The Group

A group of poets and editors are talking, very relaxed and casual but with a sense of something important that is unsaid, and maybe unsayable. My mentor is there and is mostly quiet. There are comfortable silences in which it seems that things are still being communicated. There is some task that needs to be taken on and I think we are all looking to my mentor to do it, but he does not seem willing. I share with the group memories of a previous meeting we had that went on late into the night, a situation in which I would usually feel vulnerable and yet I was not concerned, while in the group it felt perfectly safe to be out late far from home. After talking for a while we moved on, as a group, creating some kind of collaborative, improvised show as we went, playing with words and movement. Still there was a sense of a task yet to be taken on, something that needed to be expressed that was not being expressed, a collective rather than purely personal thing that was being hidden, some kind of collective suffering that needed to be healed.