I think one of my biggest hurdles to my own production is the belief that poetry is complicated. I want to start this offering of prompts by proposing this question: What if it’s not?

Perhaps poetry exists alongside us, whether we notice it or not. I wish I noticed it more. So here’s a prompt to help us all take a small step in that direction.

Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright and poet, wrote a simple poem called “Pleasures.” It’s simply a list of things made up of things he finds pleasurable, and most of those things are very ordinary. Take a look:

First look from morning’s window
The rediscovered book
Fascinated faces
Snow, the change of the seasons
The newspaper
The dog
Dialectics
Showering, swimming
Old music
Comfortable shoes
Comprehension
New music
Writing, planting
Traveling
Singing
Being friendly

Reading Bercht’s list prompts me to consider what in my daily life invites pleasure, helps me take notice, makes me feel alive. Consider his poem a prompt in an of itself to create your own poem with the same title. The great thing about creating your own version of this poem is that even if you think you’re done, you’re probably not.

Here’s where mine stands today:

Pleasures, after Bertolt Brecht

Waking to a fresh coat of snow
Hot coffee
A cotton sweater
The postman, doing his job, again
A walk by Lake Michigan
That spot where the water meets the sky
Baby babbles, baby hands
My baby
Painting with no purpose
Tomatoes from the garden
A nap outside, on the ground, under the big sky
A good pen
Getting to grow older

Here is a line to consider from Rubem Alves’s Transparencies of Eternity, which is where I first stumbled upon Brecht’s poem: “It is enough to write your ‘Pleasures.’ It is easy to be a poet when one’s eyes are attentive to small joys.”

It is easy to be a poet when one’s eyes are attentive to small joys.

Again, I will be sharing prompts like this one over the next six months in hopes of helping us all engage deeper in our daily lives and generating work reflecting the realities of Racine residents. If you find yourself writing along and wanting to share your work, please send your writings my way via email. Work generated and shared by the community will be considered for publication in a small anthology. Please consider sharing, as we all have lives worth noticing and poems to be found.

Best,
L.A. Sklba
sklblauren@gmail.com