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 3/28/2024 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

Sweet talk is one of the most charming endearments between young lovers: cute names and secret codes and whispers spoken with sensual allure, whether sublime or silly. It is one of the hallmarks of early love saturated with infatuation. This kind of intimacy often fades as the relationship matures, leaving behind keywords or clever gestures that can even be performed out loud and in public.  Keen witnesses may notice a trail that disappears into a private jungle, hear a slight quickening in the coupled heartbeat, and faintly feel the tingled flesh on the nape of their own neck, all while inhaling, however briefly, the fragrance of wilder things. Sweet talk breaks the rules. It invokes the forbidden; and even a tiny taste of the forbidden can be a thrilling enclosure. It takes you right to that edge. It serves as an invitation to a private world. It brings you close in. Billy Collins both brings you close in and breaks the rules as only he can with his signature silliness and irreverence in his poem, Sweet Talk. It is worth listen to Billy Collins read it in his dead-pan style, (an also see exapmples of the paintings to which he refers) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0yn7nS_wuc

Sweet Talk

You are not the Mona Lisa
with that relentless look.
Or Venus borne over the froth
of waves on a pink half shell.
Or an odalisque by Delacroix,
veils lapping at your nakedness.

You are more like the sunlight
of Edward Hopper,
especially when it slants
against the eastern side
of a white clapboard house
in the early hours of the morning,
with no figure standing
at a window in a violet bathrobe,
just the sunlight,
the columns of the front porch,
and the long shadows
they throw down
upon the dark green lawn, baby.

—Billy Collins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0yn7nS_wuc

Prompt Ideas

  1. Compose your own sweet talk poem or describe an experience of sharing or receiving sweet talk

  2. Journal or write a poem about someone describing how they are like, or not like, a particular work of art.

  3. Use the structure Billy Collins uses by first describing what someone is not like and then what the person is more like. You could use the prompts: You are not…. And then, You are more like…. (Notice how this structure uses metaphor in the first part and a simile in the socond part, which implies that person he has in mind is actually indescribable).

  4. Write an ekphrastic poem (a poem or prose poem that describes a work of art)

  5. Journal or write a poem that ends with a surprise that is acutally foreshadowed by the title or earler references in the poem.

  6. What work of art or artist’s style would you use as a reference if you were to compse a self-portrait?

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