container for memory, breathing time capsule, envelope of living voice; the legitimizing of our own stories against the grain of the victor, the will of the hunter; a private glimpsing of the naked heart
“Vulnerability Study” by Solmaz Sharif
Thinking about the shyness of strawberry blossoms before the fruit; breadth within brevity; the intimacy of observation; the quiet of our mirrored humanness; the key of our senses; a tension that holds form; the scrutiny / to live under the scrutiny; a violent undertow; our histories, breathing through the walls
“Transformation” by Adam Zagajewski
Thinking about the pause / what happens within the pause; our untold longings; rest as resistance, rest to recuperate, rest to refocus; quiet moments of observation; the sun, the heat of the sun; how the sky changes; what happens when we pay attention; a languageless poem, alive in the world
“Sometimes I can’t feel it, what some call beauty” by Diane Seuss
Thinking about writing as a form of appreciation, how we appreciate the world; a numbness, an oversaturation; histories in the landscape; storied pieces; stories unspoken; the sea and all it contains; the water, containing memory; what we name but cannot feel; what we feel but cannot name; poem obsessions; movement; a cold chill on a fleshy cheek; feeling as flesh or feeling as fleeting; what stirs within us, what stirs around us, what stirs within me
“The Voice Notes We Shared” — the season finale of Still Processing
Thinking about the fluidity of friendship; water as mystery, water as body, water a solace; voice across distance; “the texture of loneliness”; the ways in which we forget, the paths to remember; care-full catalogs of communication; to be in relationship with people, with place; a tending to, a watering, what it means to water.
“in lieu of a poem, i'd like to say by” Danez Smith
Thinking about slow texts as letters; group texts as connection; odes to friendship; showering small details with attention; collective lists; watching ourselves bloom and wrinkle together just to cheer each other on; nourishment versus satiability; to bite into something, to allow the juice to run down our arms; the sweet-sour honesty of love; turning the ripeness, softly, over and over again, in our hands—palming the delicacy of us
“Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild” by Kathy Fish
Thinking about naming, naming as a means to know; how unexpected language shifts our understandings; a sea buoy; slow processing; what keeps us afloat—and how; innocence in joy, joy despite the threat; the blessings of connections, the forms connections take; a spark, illuminating an agency within us, what lights up around us; an exhilaration; what exhilarates you?
“Spell for Grief and Letting Go” by adrienne maree brown
Thinking about divination, oracles, asking; asking our surroundings; looking up, looking around; feeling the air; allowing the pause; allowing the silence; allowing the water to hold, to carry; feeling though movement; talking through discomforts; activating sound; releasing stagnation; starting anew; honoring the past; expanding beyond; learning new laughters; learning lived stories of new friends; dance; what the body holds; moving the body to move what the body holds; poems; embracing the nonlinear; offerings to the earth
“Tigers” by Eliza Griswold, shared in Shira Erlichman’s newsletter
Thinking about ferocity; desire, and the fear of desire; longing and letting go; what happens when we hold on too tight; letters as a list of our loves; what we are able to offer each other wholeheartedly, what we aren’t; the ways we seek wholeness; seasons; landscape; liminal space; sky tigers / earth tigers, wondering: when we let go, which tiger possesses the strongest pull?
“The Gift” by Forugh Farrokhzad
Thinking about night; light; revolution; the darkness rearranged; the unknown, unknowing; transformation; rebirth; separation/togetherness; our becoming, together; a window of hope, climbing through a window of hope holding your hand; uncertainty; the void; odes to friendship; our kindreds as lamps that light our alleys; hair blowing in the wind
"It’s the Season I Often Mistake" by Ada Limón
Thinking about disorientation; a melding, a melting; the tremble of reciprocity and return; movement into being, gentle and slow; discomfort; solace in small moments; unspooling, a spilling of spells; a golden flutter; the whisper of wind that harkens change
“pillow talk” by Audrey Gidman
Thinking about attention begetting beauty; ephemerality; soft spaces; how language builds; what and how we share, and with whom; to ebb and flow / to hold and release; a letting go; a lightness; a levity of feathers
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Thinking about the intimacy of play; play as prophetic; intimacy of friendship; collaboration or friendship over romantic love → tripping up the status quo; intimacies outside of romantic relationship; types of love; devotion; skirts with pockets filled with notes only shared with friends; how we are tricked into romance but the actual romance of community; how to exist and multiply within it
“Creatures Abandoned by Time” by Jackie Wang
Thinking about dream poetics; the power of dreams; where we pour / pay attention; how we pray / show devotion; realities, coming into ourselves; layers, layering; plan(e)s of consciousness; attachment; seeds and their relation to ground; where are we?; who are we?; how memory flows and follows; what more, what more can we imagine?
surrender my softness
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.
This cycle’s theme poem is “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On” by Franny Choi.
Thinking about cycles of apocalypse (personal & collective), history’s (un)raveling, legacies of violence, ownership (land, bodies, narrative), language as a tool to speak & learn what’s silenced, tipping points / collapse / inertia, how do we live on a dying planet?, the myriad types of deaths, accountability & reckoning, erasure & memory, trauma, epigenetics, apocalypse as law, complacency in chaos, how do we process our collective grief through art?, interconnectedness / interdependence, the trees, the trees, the trees
“As Coronavirus Panic Spreads, I Went in Search of Wuhan’s Defining Dish” by Zoe Yang
Thinking about [viruses, racism, fear] as contagion; protective measures (practical or symbolic); living memory; infectious “American Narrative”; forms of panic; inaction paralysis; the body as signifier / container / belonging; variant homesicknesses; distance; boundaries; quarantine vs seclusion vs hiding; safety (or the idea of); the untranslatable; food as intimate as person, as place; isolation; calling out from open windows; movement of people, the imaginary, of wind; what it’s like to not touch the ground
“Cathy Park Hong on finding clarity through art & poetry within our political landscape”
Thinking about institutions / anti-institutionalism; social media as sharing, as access, as person-to-person; creating our own ways to move forward; “what is the efficacy of our work?”; the importance of process, of practice, of collaboration; what is the sustained power of protest?; activating from “grief to grievance”; to bear witness through art, through writing; to record, to reach out, to return to together
“A Space for Magnanimity: Talking with E.J. Koh”
Thinking about language as a living thing; hybridity; distance(s) within lineage; mothers vs mommies; blurring genres / histories / bodies / time; translation; “to speak of things that have never been spoken” i.e. naming as a means to know; the visual/emotional nature of text; the violence of colonialism; generational sorrow; memory + language alive in the body; the personal is political; multiple meanings/readings; simultaneity; reading as nourishment for creating; to open, to soften, unguarded + ready; the why: “the why is love”
“Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now” by Matthew Olzmann
Thinking about the inherited, tangible future; legacies of our (in)actions; recipes for solace among seemingly universal wreckage; to live daily at the tipping point; speciesism; connecting to + becoming ancestors; “love is an action”; transcendence; foresight; teaspoon joys on the tongue
“THE CRAFT OF WRITING: C Pam Zhang on Writing in a Time of Grief”
Thinking about bread, baking; “_________ is writing!”; lists; listlessness; work; (“you are worth more than your productivity”); personal tool kits; work; what holds my attention?; tenderness; grief; now what?; what is work?; the past where we could freely touch; the distance from the mountain allows us to see the mountain; groping through the cloud of it, this deep amorphous fog
“Do not make Grief your God” by Mahogany L. Browne
Thinking about daily rituals, recurring coffees; frequencies of grief; grief as a guest we honor and name; naming as a means to know; the shape of a name in the mouth, in the eyes, in the open air; the practice of expressing love across distance, of self love, of loving a tomorrow self; of fluid grief, of futures; to expand, feel, hold; to move; reciprocity, like fresh water; companion grief; shadow self; sun-bright and showing
Something I Saw: Kimberly Drew’s visual newsletter
Thinking about the brevity of our attention spans; the inability to read, to retain, to think a clear/complete thought; how we process the visual, quickly at first, then unfolding over time; the depth of an individual piece and the depth of a lovingly curated collection; proximity; our longing to be in the company of art, in a museum, in a living room together; the vibrancy of desire, of intimacy in all forms: letters handwritten with hand-pressed with flowers, inbox reminders, chatrooms, Zoom confessionals, shared laughs in the sun at a distance
beloved apocalypse
This cycle’s theme poem is “Etymology of butch” by K-Ming Chang.
Thinking about lineage the ancestries, to name as an attempt to know, consumption / to consume / to be consumed by [ — ], violence as or against creation, human as animal, body as home, ripe queering, (un)learning, our delicious fluidity of being—
“Why Writing Matters in the Age of Despair” by Lyz Lenz
Thinking about our private and collective despair; why and how we make art; nuance, the tangle, the hard questioning; creation against erasure; art as proof of our lived experience, of our enduring existence
“On Becoming an American Writer” by Alexander Chee
Thinking about memory and how we access memory; the bridge between language and association; our dead, our past, our ancestors; to live beyond lifespans; what’s been made for us, what, in turn, we make for them
“How our bodies domesticate/disaster: An Interview with Kristin Chang, Past Lives, Future Bodies” by Leona Chen
Thinking about how are we making art to save our younger selves?
“Ocean Vuong on being generous with your work”
Thinking about why and how we make; the intimacy of shared ideas; the importance of listening; to have the ambition to reimagine and arrive here: “Attention is the most common and purest form of generosity”
“Still, Somehow” by Hieu Minh Nguyen
Thinking about childhood; memory; the bone and the blood; the brutal and the beauty; tenderness; types of love; the clarity of grief; distance; watching; hope against all odds
“Perihelion: A History of Touch” by Franny Choi
Thinking about naming as a means to know; cycles; the moon; the phases of life; our hungers, desires; our distance, an unbecoming; the teeming world; a liminal space; how are we mirrors of the sky?
“There Is No Single Voice of America” by Elaine Castillo
Thinking about the power of untranslated language; audience; a truer representation; who are we writing for?; what opens to us, what can still be a kind of opening
“What Use Is Poetry?” by Meena Alexander
Thinking about this
“I Made Peace With My Body on a Sweaty Dance Floor” by Kimberly Drew
Thinking about spaces of celebration; creation; gathering; means of expansion; ways to get free; embodiment; going for it!; communing with each other, showing up as we are; “my body’s worthiness of love”
“How I Wrote ‘A Mexican Dreams of Heaven’” by José Olivarez
Thinking about what happens when POC enter those supposedly hallowed halls, those looming ivory towers, those gates? We may be ‘in,’ but what does that even mean? —Alana
Listen to Olivarez read this poem on the VS podcast in front of a live audience (starts at 29:40)
“Giving Up the Gaze: A Conversation with Sally Wen Mao”
Thinking about how to continue with levity amidst the grief, the struggle; how to view our creative work in our own definitions of fulfillment, of success; how to find each other; how to come together; this, this togetherness
“What Collecting 100 Rejections Taught Me about Creative Failure” by Kim Liao
Thinking about rejection; a humbling; what gains traction and how it changes, how it changes us; an “expertise” in failure; practice as commitment; a forging on; foregoing our expectations in the trust of growth
“Spell to Find Family” by Chen Chen
Thinking about how we find family — through fate, though choice; creation of new life, new family; relationships/how we relate to each other; power dynamics; embracing prismatic family in all the ways we arrive
“Envelopes of Air” by Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz
Thinking about correspondence, letters, envelopes of air; what we hold when we hold a letter; how we hold each other; collaboration; the tenderness of the page, our handwritten notes
“Who In American Is Allowed To Be Ordinary?” by Lisa Ko
Thinking about who gets to “assimilate”, what that means, and at what cost; who gets to be better than another?; how can we use our interdependence to lift each other up?; the simple right to be ordinary, in our unabashed selves, in this “spiked and complicated love”
“Sorrow Is Not My Name” by Ross Gay
Thinking about seasons of mud, of gravitational pull; a nighttime, a shadow; and then, the sweetness among the sorrow
“The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma as a Subversive Act” by Melissa Febos
Thinking about universal truths in personal stories; the telling, to decide to tell; acts of subversion against a patriarchy that aims to shame and silence; vulnerability as bravery; writing as art
“Speaking Tree” by Joy Harjo
Thinking about how to slow down and listen; unlanguaging; what language can/cannot say; interconnectedness with our world; “what shall I do with this heartache?”
“How Can Black People Write about Flowers at a Time Like This” by Hanif Abdurraqib
Thinking about tender and brief, this life, this love; the lines we return to: “Forgive me, for I have been nurturing my well-worn / grudges against beauty”; the temporality of our springs; this gorgeously crushing poem: take a handful of fleeting minutes to hold it, knotted, in your hands
“Etymology” by Airea D. Matthews
Thinking about etymologies; definition; self-definition; our names and those who named us; mispronunciation; names alive on the tongue
“I Don't Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We've Done to the Earth” by Fatimah Asghar
Thinking about the fever spring, a collapsing umbrella of catastrophe all around us; and also, the world’s small beauties at our fingertips
“'And Yet, We Meet There': On Resistance, Memory, and Transformation in Sarah Gambito's Loves You" by Rachel Ronquillo Gray
Thinking about the blurring lines between art forms; all the ways in which we’re nourished
“The Palace” by Kaveh Akbar
Thinking about the wilds of nature, of human nature; destructive pulls; poetry, of place; what home we can find on this Earth—and how?
“Beauty is not a luxury: a praise song” by Tamiko Beyer
Thinking about the intimacy of a newsletter, a quiet inbox moment that wraps us in story; a liminal space between the written and the read; dear friends at the fire; beauty is not a luxury, beauty is necessary; the combination of poetry, prompt, and recipe to carry forward so that we may “fill our cup [...] to fight another day” together
“Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy” by T Kira Madden
Thinking about the workings of memory, of how we remember; the mechanics of communicating the past; how to pour ourselves into our work while also leaving room room for the reader to inhabit, to wonder, to wander
“I Haven’t Masturbated in Five Days for Fear of Crying” by Eloisa Amezcua
Thinking about
how “sadness keeps us from doing things that make us feel good”; what pleasures have we been avoiding for fear of crying?; can addressing this question honestly allow our sadness its course, our joy to bubble like a cold spring to the surface?
“Dream Beyond the Wounds” by adrienne maree brown
Thinking about reframing the void of darkness into a possibility to dream; where are our support systems and how do we stay connected?; how can we use our resources and imaginations to take care of each other—and keep taking care of each other far into the future?
from “Feed” by Tommy Pico
Thinking about our personal, collective, planetary ecosystems; nothing is separate; a wild immediacy where the everything-ness of life floods our senses; how life is simultaneous, wet and layered, never static, never one thing at once
“Lines of Work: Five poets on their day jobs” by Molly Sutton Kiefer
Thinking about the gig economy, the hustle; re-writing our bios, asking ourselves how we spend our days; what is work?; what does work mean to us financially, emotionally, artistically?; how does paid work inform the work of artistic practice (and vice versa) and how can we be transparent about the work that occupies our days?
“Shira Erlichman Reflects on Odes to Lithium”
Thinking about the power of naming as a way to know; how vulnerability can weave our connections stronger; remembering to listen to our deep knowing, to allow our creative force to flow
“Regarding Columbus, Ohio” by Saeed Jones
Thinking about letters; intimate spaces of reflection; moving and how we move; following our happiness, wherever it leads; engaging with new meanings of our preconceived notions of “making it”; taking steps towards a joy that sustains our practices; love growing through the cracks of oppressive structures; there is kinship and caring outside of capitalism