Poetry is Witness. Creation is Activism. 

 If we pay attention...look around...really look...

there is nothing but writing material.

                                          Tearing your sweater on a nail? Poem.

Taking a right turn and heading in the wrong direction? Poem.

                                                 Spilling soup? Tea? Coffee? Paint? Poem.

Buying the wrong size jeans? Those precious seconds before sending an e-mail? Text? 

                  Tripping over a toy or something you no longer use? Poem. 

      Revolution? Hurricanes? Earthquakes?Snow? Divorce? Love? Viruses?

   When asked to define grass Walt Whitman said ...it is uniform hieroglyphics...

      Hieroglyphics

     Think of this course, or the rest of your seeing, thinking ,deciphering life this way...

              Everything is waiting for me.

         I want to decode the world.

     I want to be a poem.

    Walt Whitman said it best, in his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all that you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…”