She asks great questions, but she also taught me two amazing reading habits. As she reads, she creates a Lexicon. She describes it as

a list of words that stand out or work to build the author’s argument/world/vibe.

These are words that catch her attention, that together form the world of the book. It’s just a running list and could be kept in the book itself. But it’s oh so close to creating One Word Writing Prompts for yourself! And it feels like a great aid to memory, that the list itself would become a kind of personal outline for the book. This could be an easy entry into commonplacing.

Amy also collects Other Voices, a list of people and ideas that the author cites,

other writers and cultural references that the author brings into their argument/conversation.

The first chapter of How to Do Nothing includes Walter Benjamin, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Herman Melville. Again, this feels like an easy thing to track and creates a wonderfully diverse set of rabbit trails to follow.

Early on in the book Odell says she is interested in

This simple definition caught my eye because it sounded to my ear like a pretty good description of both facets my life, homeschooling and poetry. I could easily see how the very structure of our days is a pattern for contemplative space.

But what about poetry? Could the poems be a pattern as well?

Years ago I took a wonderful poetry class from . During the class she quoted William Carlos Williams:

A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

I liked the small part, but a machine? Really? That felt off to me. Poems feel organic, not a part of the machine. Instead, I created a long list of of things that poetry might be. In an enlightening, funny, astute interview, Sally said that she too wondered about the poem as machine.

If homeschooling and poetry could work like the patterns that Odell mentioned, what else might be a pattern? So I started a list. Again, this could have just been a collection of One Word Prompts. But what if I made a set of cards? Alright! But what if I wrote a guidebook as well?

I came up with a list of 56 words and started writing three simple lines for each of the patterns, then linking them to two other patterns. For example, 11. The Notebook is connected to 10. The Library and 43. The University.

11. The Notebook

43/10

The notebook is a way to think that lives outside your head. It’s a place of return and refuge. Even if you don’t do morning pages as directed, the practice is useful. The notebook is where we can find good, orderly direction. But to find it, we have to find a way to return to our words, to mine what’s been collected, to turn the journals into an archive in a library. And over time all the rivers flow together to hold a university of knowledge and experience, all the places you’ve invested in your attention.

I made a set of cards for myself and one as a gift for Amy. And you can make a set too! The images for my cards are from old National Geographics and Amy’s cards are from the art calendar that we use every year.

To make your own set of cards, just pick an image and glue it to an index card. Then add a word. I do this randomly intuitively. Print out the guidebook, and you are ready to go!

Attention Oracle By Kortney Garrison

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Attention Oracle Titles

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So. Pick a card at random. Look up the other two patterns that your card is connected to and find those cards in the stack. Look at the three images. What do you notice? Do you see any patterns? Then read the guidebook for the card that you chose. You can also read the connected entries. Many entries point you back to your journal or out into the world to try something.

On the full Thunder Moon, subscribers to the Poetry Post received Oracle 8. The Poem delivered in the mail. If you’d like to receive poetry goodness each month in the post, you can become a paid subscriber!

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It was astounding to me how many times Stafford sent a poem out. Over years and years, the same poems make the rounds and return with rejections.

Some of the archive can be seen online. Here are the drafts for “At the Bomb Testing Site.” Within a month the poem quickly goes through multiple drafts. But at the bottom of the Documentary Copy you can see that it takes over four years for it to be published.

Even after he had won the National Book Award for Traveling Through the Dark, his editor at Harper and Row sent back his new manuscript with the note,

But there is more work that must be done.

This is the very first draft of the poem “Ask Me” from December 1974 when I was 5 months old.

I returned from the conference resolved to send more work out. In the intervening month, I’ve already gotten a rejection:

I don’t know that I have it in me to keep sending the same poems out for years on end. But I am slowly building resilience every time I send out a packet.

I was awarded a fellowship to attend the conference—my first award after many, many applications. I am excited to soak in the atmosphere at a beautiful location and happy to spend some concentrated time with other poets.

But this also feels like a wonderful way to create a writing retreat, focused time away from daily life to move my writing forward. I hope you can use these ideas to structure a bit of retreat time this summer. Writing conference not necessary!

Make a Space

The conference is happening Thursday-Sunday. So I already have a container. The conference is local, so I will be coming home every evening.

Usually, I do not have so many days away. Even a morning away can be a balm. Lorrie Tom has plans for a one hour retreat including great suggested reading.

Name the Task

I will primarily be learning and gathering inspiration. I will also have a pile of drafts in my bag in case inspiration strikes. Making connections with local poets, taking walks on the campus, and taking lots of photographs will be a bonus!

Whatever you choose to work on at your retreat, make it specific…and then make it a little smaller. Good things will happen; you won’t need to press it.

Gather Resources

I will be traveling across town on the city bus. I’ve got a collection of audio lectures by Clarissa Pinkola Estes downloaded, along with Hamnet and the new Ann Patchett on Kindle. Lots of choices in just a little bit of space!

When I go on retreat, I like to find a craft essay and a podcast or two for inspiration. I like to keep things easy to transport.

Sink into Experience

The conference will be a singular experience. Usually, my retreats are much more basic! But there is downtime in our days and I want to use that to rest and walk and read.

Creating a tiny ritual to anchor your retreat time is beneficial. I like to walk, read, write, and reflect briefly on the process. I borrowed this simple formula from .

Return with Bounty

I have never had such a generous time away dedicated to writing. I’m not sure what will come of this time but I have high hopes! I am taking the instaprint camera with me and want to make a zine with some of the pictures.

And I am tucking this question from the book Flourish by Daniel Coyle into my pocket as a way to journal.

What a beautiful invitation to reflect on the grace that each day brings!

I want to do that for Summer. I am declaring myself Summer’s Writer in Residence!

Here is a menu of ways you might choose to join in and drink deep of Summer’s gifts.

Amanda’s prompts are pure gold. Here are the June invitations. I love to slip a word into my pocket and head outside for a walk.

The Ordinary Hours

June Invitations

At the beginning of each month, I share a small collection of prompts to inspire your writing, noticing, reflecting, or making. They’re not meant to be completed or perfected. They’re simply invitations. A way of marking time with a little more attention. If you choose to share, please tag me so I can see what you’re up to …

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2 months ago · 3 likes · amanda

Lorrie has a whole summer of writing fun planned. You can dip into most of these ideas as they work for your schedule. I can’t wait for zine week and William Stafford Week.

Power Lines

Summer Writing Fun!

My husband and I just got back from a lovely neighborhood walk in shorts and t-shirts. We left at 7 PM and it was still light outside. Lovely summer feels like it has arrived in my neck of the woods. I even contemplated wearing white jeans to church this morning, but that felt like I was tempting fate since I’m sure our coastal June gloom is right aroun…

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2 months ago · 1 like · Lorrie Tom

Caroline Donahue is hosting Governess Season ingo. Think Artist Dates meet Analog Summer!

The Tattooed Governess

Governess Season Bingo begins June 1

Welcome to the challenge…

Listen now

2 months ago · 35 likes · 17 comments · Caroline Donahue

Lara Vesta is greeting the season with herbs + story.

Our Lady of the Underworld

The Solstice Flower Bath Challenge 2026 Begins!

13 days of water, sun and plant alchemy in ritual…begun a day late. Or in perfect timing…

Listen now

2 months ago · 4 likes · Lara Vesta

Amy is making a list of small adventures that feels like Summer!

The Wrack

summer

Summer feels like it is finally here…

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3 months ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Amy Bowers

So while I wait to read the real book, here’s my home education version!

Throw Out the Instructions

There aren’t instructions for the thing you want to do. Educating this child? It’s never happened before. That doesn’t mean that planning + thinking aren’t worthwhile. But it’s like making a birth plan. You are thoughtful about the upcoming birth, but many things are out of your control. Blessedly.

Don’t Take Things Too Seriously

Things are lighter than you think. As much as possible loosen your grip: open hand, open heart.

Give Yourself Time, Space, and Materials

This is the crux. Structure your time, and let the content find its level. Have a place: a desk, a the dining table, a basket, a bookshelf. Develop a practice: show up every day and see what happens.

Permission to Be Bad

Permission to let things take the time they take. It’s usually longer than you think and slower than you want. Like William Stafford says, lower your expectations and keep going.

Believe in Magic

You find just the right book or resource at just the right time. It feels like magic. But it happens often enough that it’s not a coincidence; it’s a practice. Yesterday my daughter asked if we had any stamp carving tools. Well, yes we do! Tucked inside a pouch handmade by were the supplies she needed.

And just last week we read about an obscure Russian philosopher named Khomyakov who was mentioned in a footnote in Anna Karenina on the day after his birthday! You can’t plan things like this, but you can be alert and alive to the wonder that’s already happening.

Think Outside Your Head

You need a way to track things that lives outside your head. Keep it as simple as possible to serve you. A dedicated notebook and pen work great. That’s where I track book lists, plans for the upcoming year, ideas for co-op. I also have a notebook for homeschooling high school. This is where I track classes + activities for their transcripts.

Every Friday I set up a docket for the coming week with our checklists, menu plan, and calendar. Make a copy and customize it for your homeschool!

Problems of Output Are Problems of Input

Read good books together. Eat simple food. Care for a garden or (10,000!) animals. Walk somewhere each day.

Borrow a Kid

Pour into another family. Your kids need peers, and you will benefit from the accountability. And co-op is a great reason to clean your house!

Insead of looking for the perfect co-op, we built our own. Our tiny homemade co-op was created based on what my kids needed and what I could offer.

Nothing Is Wasted

Nothing is wasted. Nothing is wasted. Except maybe that really bad Spanish curriculum that you bought. But the kid ended up testing into Spanish 201. So yeah, nothing is wasted.

Figure out if you are an under-buyer or an over-buyer. I tend to under-buy and learn as much as possible for free. But in all our years, nothing that we’ve purchased has been wasted. (There is still an unused microscope in the basement, but I hold out hope!)

You Don’t Need a Vision

You need a practice.

The best practices do have a why behind them. But don’t wait to start until you’ve got that figured out. Small steps add up over time. Even a few hours of devoted attention will reap a harvest.

How would your chapters read?

The idea is simple. Create something on an index card every day for 61 days. Easy supplies, small canvas, low stakes. This is a great way to add a bit of fun and structure right at the beginning of summer break when everyone might be feeling a little amped up but a little directionless.

We’ve participated since 2013, as long as my youngest child has been around! I am using my mass of cards to record the quotes for my zettelkasten.

These are a few cards that I created last year and turned into a set of One Word Writing Prompts.

Obviously, these are very simple cards. Just images from our daily art calendar pasted to an index card with a word added.

The words + images are only tangentially related. I mean, I picked them both. But the images are not primarily illustrative. Even so, I do hope that there’s some sort of spark between the two.

I posted these pictures as prompts to celebrate April’s Poetry Month, but wanted to gather them here so they don’t just disappear in Notes.

My ICAD project this year is very similar. I am making an Attention Oracle inspired by the read-along hosted by of Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing.

The Oracle looks for

“a pattern that holds open contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction.”

Along with the images on index cards, I am writing a guidebook. A simple reflection describing each pattern and connecting it to other patterns. Think of it as A Pattern Language for creativity.

What creative plans are you making for summer?

Robert Richardson is the biographer of three 19th century Americans: Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James. He’s also Annie Dillard’s husband. They met when Annie wrote Bob a fan letter after reading his Thoreau biography! Can you imagine?

Richardson credits his teacher, Walter Jackson Bate, with creating the structure he used in his books. Bate said that readers want to have a sense of accomplishment every time they sit down to read. But that’s hard to sustain over the course of a 450 page biography.

One solution? Write the book in 100 short chapters. Every time you sit down to write, you know that you are working on a section that’s roughly 1,000 words. That discrete section is going to be added to 99 more. And then you have a book. Pure genius!

This is the writerly corollary to a slow read. Just one chunk a day; manageable in theory! I am reading Candide this way with my 17 year old right now.

Richardson’s biographical strategy was to read everything that his subject read in the original order read, to encounter the pivotal texts just as his subject did. He really wanted to write about William James, but felt like he didn’t have the necessary background. So he started with Thoreau and Emerson. Each of these books took 10 years to write. His apprenticeship was 20 years.

20 years of practice to approach what he considered his true subject.

This year I am planning to read Richardson’s biographies of Thoreau, Emerson, and James. Reading a chapter takes roughly the same amount of time as drinking a cup of tea. Almost every afternoon I drink a cup of tea. In a year I should be able to read all three books.

I am using this space to create a commonplace book so that I can share quotes as I read them. I will edit this post with new quotes as the spirit moves.

You can try the Sortes Thoreauianae, a homemade oracle. Scroll quickly through the quotes and stop as the spirit moves. Let that quote guide you for the day.

Commonplace

from Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind by Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

{Passages with quotation marks are direct quotes from Thoreau; passages without quotation marks are direct quotes from Richardson.}

Through the extraordinary, catalytic, almost providential friendship with Emerson, Thoreau’s life changed from the passive to the active mood. (18)

E.M. Forster has sensibly said that “the only books that influence us are the ones for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.” (21)

Like Emerson he believed that a poet’s function was to “pierce this rotten diction” of stale phrase and metaphor “and fasten words again to visible things.” (50)

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.” (58)

“That night was the turning point of the season. We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn.” (66)

Indeed for this entire generation the problem of how to live a heroic life in the unheroic modern world was a major concern. (69)

“To travel is to think new thoughts.” (78)

…heroism, by which he meant the autonomous, courageous, self-reliant, freestanding individual. (84)

“Beauty is where it is perceived. When I see the sun shining on the woods across the pond, I think this side the richer which sees it.” (87)

“In a little hollow between the hills, some twenty feet higher than the village, lies Walden Pond, the expressed juice of the hills and trees whose leaves are annually steeped in it. Its history is in the lapse of its waves, in the rounded pebbles on its shore, and the pines which have grown on its brink.” (88)

[Emerson] was, he said, trying to ameliorate or abolish menial labor in his household, and in its place he was trying to school himself to regular manual labor. (97)

“I don’t like people who are too good for this world.”(104)

“I am a diseased bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf.” (120)

He admired [Raleigh] as he had admired Persius, as a supreme example of the kind of writer and poet whose own life is his major work. (123)

“I expect to leave Concord, which is my Rome and its people, who are my Romans, in May, and go to New York, to be a tutor to Mr. William Emerson’s family.” (125)

Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that he found himself out of place and out of step, he continued work in his own room on his own writing. (132)

No doubt nothing great could be accomplished without enthusiasm, but Thoreau was sure that nothing at all would ever be accomplished without work. (134)

A writer who aspires to a language adequate to nature must be able to link fact with myth. (135)

Thoreau casts the reader as his walking companion.

Much of Thoreau’s best writing, like Wordsworth’s, came from feeling recollected in tranquility, his glad spontaneous response to the seasons was filtered through the imagination. (140)

On October 14 in Boston, a young seaman named Herman Melville had just returned from four years of wandering and was being paid off at the Navy Yard. (147)

According to William Miller of Pittsfield and his followers, October 22, 1844, was to be the last day of the world. (148)

“When I was four years old as I well remember, I was brought from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond.” (149)

As George Eliot observed, there is no private life without its public context. (149)

Thoreau’s stay at Walden was the ultimate reform commune, reduced, for purposes of emphasis, to the simplest possible constituent, the self. (150)

His account of himself in Walden is an interesting parallel to Douglass’s account of his liberation, which was published and reviewed…just shortly before Thoreau’s move out to the pond. (151)

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the deliberate facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” (153)

He was also in search of simple living conditions that would permit him to concentrate on his writing. (153)

During the stay at Walden, Thoreau managed, for one, to lead a life of extraordinary intensity, to provide a sustained record of that life, and, crucially, to give that record literary shape. (154)

My purpose in making this wonderful journey is to discover myself in the object I see.” Goethe in Italian Journey

“The hardest material obeys the same law with the most fluid. Trees are but rivers of sap and woody fibre flowing from the atmosphere and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as their roots on the other hand flow upward to the surface. And in the heavens there are rivers of stars and milky ways. There are rivers of rock in the surface of rivers of ore in the bowels of the earth. And our thoughts flow and circulate-and seasons lapse into the current year.” (158)

Thoreau’s idea of the cost of something as “the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.” (167)

“To be a philosopher is not…to have subtle thoughts and found a school—but…to live a life of simplicity—of independence—of magnanimity and trust—such as all men should live.” (169)

“All memorable events in my experience transpire in morning time.” (173)

“Mythology is ancient history or biography. The oldest history still memorable becomes a mythos. It is the fruit which history at last bears—the fable so far from being false contains only the essential.” (185)

To Emerson he wrote in mid-November, “the world is a cow that is hard to milk, life does not come easy.” (186)

“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good—be good for something.” (188)

“No matter what solitudes banished, I have always been a favorite of fortune. For Fortune’s favorite is the man who awards her good gifts to himself.” “What is the very best that can be said or done with the materials at your disposal? Be it what may, you have the power to say it or do it; let there be no pretense that you are not a free agent.” —Marcus Aurelius (191)

“Shall no man have his spring as well as the plants?” (207)

Wildness stands for much of what we characteristically regard as Thoreauvian. (224)

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” (225)

“All good things are wild and free.” (225)

Thoreau was a chain reader. One book led to others, each of which led to still others. (245)

“Botany is worth studying if only for the precision of its terms.” (246)

Sometimes he almost sank beneath the detail. (247)

“I feel myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work.” (249)

Roman law prefered thieves over bankers, since the law only required thieves to repay his vitum double, while it required a banker who lent money at interest to replay hi victim fourfold. (250)

Thoreau was by now very much fixed in his ways. (252)

He used Emerson as an oracle, opening his printed works at random and reading the first sentence his eye lit upon, a sortes Emersonianae. (252)

He could not decide whether Linnaeus was imposing a system on nature or deciphering the system in nature. (254)

The writer of Walden is one of our great poets of loss…but his songs are about sustainable loses and how not to go down beneath them. (259)

Gilpin had already gone further down the road Thoreau was on, and his example could therefore extend Thoreau’s range, enlarge his palette, sharpen his vision. (263)

Thoreau revives the ancient Greek religious tradition in which, “the land was not a picture but a true force which physically embodied the powers that ruled the world.” (263)

“A journal, a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstacy” (270)

Thoreau’s creativity was at flood tide for most of 1852. (279)

He snarled at the idea of the sun being 95 million miles away: “a statement which never made any impression on me, because I never walked it, and which I cannot be said to believe.” (284)

As Henry James was said to be not so much a citizen of England or America as of the James family, so Thoreau was a citizen of his family, of the town of Concord, of New England, and of nature, and while all these taken together might make him an American, any one of them by itself took precedence over the grand abstraction of America. (290)

“He is richest who has most use for nature as raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life.” (291)

“A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally…We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.” (291)

Richard Trench: “Language is fossil poetry.” (292)

“There is no such thing as a pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, ie, to be significant, must be subjective.” (310)

Nature teaches us to reach beyond nature. (310)

“Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship around the globe.” (312)

On March 28, almost nine years to the day after he had gone out to the pond with an ax to cut the arrowy pines for his hut, the first batch of printer’s proofs for Walden arrived to be corrected. (313)

What does a life close to nature teach? It taught Thoreau the imperative of courage, the absolute value of freedom, a conception of nature as law, a respect for the limits put on us by that law, and finally, the necessity of individual wholeness or integrity if one wants to avoid a life of despair.

Blake reread Thoreau’s letters all his life and said he was “till warmed and instructed by them, with more force occasionally than ever before; so that in a sense they are still in the mail, have not reached me yet, and will not before I die.” (328)

Thoreau was always glad to find he could take pleasure in the common. (341)

Morning Gold and Evening Soil1

On the walls of a Massachusetts church
Jesus, the mossy god, stands transfigured,

wholly turned into fire. White
birds rush around him.

The dome is ringed round with windows,
and the hollow belly of our savior

opens into the blue sky.

But these days at the edge of the new season have felt a bit off. End of the school year responsibilities, a grown child studying halfway across the world, nights that empty out with insomnia—these haven’t kept me from the desk, but they’ve kept me from fully attending to the page.

And then a gift arrives. Something unlooked for, more than I could ask or imagine.

I woke to a new poem: words stitched together and shared with generosity.

Diary Poems hosted a new cento created by Ann Collins from Microseasons. The poem stretches over four stanzas and features the work of 25+ poets! What a feat!

Diary Poems

5.11.2026

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3 months ago · 33 likes · 46 comments

Lines from the poem “When We Are Apart,” from my chapbook Every Broken Year, open the second stanza and close the third. But then a curious thing happened. As I read through the poem, many other lines felt like something I might have written!

And then there were lines I wished I could have written!

It made me think of the line from Anne Sexton. She said that we are all writing one poem, God’s poem. Ann has given my lines back to me in a fresh, inspiring, humbling context.

I’d love to slip a copy of Every Broken Year into the post for you. It’s small enough to tuck in a pocket as you head out or even to hide a few lines in your heart. Become desire’s apprentice this summer!

Every Broken Year: The Persephone Cycle

It’s almost April, and that means it’s almost Poetry Month. This year is busier than usual and that makes it all the more important to proactively make a little space for writing.

I have been working to clear the decks ahead of Poetry Month. My desk was woefully crammed with too many projects: taxes + homeschooling + co-op plans each with their piles and bookstacks. There are still too many books, but I am making progress. I have also started a new round of revision—pulling promising drafts (mostly about the Handless Maiden) out of the journal and typing them up. I’m already planning a revision retreat in June!

Through the generous patronage of paid subscribers, I’ve joined Ellen Rowland’s April Writing Series: daily poems, prompts, and craft notes. I am looking forward to learning + writing together. I am also looking forward to the Junk Journaling daily practice at Creativebug.

If you are looking for writing prompts, I’ve created a collection of One Word Writing Prompts based on the work of William Stafford, Hilary Mantel, and Joan Didion. And I created a brand new collection based on the story of Vasilisa the Wise for this month’s Poetry Post. I’d love to send you a copy in the mail!

Subscribe to the Poetry Post

I also plan to post pictures of my Personal Universe Deck throughout the month. I learned about the deck from the work of Tammi Salas. I glued images from our daily art calendar onto index cards and than added words. You can use the image or the words or even the collection of words to spark your new creative work.

I’d love to hear about your plans for Poetry Month and the blossoming of the Pink Moon.

…inspired by the sentences of

…and glued into a desktop zine made from a magazine page.

There’s more poetry zine inspiration + resources right here:

Subscribe now

Robert Richardson is the biographer of three 19th century Americans: Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James. He’s also Annie Dillard’s husband. They met when Annie wrote Bob a fan letter after reading his Thoreau biography! Can you imagine?

Richardson credits his teacher, W.J. Bate, with creating the structure he used in his books. Bate said that readers want to have a sense of accomplishment every time they sit down to read. But that’s hard to sustain over the course of a 450 page biography.

One solution? Write the book in 100 short chapters. Every time you sit down to write, you know that you are working on a section that’s roughly 1,000 words. That discrete section is going to be added to 99 more. And then you have a book.

Pure genius!

This is the writerly corollary to a slow read. Just one chunk a day; manageable in theory! I am reading Candide this way with my 17 year old right now.

Richardson’s biographical strategy was to read everything that his subject read in the original order read, to encounter the pivotal texts just as his subject did. He really wanted to write about William James, but felt like he didn’t have the necessary background. So he started with Thoreau and Emerson. Each of these books took 10 years to write. His apprenticeship was 20 years.

20 years of practice to approach what he considered his true subject.

This year I am planning to read Richardson’s biographies of Thoreau, Emerson, and James. Reading a chapter takes roughly the same amount of time as drinking a cup of tea. Almost every afternoon I drink a cup of tea. In a year I should be able to read all three books.

I am using this space to create a commonplace book so that I can share quotes as I read them. I will edit this post with new quotes as the spirit moves.

You can try the sortes Thoreauianae, a homemade oracle. Scroll quickly through the quotes and stop as the spirit moves. Let that quote guide you for the day

Commonplace

from Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind by Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

Through the extraordinary, catalytic, almost providential friendship with Emerson, Thoreau’s life changed from the passive to the active mood. (18)

E.M. Forster has sensibly said that “the only books that influence us are the ones for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.” (21)

Like Emerson he believed that a poet’s function was to “pierce this rotten diction” of stale phrase and metaphor “and fasten words again to visible things.” (50)

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.” (58)

“That night was the turning point of the season. We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn.” (66)

Indeed for this entire generation the problem of how to live a heroic life in the unheroic modern world was a major concern. (69)

“To travel is to think new thoughts.” (78)

…heroism, by which he meant the autonomous, courageous, self-reliant, freestanding individual. (84)

“Beauty is where it is perceived. When I see the sun shining on the woods across the pond, I think this side the richer which sees it.” (87)

“In a little hollow between the hills, some twenty feet higher than the village, lies Walden Pond, the expressed juice of the hills and trees whose leaves are annually steeped in it. Its history is in the lapse of its waves, in the rounded pebbles on its shore, and the pines which have grown on its brink.” (88)

[Emerson] was, he said, trying to ameliorate or abolish menial labor in his household, and in its place he was trying to school himself to regular manual labor. (97)

“I don’t like people who are too good for this world.”(104)

“I am a diseased bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf.” (120)

He admired [Raleigh] as he had admired Persius, as a supreme example of the kind of writer and poet whose own life is his major work. (123)

“I expect to leave Concord, which is my Rome and its people, who are my Romans, in May, and go to New York, to be a tutor to Mr. William Emerson’s family.” (125)

Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that he found himself out of place and out of step, he continued work in his own room on his own writing. (132)

No doubt nothing great could be accomplished without enthusiasm, but Thoreau was sure that nothing at all would ever be accomplished without work. (134)

A writer who aspires to a language adequate to nature must be able to link fact with myth. (135)

Thoreau casts the reader as his walking companion.

Much of Thoreau’s best writing, like Wordsworth’s, came from feeling recollected in tranquility, his glad spontaneous response to the seasons was filtered through the imagination. (140)

On October 14 in Boston, a young seaman named Herman Melville had just returned from four years of wandering and was being paid off at the Navy Yard. (147)

According to William Miller of Pittsfield and his followers, October 22, 1844, was to be the last day of the world. (148)

“When I was four years old as I well remember, I was brought from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond.” (149)

As George Eliot observed, there is no private life without its public context. (149)

Thoreau’s stay at Walden was the ultimate reform commune, reduced, for purposes of emphasis, to the simplest possible constituent, the self. (150)

His account of himself in Walden is an interesting parallel to Douglass’s account of his liberation, which was published and reviewed…just shortly before Thoreau’s move out to the pond. (151)

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the deliberate facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” (153)

He was also in search of simple living conditions that would permit him to concentrate on his writing. (153)

During the stay at Walden, Thoreau managed, for one, to lead a life of extraordinary intensity, to provide a sustained record of that life, and, crucially, to give that record literary shape. (154)

My purpose in making this wonderful journey is to discover myself in the object I see.” Goethe in Italian Journey

“The hardest material obeys the same law with the most fluid. Trees are but rivers of sap and woody fibre flowing from the atmosphere and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as their roots on the other hand flow upward to the surface. And in the heavens there are rivers of stars and milky ways. There are rivers of rock in the surface of rivers of ore in the bowels of the earth. And our thoughts flow and circulate-and seasons lapse into the current year.” (158)

Thoreau’s idea of the cost of something as “the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.” (167)

“To be a philosopher is not…to have subtle thoughts and found a school—but…to live a life of simplicity—of independence—of magnanimity and trust—such as all men should live.” (169)

“All memorable events in my experience transpire in morning time.” (173)

“Mythology is ancient history or biography. The oldest history still memorable becomes a mythos. It is the fruit which history at last bears—the fable so far from being false contains only the essential.” (185)

To Emerson he wrote in mid-November, “the world is a cow that is hard to milk, life does not come easy.” (186)

“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good—be good for something.” (188)

“No matter what solitudes banished, I have always been a favorite of fortune. For Fortune’s favorite is the man who awards her good gifts to himself.” “What is the very best that can be said or done with the materials at your disposal? Be it what may, you have the power to say it or do it; let there be no pretense that you are not a free agent.” —Marcus Aurelius (191)

“Shall no man have his spring as well as the plants?” (207)

Wildness stands for much of what we characteristically regard as Thoreauvian. (224)

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” (225)

“All good things are wild and free.” (225)

Thoreau was a chain reader. One book led to others, each of which led to still others. (245)

“Botany is worth studying if only for the precision of its terms.” (246)

Sometimes he almost sank beneath the detail. (247)

“I feel myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work.” (249)

Roman law prefered thieves over bankers, since the law only required thieves to repay his vitum double, while it required a banker who lent money at interest to replay hi victim fourfold. (250)

Thoreau was by now very much fixed in his ways. (252)

He used Emerson as an oracle, opening his printed works at random and reading the first sentence his eye lit upon, a sortes Emersonianae. (252)

He could not decide whether Linnaeus was imposing a system on nature or deciphering the system in nature. (254)

The writer of Walden is one of our great poets of loss…but his songs are about sustainable loses and how not to go down beneath them. (259)

Gilpin had already gone further down the road Thoreau was on, and his example could therefore extend Thoreau’s range, enlarge his palette, sharpen his vision. (263)

Thoreau revives the ancient Greek religious tradition in which, “the land was not a picture but a true force which physically embodied the powers that ruled the world.” (263)

“A journal, a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstacy” (270)

Thoreau’s creativity was at flood tide for most of 1852. (279)

He snarled at the idea of the sun being 95 million miles away: “a statement which never made any impression on me, because I never walked it, and which I cannot be said to believe.” (284)

As Henry James was said to be not so much a citizen of England or America as of the Jones family, so Thoreau was a citizen of his family, of the town of Concord, of New England, and of nature, and while all these taken together might make him an American, any one of them by itself took precedence over the grand abstraction of America. (290)

“He is richest who has most use for nature as raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life.” (291)

“A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally…We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.” (291)

Richard Trench: “Language is fossil poetry.” (292)

“There is no such thing as a pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, ie, to be significant, must be subjective.” (310)

Nature teaches us to reach beyond nature. (310)

“Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship around the globe.” (312)

On March 28, almost nine years to the day after he had gone out to the pond with an ax to cut the arrowy pines for his hut, the first batch of printer’s proofs for Walden arrived to be corrected. (313)

What does a life close to nature teach? It taught Thoreau the imperative of courage, the absolute value of freedom, a conception of nature as law, a respect for the limits put on us by that law, and finally, the necessity of individual wholeness or integrity if one wants to avoid a life of despair.

Blake reread Thoreau’s letters all his life and said he was “till warmed and instructed by them, with more force occasionally than ever before; so that in a sense they are still in the mail, have not reached me yet, and will not before I die.” (328)

Thoreau was always glad to find he could take please in the common. (341)

Basket

Another name for the woven
refuge of the womb: the dark,

waiting center, a place to carry
what we can’t leave behind.

Even from Moving Cars

Look for silvery salvia,
and you will see working
honey bees.

On Downtown Buildings

Winter sun reveals
the elegant beauty of bare 
street tree shadows.

Buying Cough Syrup

I chose the express line
instead of self checkout.

Will the cashier still have a job
when the cherries are ripe?

How’s your writing going this month? Are you joining in the Poetry Adventure?

Petra Glyphs

February Poetry Adventure 2026 Prompts

Hello, Adventurers…

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6 months ago · 18 likes · 7 comments · Petra Hernandez

For my part in the project, I gathered up 24 tiny poems and called it “The School for Seasons.” Even though the entire collection was an unwieldy length, I wanted a way to share at least some of these poems, to commemorate the first creative burst of the new year. I wanted to make a zine.

Ever since discovering the absolutely gorgeous work that tiny wren lit creates, I’ve wanted to make a one page poetry zine. I mean it just knocks my socks off that Dana Knott creates zines full of tiny poems that you can print + fold for FREE.

(I’ve got work in Issue 4 and Issue 10. While you’re there, submit some poems…or even a chapbook. Dana, the editor, is a dream to work with!)

I discovered a zine template shared in this post:

Rarasaur

I want you to make a zine.

The short of this is, I want to read your zine. I want to own it. I want to hold it in my hands and know a little something about you and your world…

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2 years ago · 396 likes · 64 comments · Ra Avis

The template’s a little fussy…or maybe that’s just my lack of Canva skills. But I’m happy with the finished product. I sent copies out in the Poetry Post this month and would be happy to send one to any new paid subscribers!

posted about the smashing zine work she is doing.

The Wrack

desktop zines

When you are at your desk all day working on a computer and need a break, do you (like I do) sometimes reach for your phone and s…

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7 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Amy Bowers

Amy made herself a zine machine—an easy way to keep materials close at hand! She collects stickers + other ephemera in a tin that she keeps on her desk. Then she has what she needs to create one page zines.

I love everything about this project! The scrappiness, returning to the work throughout the day, taking breaks by making something. So much goodness here! I folded a torn-out magazine page, and then pasted in poem fragments left over from editing. It felt good to give those lost lines another life.

Do you have a zine to trade? Or maybe you’d like to join the Poetry Post and receive poems + inspiration in your mailbox every month around the full moon.

Join the Poetry Post

I generally detest prose poems as a genre, but I guess I’ve written a few myself. —Danilo Kis

Last Summer I happily took part in Summer Reading Bingo hosted by . We practiced reading like a writer—noticing the places where voice or setting took the stage, where silence instead of speech became the driving force. It was the perfect summer project. Because I was only reading single poems, I was engaged but not overwhelmed.

I completed my squares. And started writing about it in the Even Astonishment series (overdue for a new post!). Then I entered the contest and…won! So I will be taking Rachel’s prose poetry class in a couple of weeks. Prose poetry isn’t something I have much experience with. But I wanted to honor the gift of the class by preparing and being a willing participant.

So I started gathering resources and following rabbit trails. Soon enough I had weeks worth of materials. I am most looking forward to Rachel’s careful feedback. She is an editor with an expansive eye, someone who sees and honors what’s already on the page while also inviting you into bigger things.

I would love to have you join along on this prose poetry adventure this winter!

Articles

What makes a poem a poem? by Sarah Teresa Cook

3 Observable Prose Poetry Forms to Try for Yourself by Danielle Mitchell

The Art of the Prose Poem by Robert Bly

What the Prose Poem Carries With It by Robert Bly

The Prose Poem and The Secret Life of Poetry by Brooke Horvath

The Poet’s Revolt: A Brief Guide to the Prose Poem by Danielle Mitchell

Sit Down and Write: Prose Poems The Poetry Lab Podcast

5 Prose Poems That Think Inside the Box by Ginger Ayla

The Zuihitsu and the Toadstool by Kimiko Hahn

Books

The Narrow Road to the Interior by Kimiko Hahn

A Shimmer of Something: Lean Stories of Spiritual Substance by Brian Doyle

A Class

Prose Poetry: Write Lyrical Narratives with Rachel Thompson from

An Early Draft

Like I said, I don’t have much experience with prose poems. But all this research has sent me back to my pile of drafts looking with new eyes at fragments and lost lines. Here is a beginning draft that I am still returning to.

1934

One night a woman told the stories of winter. Stories not told at other times. Stories for long nights and hungry days.

*

A girl, almost too young to marry. A wedding the only way out of a life bounded by violence. She married the widower who ran the hotel in town, birthed a daughter by him, named her Josephine. And when he died, the hotel had to be sold. Later, war carried the whole world into disaster. Then, a man came back from across the waters. His legs sustained the French winters and never were strong again. But he could love her and care for the child. They could move out of town.

*

She dreamed of stars, light and heat from far away. When she woke, a man was sleeping next to her. The edge of his beard was singed, and smoke filled the room.

What about you? Do you write prose poems? Does that category even make sense to you? How do you make decisions about form in your work? Do you have resources that I should add to this winter’s curriculum?

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I found us a stack of copies to read. The four oldest in the family each read a chapter a day on their own and then we talked together after our readings. Early in the year I happened upon from Footnotes and Tangents. It was helpful to have his insightful commentary and art to accompany the book.

Footnotes and Tangents

Join the 2026 'War and Peace' Slow Read

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8 months ago · 314 likes · 52 comments · Simon Haisell

Through the years we have read,

• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (2023)

• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (2024)

• The Divine Comedy by Dante (2024)

• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (2025)

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (2026)

This year, our oldest has started college and the youngest is now 13. So our reading foursome has changed a little. Even though we have a strong read aloud tradition, these year-long slow reads have been a boon. Over the course of the year, the characters come to inhabit our imaginations. Sharing the stories slowly, over the year opens up a new way of reading, one centered on companionship and deep attention. Instead of rushing through, we linger. Instead of just getting through a big classic, we grow + change alongside the characters.

In 2023, throughout the year as we finished sections of the novel, we also watched the Soviet era movie version of War and Peace.

In 2024 we watched the lush, thoroughly modern 1934 black and white version of Les Miserables. There is blessedly no singing in this version and Jean Valjean is perfectly cast.

Slow reads are the perfect way to reset your relationship with reading. You only read a couple of pages a day. By the end of the year, you’ve read a substantial book. I think you should join in and read W + P, but if you aren’t ready for that, hosts slow looking deep dives into paintings

THE REFLECTIVE EYE

Bruegel Advent in 24 Fragments

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8 months ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Kristine Benoit de Bykhovetz

And is hosting a slow(ish) read of How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.

The Wrack

& I'm back

Hey friends! I hope your holiday was good and you are enjoying this weird in-between time. I enjoyed time with my kids. We had a super simple but tasty dinner and opened presents slowly all day, which was fun. Then a big snowstorm came and forced us to stay cozy inside for a few days…

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7 months ago · 4 likes · Amy Bowers

The best thing about slow reads is that there is space to read other things as well! Just now, I’m off to meet Anna at the train station—imagine not introducing your title character until page 137!

What are you reading in the new year?

I am making a microseasons poetry zine for my paid subscribers this month. I’d love to send one your way!

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The texture in this print is completely arresting. I can feel the weight of this child, the softness of the cloth against my hands. This is revelation on the landscape of the body.

I immediately thought of my own boy in my arms, a boy who is now much taller than me.

Apparently I had this same thought last year. And the Milton quote still sings to me.

But this year I have a Karl Barth quote to go alongside.

Then AP pointed me toward this year’s Milton quote.

By this time, the girl who is in the midst of her first college finals, joins the conversation. She reads us a quote from The Aeneid.

….easy is the descent to Avernus;
night and day the doors of gloomy Dis stand open;
but to retrace thy steps and pass out into the upper air,
this is the task, here is the toil.

And then she connected us back to Milton’s gratitude with this bit from a reflection by on Luci Shaw.

The words struck her even though she didn’t really know who Luci Shaw was. I told her that she had listened to Luci Shaw once. When she was very young, we attended an evensong service where Luci Shaw happened to be the lector. And I told her that she was Madeleine L’Engle’s friend and publisher. That sent her back to the bookshelf to grab a copy of A Wrinkle in Time.

“Who have our fighters been?” asked Calvin.
“Oh, you must know them, dear,” Mrs. Whatsit said.
Mrs. Who’s spectacles shone out at them triumphantly, “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
“Jesus!” Charles Wallace said. “Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They’ve been lights for us to see by.”
“Leonardo da Vinci?” Calvin suggested tentatively. “And Michelangelo?”
“And Shakespeare,” Charles Wallace called out, “and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!”
Now Calvin’s voice rang with confidence. “And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Budda and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!”
“Now you, Meg,” Mrs. Whatsit ordered.
”Oh Euclid, I suppose.” Meg was in such an agony of impatience that her voice grated irritably. “And Copernicus…”

By this time it was getting a little crowded in our bedroom with the great cloud of witnesses pressing in. And it was time to catch the bus.

Not every day is like this, and there is certainly toil in the midst of the ten thousand days of work. But there are also tremendous, sustaining graces.

I contributed an essay about the revision retreats I take at a local park. A simple morning away from my everyday responsibilities is enough to make progress on some poems and have a clearer understanding of what needs to happen next.

Charlotte Donlon is a wise and generous editor, and I can’t wait to read the other contributions! Plans are underway for more retreat guides to be published later in the year. Upcoming titles include

• Take More Retreats for Soul Growth

• Take More Retreats for Artful Encounters

• Take More Retreats for Book Lovers

Each pre-order includes early access to pitch an essay of your own for one of the new books! This is a wonderful opportunity for writers just beginning to publish or returning to the ups and downs of the submission process. Let’s be a part of a publishing model that builds our capacity, creativity, and resilience!

And you can use the code PREORDERKORTNEY5 to get $5 off the price of the book!

But I kept trying and by the end of the season I had a little collection of curling leaves on my desk. I sent them to Ann, just to let her know that her idea had found a home with me. This morning, while looking for something else, I came across this draft:

Sibyl

The seer writes her prophecy on oak leaves.
Word by word, leaf by leaf, each one taken
by the wind at the end of the season. Gather

what you can: even great piles only hold
fragments, wisdom pieced together
and crumbling at your touch.

I also returned to William Stafford’s A Scripture of Leaves, a poetry collection from 1989. The book opens with one of Stafford’s most famous poems, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other.”

As I was reading, I began jotting down Stafford’s phrases—phrases that are commonplace and inimitable at the same time. I planned to use this collection as a glimmer or a spark for my own writing.

Then Ann created a beautiful poem from the jottings I sent her on leaves.

And this gift made me want to share the phrases I had gathered. Normally I share one word prompts. Often a single word is enough to get the ink flowing. But these are larger phrases. Stafford’s phrases. If you use these prompts, make note of their origin.

An Autumn Ritual Prompts From A Scripture Of Leaves By William Stafford

1.2MB ∙ PDF file

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I can’t wait to see what you create!

If this sort of soulful writing interests you, you might like to hear about the Take More Retreats project. I’ve got an essay in the anthology about the simple revision retreats that I take. To celebrate pre-orders Charlotte Donolon is hosting a workshop called Flourish Anyway with Rhythms, Rituals, & Retreats happening on November 22, but available via a recording after that.

The best part is that the workshop includes the opportunity to pitch an essay of your own! Charlotte is creating a community of creative people, and there is space for you. And I’ve got a discount code for $5 off: PREORDERKORTNEY5