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 10/31/24 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

Rae Armantrout’s poem, Djinn, is not about the invisible, shapeshifting supernatrual beings from Islamic tales. It is about our relationship to the unseen forces in life. The modern view cast the world of Djinns into cartoons with false promises, operating on the premise that seeing is believing and that ghostly apparitions are simply iffy bits, explicable by the absolute forces of physics that bind things. But Amantrout leaves the door open to the world of Djinns. The word itself refers to a demon or spirit, which can be good or bad; but it also means “hidden from sight.” Rae focuses the poem on the auditory sense in the first three stanzas: what we say about the unseen, how we converse with life, how we whisper “lies to the dead” because, on a deeper level, we know there is more than we perceive in the world. Despite how much we might trick ourselves, Halloween, when things are hopping in the spirit world, is certainly a time for us to ponder our relationship with the unseen. Spirits are lining up at the gateway for the annual opening of the crack between the worlds. Some are longing to see what has become of their world. Some to visit those they've left behind, and some simply to smell the pungeant air and taste the blood of life once again. Most just want the thrill of the world and will do anything to get a rise out of the living. What spirits will you see or call into being, this Halloween?

Djinn 

“Haunted”, they say, believing
the soft, shifty
dunes are made up
of false promises.

Many believe
whatever happens
is the other half
of a conversation.

Many whisper
white lies
to the dead.

"The boys are doing really well."

Some think
nothing is so
until it has been witnessed.

They believe
the bits are iffy;

the forces that bind them,
absolute.

Rae Armantrout
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/51183/djinnz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rae_Armantrout

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about “false promises:” the promises of childhood (Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy) to the promises of adulthood (that hard work will lead to riches). This could be something you once believed but no longer believe or any “disillusionment” in life.

  2. A desert landscape has the uncanny ability to create mirages, like a shimmering lake in the distance. Journal or write poem when you saw something that was not there.

  3. Use the first word of Armantrout’s poem as your title: Haunted. Then follow where that title leads you. What landscapes and places evoke the sense of being haunted to you.

  4. Consider yourself in a conversation with life and describe what you say and what life says back to you form the other side of the conversation.

  5. Journal of write a poem about a conversation with someone who has passed on or who is no longer in your life.

  6. Journal or write a poem on the idiom that “seeing is believing’”

  7. It is easy, in dim light or when you catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye, to see apparitions, whether real of floghts of fancy from the iffy bits registered in our sensory system. . Journal or wraite a poem about such sightings.

  8. Journal or write a poem about the forces bind us to the world, to each other, to the living, and to the dead.

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