How to Love the World: A Poetry Practice Invitation

Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it. ~ Jericho Brown

As we weather the numerous transitions of this trying time, many of us are turning to poetry more than ever for a sense of groundedness and hope in the face of so many uncertainties about our future. Poetry provides an ideal practice for this moment, since the container of a poem can hold delight and disappointment, sorrow and joy, gratefulness and mystery, all at the same time, and sometimes even in the same breath.

We first met the poet James Crews when he joined us and Br. David Steindl-Rast for the Radical Aliveness and Belonging Symposium in September of 2019. None of us would have imagined that just a few months later, we’d all be sheltering in place, immersed in a global pandemic that has challenged even the most resilient among us. Answering the call of this transformative moment, James has published a new book, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, with uplifting poems and invitations for writing and reflection. 

As we emerge into a new way of being and living with open and curious hearts, we invite you during National Poetry Month to make writing a part of your own gratefulness practice, using weekly poems and prompts shared by James to touch in on your own lived and everyday experiences. As you allow these poems to spark your own inspiration, feel how they show us that, as Ross Gay writes in the Foreword to James’ new book: “Studying how we care, and are cared for, how we tend and are tended to, how we give and are given, is such necessary work. It makes the world.”

We hope you will join us for How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, a four-session practice that will take place weekly during April. Anticipating the month to come, we invite you to meet each practice day with openness and creativity, allowing the poems to take you in your own directions and never feeling as though you need to follow the prompts exactly. Mark Nepo has called poetry “the unexpected utterance of the soul,” and there can be no right or wrong when it comes to the poems, essays, stories, or journal entries we hope you might draw up from the depths of your being over this next month.

Registration for this practice is now closed. If you would like to learn about future practices and additional offerings, please subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

With grateful hearts,

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry, The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Crews teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University and lives with his husband on an organic farm in Vermont. jamescrews.net.