Recently, I summoned Brent Goodman to his computer to grill him via e-mail about his debut collection, The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. The book was more than a decade in the making, yet this masterful collection manages to reflect who Brent is now as a poet. His poems are seductive, [...]

This week’s prompt is a collaborative work between me (Blythe) and the fabulous blogger and guest contributor Twitches.
Twitches loves smell, and she’s written blog entries about her favorite perfume brands that are more sensual and evocative than most of my poetry. So when she suggested a prompt on smell, I was excited to work with [...]

I have two poems-in-progress right now. One is about aliens, visitors from other galaxies. The other has something to do with Hemingway. Neither aliens nor Hemingway is on the list of choices for the current poll. Apparently there are other things to write about, as you’ve all pointed out in your generous responses. (I’m [...]

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, a ballad. (Or some other poetry project of yours. We hope it sings, and we’d love to read a ballad, but we are all about poetry [...]

Aside from Christine’s excellent post on Shakespearean Sonnets, there hasn’t been much written here about metrically formal poetry. There are a couple of reasons, one being that I wanted to write a piece on meter before I started writing about verse forms that use it, and another is that I rarely write in meter. It’s [...]

Yes, the song. No hidden meaning there. For over thirty years the Eagles’ “Hotel California” has inspired and intrigued people the world over. It has been covered and translated and parodied and most people still have no idea what the song even means.
But what in the world has that to do with a poetry prompt?
On [...]

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. Did you poem to one of Rick Mobb’s paintings? We hope so, but if something else inspired you, we want to read that work, too.
Be sure [...]

Read Write Poem is having an ekphrastic extravaganza this week, thanks to the talents and generosity of poet and artist Rick Mobbs.
In his welcome message on his blog, Mine Enemy Grows Older, Rick says, “I started this as a place to share my own work but find I am more interested in the stories, myths, [...]

How do you know when a poem is finished? (And by “finished” I don’t mean “doomed;” I mean “completed.”) It’s a question every poet struggles with, and the possible answers are endless: A finished poem is one somewhere between “just started” and “beaten to death.” A finished poem is one that survives the trash [...]

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. (Carolee hopes in sympathy with her aversion to sun strokes, but leave a link to any poem or poem-like writing you’d like to share this week.)
Be [...]