Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Roundup is HERE!
So, I have a secret I'm ready to share: I'm in the process of creating a digital course called Wild & Precious Writer. (Mary Oliver fans will know exactly where this title comes from!)
My goal is to provide for others (you!) a path to higher joy and authenticity in your writing to create real change in your life and in the world. I'll be sharing things that have worked for me on my journey—ideas and practices that I've collected over the past twenty years from sources like The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez, and many others.
With that in mind, I want to invite you along to help me create the course you would want. You can help me right away by answering the following question in comments:
If you could wave a magic wand to make your biggest writing challenge disappear, what would that be?
Thank you for your help! I'm VERY excited about sharing so many of the things that have been transformative in my life... stay tuned! You, too, can become an official Wild & Precious Writer when I open the course in early 2022. :)
And now, please join me in celebrating the season with some excerpts from "Ode to Autumn" by Pablo Neruda... and then please leave your link below!
Ode to Autumn
by Pablo Neruda, trs. by Ilan Stavans
Autumn is modest
like the woodcutters.
It's hard
to remove all the leaves
of all the trees
of all the countries.
Spring
sewed them together on the fly
and now
one must allow them
to fall as if they were
yellow birds.
It isn't easy.
There's not enough time.
One must run down all
the roads,
speak languages,
Swedish,
Portuguese,
speak in the red tongue,
the green tongue.
One must know
how to be quiet in all
the languages
and everywhere,
always
allowing
the leaves to fall,
fall
allowing them to fall,
fall.
***
And here is my latest ArtSpeak: Four Seasons poem! Thank you for reading.
Autumn PuzzleI will not ask
whybecause life has taught me
about cycles and seasons.
Today I will fit myself
into the mystery—
how time eats daylight,
and I am always always
grasping for more;
squirrels hoard exactly
as much as they need;
and maples, god bless them,
give away every
last
jewel.
-Irene Latham
