Recently, we received the same chain letter from two different friends. When we read the instructions, our eyes glazed over: “it only takes 8 to 10 minutes“. We’ve just got too much going on to wrap our heads around it: send a poem to the first person on the list, copy-and-paste the letter into a separate email and shift the names, then think of 20 (TWENTY!) people to send it to. We did it just to see if it was as much of a pain-in-the-ass as we imagined. It is (though entirely well-intentioned).

But we love the idea of emailing poems to friends. So we created a guilt-free, no-obligation, joy-based email:

The gist: NO OBLIGATION! No threats of bad karma if you don’t pass it on.

Sally Schneider
Sally Schneider

In case you can’t read our email message, here it is:

I received the chain letter below TWICE and find it too complicated. So I decided to scrap it and create my own simple poetry email. I decided to just send poems to people I love. Which is you. 
 
You can:
—not do anything but just enjoy the poem
—forward it to anyone you love
—forward it to as many friends as you like AND ME, along with a poem you like (which turns it into a chain letter)
We tried it and found that we FELT great just doing it, whether we go anything back or not…

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One thought on “Pain-in-the-Ass Poetry Chain Letter: Our Guilt-Free Hack

  1. I really like what you did with that well-intentioned but definitely annoying letter, transforming it from a prescriptive task into a simple act of love and appreciation. Personally I’d much rather receive a simple emailed poem by a friend (or anonymous person), rather than something as part of an “assignment”.

    This was a great reminder to keep up sending people little personal notes when I think about them 🙂

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