I spent this past March in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York promoting Hurrah’s Nest and A Penny Saved. I gave readings, a lecture, and workshops. I wanted to share some of the poems that came out of the two workshops I taught in Brooklyn at the Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon and Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

On March 17 I facilitated the following workshop: What’s Going On?! Have you been moved to write a poem in response to what you have seen on the evening news or read in the papers? In this workshop we will transform newsworthy items into poems that reflect our distinctive point of view with language that compels us to pay attention. Bring a story or article you would like to make into a poem.

Here is what Esther Louise had to say about the workshop: “Thank you for Sunday. . . .You showed me how to prompt a poem out of an article. Wonderful, just plain wonderful.”

the shrink
for arisa who showed me how

how many feet do i need
after i’m all grown up
and collecting since before?
how many feet do i need
when ads did their jobs well?
will these chairs hold hips
in pairs and table settings
feed multi-mouths?
if i count shoes, how many
pairs can any pair wear?
how many hats cover a head?
with books lined up from surface
to surface, side to side,
and art covering all other ends,
making painted backgrounds
forget their color?
how many feet do i need
for clothes that stretch
and define decades?
how large is 3600 square feet?
how small is 420 squared feet?
when i make naked walls,
and strip all cases,
can a foot shrink and
be small again?
when i hide my bed upright,
can a foot shrink and be small
again? when i give away my books,
my art, and recycle my clothes,
use only my needs during
the course of one year?
can a foot shrink and
be small again?
how many feet can
i shrink before i am
just six feet under all?

Here is the article that inspired the poem: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/living-with-less-a-lot-less.html?pagewanted=all

On March 27, at Hampshire College, I facilitated Split A Part: A Conversation and Writing Workshop: In this workshop, we will dialogue about how we, as writers, approach difficult and vulnerable-making subject matter: race, sexuality, religion; politics?those hot topics that spur the desire to write. Yet when we get to the page, we are often confronted with our own self-consciousness. What new idea or point of view can deepen the conversation? How to artistically enter into something that feels bigger than the individual? Writing exercises will offer participants a way to start; to approach topics and subjects that may intimidate them as writers, and find that through embracing one?s self?voice, history, and experiences?as a source of intelligence, we see who we are and what we put forth as distinctive, new, enlarging, and necessary.

One of the Hampshire participants, who would like to remain anonymous, had to say this about Split A Part: “Thank you for the powerful workshop tonight–the questions you guided us through were really generative for me. I especially appreciated the emphasis on tuning in to how we were feeling in our bodies/ where we feel things. Thank you also for sharing your work with us and for cultivating a space open to risk-taking and exploring vulnerabilities.”

Here is the prose piece she created during our time together:

I am not saying the tears that are in my throat, even though I’ve had a lot of practice learning how to listen them out of me.

I am not saying that I’m scared and sad to see you and nervous.

I feel myself rubbing my own arm, saying its okay to feel— and not know why. I linger. Your cough. Smoke. Franzia. Graduation. A short season. Black holes where I don’t know why I lived in so many places growing up. I’m feeling the summer I lived with you and those few weeks you were so depressed you hardly left your room. Black sheets on your bed with the curly-Q metal headboard. Chain-smoking. Smoke stale in everything, settled.

I felt “daughter” and how that word feels weird to me, how you gave me my breath, my back, but were maybe never a parent. That feels like a sin to say. It keeps occurring to me—what if your ex husband moved here to live with his son after he gets out of jail and suddenly this town isn’t mine anymore and it becomes really dangerous. I’m going to see you here, in a month, two.

I know things but there isn’t much language for my knowledge to follow. Smells like pine on the wind, when it’s warm out, but you can’t quite locate it for sure.

I only share my silence with people who know silence. And when I do, I do it slowly.

I know your cheek against mine. The piece of river glass I gave you, you gave back to me wrapped in copper wire.

I want to thank all the folks you participated in these workshops–the willingness to go through this challenging process of interrogating your subjects, writing from your bodies, and being willing to following me along the way, taught me a lot about my abilities as a teacher and a poet. It is more than sharing what I love to do, this was an opportunity to understand what I do, how I do it, and then put it into language, into a practice so that others can replicated in their lives. I was a part of an exchange of creative energy and it will fuel me during those times when I feel drained and uninspired.