Every Day is a Poem

with Jacqueline Suskin

Writing practices for healing, happiness, and honoring the power of your voice

This course is free July 6 to 10. Join us.

Poetry is an invitation to blend beauty into your deepest emotions. To use the power of your voice as you explore what it means to be alive. To examine and release life’s heaviness with pen and paper.

Your life is an inspiration.

Poetry is a tool to capture how you see the world.

In Every Day is a Poem, Jacqueline Suskin guides you through her creative writing process with prompts, encouragement, and examples from her own work. You will develop a deeper understanding of what poetry is, create a writing practice that works for you, and in doing so get in touch with your purpose.

You will uncover inspiration, fuel your natural creativity, engage with your emotions, and mold meaning out of the difficult and the wonderful times in your life. Best of all: You will write poetry!

 

Writing is a transformative act.

Poetry enables and empowers you to:

  • Find new ways to articulate and express yourself
  • Process emotional pain and heartache
  • Know yourself in a new, deep, and meaningful way
  • Express love, awe, and affection
  • Enhance self-awareness and critical thinking skills
  • Develop empathy, compassion, and insight
  • Celebrate life’s moments and milestones

 In other words, writing poetry is good for you!

Meet Your Teacher

Jacqueline Suskin is a performance poet and educator who has been teaching workshops, writing books, and creating spontaneous poetry around the world since 2009. With her project, the Poem Store, Suskin has composed over forty thousand improvisational poems for patrons who chose a topic in exchange for a unique verse. Her work has been featured in New York Times, T Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and other publications. 

She is also the author of The Collected (Publication Studio, 2010), Go Ahead & Like It (Ten Speed Press, 2014), The Edge of The Continent Volume One (Rare Bird, 2018), The Edge of The Continent Volume Two (Rare Bird, 2019), Help in the Dark Season (Write Bloody, 2019), and The Edge of The Continent Volume Three (Rare Bird, 2020). Her newest book, Every Day is a Poem, releases in the fall of 2020. 

“Even the effort of showing up for poetic exploration can alter the way we witness everyday life and that can have profound effects that reverberate in all we do.” 

Daily Lessons

Wherever you stand at any moment, whatever the situation, you can drum up a large dose of awe to get you through. 

Awe is appreciation. Awe is curiosity. It gets you to look closer, to lead with patience and compassion, acceptance and intrigue. There is no shortage of wonder in the human spirit. We were born to ask why. We are here to make up our own answers. This is the poetry of being alive. Today we will hone in on our awe, we will uncover it like an aquifer and bring it to the surface so that it never goes silent again. 

On Day 1 of Every Day is Poem, Jacqueline introduces what it means to be in awe, discusses the many forms awe can take, and then guides you through a writing practice.

Then, watch as Jacqueline responds on-screen to the exercise, showing you how she finds awe in the moment.

Because we are the ones asking questions and finding answers, we are the ones who get to determine the meaning that we live by.

Meaning is a choice. You can delve into the details surrounding you and measure the might of sacredness in each. You can make the street sign sacred if you want to. Anything can be holy. We are graced with the ability to tell stories and apply them again and again in situations of doubt. We choose talismans that hold the power of repetition, this repetition creates significance.

Today we will look at the details of our life and name what makes it all meaningful. Once we do this practice, the significance sticks and we can hold onto it always, we can let it all grow more and more meaningful with time.

Today, Jacqueline introduces the idea of creating a personal mythology that adds importance to everyday life and illuminates that anything can be meaningful if we assign significance. She walks you through this process by offering up personal examples of her own mythology and then writes on-screen to further explore this practice.

There is a wealth of inspiration swirling around us and within us on any given day.

This part of the course focuses on these endless offerings, reminding us that we have the opportunity to use our senses, our pain, our joy, and our memory as sources of inspiration for our writing.

What to write about? They always say, write what you know. This means that your personal life experience is always enough as a starting point on a journey of creative expression. Today we will lean into this potential that you carry and begin to see that we are all overflowing with our own material.

Today, Jacqueline introduces the various types of inspiration that we all have access to and walks you through this accessibility. Writing time on-screen focuses on the senses and the therapeutic nature of poetry, the way that inspiration is endless because of our personal experiences.

Why do you write? Who are you writing for? What is the purpose behind your creative expression?

It’s okay to not know your purpose. Most people don’t, although, I believe it’s there inside of you waiting to be identified. Your purpose can change throughout your life. Your purpose can look like something very certain and then you’ll realize there is a hidden door to another aspect of intention that will offer up new motivation.

Maybe you have a few different types of purpose that fuel your existence and all of these reasons for doing what you do can come out in small ways and large ways.

Purpose is a grand idea, so today we will just begin to reveal the roots of our poetic purpose, the reason we write our words on the page. The knowledge of why you want to write will illuminate the foundation of every poem you create, it will guide you when you sit down with your journal, and it will add clarity to moments of poetic experience in the world outside of the written word.

In this lesson, Jacqueline opens with her philosophy around purpose and a personal story about the moment she became aware of her own purpose. Instead of having on-screen writing time, Jacqueline will read her “Poetic Purpose” piece and show you what it is to create a poem of purpose.

We all have a poet living inside of us, or beside us, close at hand. You have permission to love that part of yourself, to work at that piece inside of you until it comes out in words, to gather up all of those swirling expressions and make sense of them in language.

You can be a secret poet, a poet who never writes, a poet who just appreciates the craft but keeps a journal locked away from others. You don’t have to call yourself a poet to be one.

This can be a private journey of naming feelings and processing experiences. But if you are looking to give yourself over to your work in a deeper way, there are a few things that will make the process that much more of a craft. This means dedicating yourself to a practice. Today, we will discuss some very easy ways to start this process.

"Jacqueline Suskin shows us poetry isn’t just an art form, it’s a way of seeing the world, and it can be learned."

Hallie Bateman
author of What to Do When I’m Gone

How Commune Courses Work

Learning is a collective experience at Commune: Starting July 6, you will receive a daily email with access to course videos during the 5-day program. This encourages all participants to move through the course together. After July 10, the free period will end and the course will lock. If you want immediate, lifetime access, you can buy the course or Commune Membership.

There's a world within you
waiting to be expressed.

And this is it: your moment to find your voice, to connect to yourself in a deep and meaningful way, to see the beauty in life, and to honor and commemorate your lived experiences with verse.

Are you ready to discover what the power of poetry can do for you?

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