Matthew Rohrer was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Oklahoma. He earned a bachelor of arts at the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Award for poetry, and a master of fine arts in poetry from the University of Iowa.
His books are Rise Up (2007), A Green Light (2004), Satellite (2001) [...]

We all wear clothes, whether we’re a fashion victim or take an entirely functional view of what we put on our bodies. Why not use this everyday topic to inspire poetry?  The Academy of American Poets offers this article about clothing in poetry, including links to poems inspired by clothes. The current issue of  Mslexia - a [...]

I always wanted to be a poll dancer, and it’s appropriate that this poet’s first foray into the field is figurative. I’ll be “poll dancing” - launching a discussion about our sidebar polls - every couple of weeks here at Read Write Poem.
The current poll asks, “How often do you organize your poetry-related life?” [...]

From now until midnight one week from today, comments on this post will be open, so you can leave a permalink to your blog post for this week’s contribution.
Please take a few moments to read the the about page, the code of conduct and our copyrights page. If you have any questions about the project [...]

Without making any judgments about the value of obsession in poetry, the villanelle is an excellent vehicle for obsession. The repeated use of the refrains force the poem to keep circling and grabbing onto a very small set of ideas. This repetition is the key element of the villanelle.
Villanelle of Change
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Since Persia [...]

What does 7 + 5 = 12 have to do with metaphor and consonance? After attending a poetry reading and workshop by Earl S. Braggs I learned that, although mathematics and poetry are two different languages, when they bisect each other they create a complementary algebra of the heart and mind.
Here’s an example of Braggs’ [...]

From now until midnight one week from today, comments on this post will be open, so you can leave a permalink to your blog post for this week’s contribution.
Be sure to check back through the week and see what others have written in response to this prompt or inspirations from other sources: Read Write Poem!
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Please [...]

Establishing a daily writing practice can turn into an adventure if you spend some time moseying around the web. Writing prompts appear on many different sites, on every day of the week, beckoning the poet to link up and share a few lines or read what others have to say. In fact, you can even [...]

The pendulum of poetic taste has swung in many directions over the years. While much surviving poetry comes to us in anthologies - and is given to us as representative - we really have no way of knowing what all the poets from any given time period were writing. Today, with so many poets able to participate [...]

It’s post time at Read Write Poem, this week about traveling companions.
Or maybe you wrote about something else entirely. We care less about what got you started than reading what you wrote. Actually, we do like to hear what got you started. We like all things poetry-related, and then some.
So link on! And enjoy another week of [...]