If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 4/4/2024 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

My Thoughts

I had a hard time deciding to use William Carlos Williams poem, Danse Russe, for a prompt. To some, the poet’s joyful celebration of himself may seem narcissistic, impolite and even indecent. For others, it could be an invitation to a deep sense of self-acceptance and self-celebration. Either way, I’m guessing we all share a desire to be completely unburdened similar to the way Williams describes his Russian Dance.  If only we were free enough to take advantage of a private moment and be unabashedly forward in celebrating ourselves through the instrument of our body. The whole poem is construed around causal contingencies with three “if’s” describing this moment of joyful abandon, of total self acceptance, leading to the “then” in the form of a (rhetorical?) question: who could deny him? The reader is left to come to their own conclusion. By setting the scene so dramatically, Williams gives us a yardstick to measure our own degree of self acceptance. For many of us, there is a long list of conditionals that are seldom ever met before we might permit ourselves a genuine act of self-affirmation. Williams extends the invitation and leaves the rest up to us.

Danse Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

William Carlos Williams
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-carlos-williams

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about something that you enjoy doing when everybody else is gone

  2. What are your conditionals: the if’s that must be met for you to then reward yourself.

  3. How do you celebrate yourself? Journal are write a poem about what you do to, or how you might, celebrate yourself.

  4. Where is your “north room,” a room or place where you can go and be by yourself? Journal or write a poem about a space that is yours (your office, your desk, your car on the open road, your kitchen, your garden, etc.)

  5. In what way are you best when you are lonely? Journal are right a poem, celebrating the experience of being alone.

  6. For the brave: stand naked in front of a mirror and do your best to admire your body. Then, Journal or write a poem about the experience.

  7. What might it mean to be the happy genius of your household? Journal or write a poem using the prompt: as the happy genius of my household, I….

  8. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.