by Juliet Wilson
I love recycling and was fascinated by January’s recent article about revising poetry, so here’s a quick recycling prompt: Take an old poem and revise it, either polish it or totally rework it — then share both versions with us! If you want, share your thoughts about the process, in your blog post (or here)!
Idea for collaboration: Swap poems with a fellow participant and rework each other’s poems!
Come back after the early morning hours next Monday and post a link to your recycled poem, or anything else you want to share, at the Get Your Poem On post that will be waiting for you!
Want to collaborate? Leave a note here and see if anyone else wants to hook up. Or contact one of the participants on their blog and see if they’re game.
by Carolee Sherwood
Kermit said it best: “It’s not easy being green.” It’s hard to be who you are, sometimes, and if who you are is a writer, you face some difficult choices when it comes to writing about intense subjects. What do you share? How much do you share? With whom do you share?
Many topics are considered intimate (not to be shared in mixed company) or private (dirty laundry not to be aired in public). Other topics are simply so edgy or raw it’s challenging to capture them in writing. Often these themes are painful, but that doesn’t have to be the case. It can be just as hard to write a piece in homage or celebration of something particularly personal.
In our poll, we identified some subjects that may be hard to write about. The tricky part of putting them in writing goes beyond the regular fears of disclosure; risk lurks in the necessity of the poem itself (the craft) to deliver. If the form or the language or the metaphors flop, it’s especially obvious in the face of such weighty material.
There are as many ways to handle delicate subjects as there are poets, and we can discover a lot about ourselves as writers by reading other writers. So this poll dance is going to take a different angle than our prior chats. For this discussion, I am offering some examples of poems I found on the very subjects we mention in the poll.
Each poem addresses the subject from a different angle, some shocking, some humorous, some gut-wrenching, some delightful. Each poet exhibits skill and grace. Each reading experience should bolster your own courage as you face the bold life you’re living and seek a voice for the stories you want to tell.
Sex
- “The Elephant is Slow to Mate” by D. H. Lawrence (It begins, “The elephant, the huge old beast, / is slow to mate; / he finds a female, they show no haste / they wait.”)
- “Erotic Energy” by Chase Twichell (It begins, “Don’t tell me we’re not like plants, / sending out a shoot when we need to, / or spikes, poisonous oils, or flowers.”)
Difficult family relationships
- “Be Near Me (link may or may not be working; see note below about technical difficulty at poets.org)” by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated by Naomi Lazard (It begins, “Be near me now, / My tormenter, my love, be near me —”)
- “Brother” by Mary Ann Hoberman (It begins, “I had a little brother / And I brought him to my mother / And I said I want another / Little brother for a change.)
- “I Go Back to May 1937” by Sharon Olds (It includes the lines, “I want to go up to them and say Stop, / don’t do it — she’s the wrong woman, / he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things / you cannot imagine you would ever do.”)
- “The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson (It includes the lines, “My mother speaks suddenly. / That psychotherapy’s not doing you much good is it? / You aren’t getting over him. / My mother has a way of summing things up.”)
Marriage or dating
- “I Married You” by Linda Pastan (“I married you / for all the wrong reasons”)
- “50-50” by Langston Hughes (It includes the lines, “If you had a head and used your mind / You could have me with you / All the time. / She answered, Babe, what must I do? / He said, Share your bed— / And your money, too.”)
- “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” by Galway Kinnell: ” … as now, we lie together, / after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies, / familiar touch of the long-married, / and he appears — in his baseball pajamas … “)
Abuse or violence
- “The Body” by Frederick Morgan (It begins, “The body frozen in the lake / rose up again in spring. / It could not be identified / at first, despite the golden hair, / despite the ruby ring. / Its finder could not shake the chill / and suffered sleepless nights.”)
- “When the World Ended as We Knew It” by Joy Harjo (It includes the lines, “Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched / the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry / by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed / by a fire dragon, by oil and fear. / Eaten whole.”)
- “Incident” by LeRoi Jones (It includes the lines, “Pictures of the dead man, are everywhere. And his spirit / sucks up the light.”)
- “The Fearful Child” by Carol Frost (It includes the lines, “I quaked at the sound of my voice whispering, No, /or turned my face to the wall / and wept salt onto my knuckles.”)
- “The Search Party” by William Matthews (It includes the line, “I feared I’d find something.”)
Mental wellbeing or illness
- “Letters from an Institution” by Michael Ryan (It begins, “The ward beds float like ghost ships / in the darkness, the nightlight / above my bed I pretend is a lighthouse / with a little man inside who wears / a sailor cap and tells good old stories/ of the sea.”)
- “Solitude” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (It begins, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; / Weep, and you weep alone;” and ends “But one by one we must all file on / Through the narrow aisles of pain.”)
My body
- Homage to my hips.” (It includes this gem: “these hips are magic hips, i have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top.”)
- Of course, on this subject, you must consider Walt Whitman’s “I sing the body electric.“
- “Body” by Alissa Leigh (It begins, “Map of terror and pleasure, / ardent junk, passionate congress / filled with the arguments of chemicals.”)
- “Question” by May Swenson (It begins, “Body my house / my horse my hound / what will I do / when you are fallen / Where will I sleep / How will I ride / What will I hunt.”)
- “Washing My Hair” by Anne Stevenson (It includes the lines, “none will know me better when I’m / words on stone / Than I, these creased familiar hands / and clumsy feet.”)
Physical wellbeing or illness
- “Bedside (link may or may not be working; see note below about technical difficulty at poets.org)” by William Olsen (It begins, “Because it turns out the world really is a hospital.”)
- “Mastectomy” by Wanda Coleman (It includes the lines, “forget cool evening air kisses the rush of / liberation freed from the brassiere / forget the cupping of his hands the pleasure / his eyes looking down / anticipating / forget his mouth. his tongue at the nipples / his intense hungry nursing”)
- “His Stillness” by Sharon Olds (It begins, “The doctor said to my father, “You asked me/ to tell you when nothing more could be done. / That’s what I’m telling you now.”)
Death (not in our poll, but still important)
- “Eyes Fastened with Pins” by Charles Simic (It begins, “How much death works, / No one knows what a long / Day he puts in.”)
- “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson (about a seemingly terrific guy who kills himself “on one calm summer night.”)
- “The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton (It begins with quote from Vincent Van Gogh and includes the lines, “This is how / I want to die: / into that rushing beast of the night, / sucked up by that great dragon.”)
- “Writing in the afterlife” by Billy Collins (It includes the lines, “I knew I would not live forever, / jumping all day through the hoop of myself. / I had heard about the journey to the other side / and the clink of the final coin / in the leather purse of the man holding the oar.”)
In the comments section, please join me in sharing poems you’ve found to be brave or unique in their handling of difficult subjects.
Remember to honor other poets’ ownership of their words. Small excerpts or short quotes are permissible, but no full texts. When possible, link to the full text on a website that publishes it with permission. My own quest for these poems lead me to The Poetry Foundation and The Academy of American Poets; both sites have databases searchable by theme or subject. (At “press time” poets.org, The Academy site, was experiencing huge problems. Wherever possible we redirected the links to other locations, like poemhunter or Famous Poets and Poems, so you may have to contend with pop-ups or ads the poets.org site generously allows you to avoid.)
Here’s how the poll dance works: We post a poll and let it ride for a week and a half, and then I’ll talk a little bit about the topic and the results. The poll will stand for a few days after that to allow additional participation. The rotation gives each poll two weeks in the white-hot spotlight.
by Jessica Fox-Wilson
I think that reading is one of the most fruitful activities a poet can undertake, because it is such a varied source of inspiration.
Inspiration can come in many forms, from immersing yourself in your environment to listening to music. For me, reading other poets has been my greatest source of inspiration, because I can see the way in which theme and craft mingle in a successful poem or group of poems. Reading can benefit poets in the same way that studying art history benefits painters and watching sports reels benefits athletes.
While I will read any book of poetry, any time and any place, there have been a small handful of books of poetry that have altered the course of my writing. The four books below have broadened my subject matter or changed the way I see language.
An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, by Adrienne Rich
When I was in college, I immersed myself in women writers. I felt that the traditional canon of poets didn’t necessarily speak to my experience as a woman at the end of the twentieth century. So, of course, I read a lot of Adrienne Rich. While I enjoyed her early poetry, because it is so full of rebellion and rage, I fell in love with An Atlas of the Difficult World.
Many of the themes Rich addresses throughout her work, from social justice to the complexity of human relationships, coalesce in this collection. Her rage is still here, but it is muted and mired in ambiguity. By reading this book, I realized that there is more than one way to write when in conflict with one’s culture.
Ultramarine, by Raymond Carver
While I was openly reading rebellious women poets in college, I was secretly crushing on defiant male poets. Raymond Carver topped my list of favorites. One of the strengths of this collection is that Carver reveals the beauty in that which is broken and discarded. For instance, his poem “The Car” uses a repetitive chat to mediate on his conflicted relationship with his broken down car. He describes it alternatively as “The car without brakes” and “Car of my sleepless nights.” When I’m stuck on a poem, I still use a chant to break up my ideas, years after first reading this poem.
The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, by Elizabeth Bishop
Through a strange coincidence in course planning, I took a series of classes in graduate school that required me to read Elizabeth Bishop’s complete collection five times in a row. In one semester, I had to read it twice for two separate classes. As I read Bishop’s poems over and over (and over), I gained a greater sense of awe and admiration for what she accomplishes in a single poem. Years after graduate school, I still return to this book and her work.
Bishop achieved a precision in her language that seems almost inhuman. Whether she used form, as she did famously with villanelles and sestinas, or in her free verse, each word she employed takes on multiple nuances and connotations.
While I aspire to her control of language, I don’t envy her process. (She was notorious for revising poems upwards of 20 times.) If you are interested in learning more about Bishop’s obsessive revision techniques, I would strongly recommend picking up Edgar Allen Poe & The Juke-Box, a new collection of Bishop’s unfinished work.
Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris
I will warn you that this series of books could cause severe back strain. This three volume anthology tops 800 pages each, and chronicles all of the major experimental poetry movements, beginning with William Blake and moving through to the twentieth century. Taken together, this collection of poems provides a rich chronicle of our relationship with (and against) language and form in poetry.
Now, I don’t profess to have read all, or even most, of the poems in these anthologies. It would take a lifetime. I prefer to use these volumes as a source of quick inspiration. I can select a volume, flip open to a random page and learn something new, maybe picking up a writing technique or a line fragment along the way.
There they are — the top four books that have inspired me and deepened my understanding of what poetry can accomplish. I’m convinced that without them, I’d be a different writer.
Now it’s your turn. What are the four books that have changed your writing?
by Tom Adam
I struggled a bit to come up with a topic for this prompt. Absolutely nothing seemed like a good idea. Idly, I was flipping through feeds in Google Reader, and came across a post by Kristin Gorski of Write now is good.
Our world of storytellers
Our lives are full of the stories we tell: bits about ourselves and those we hear from others … When we are not telling stories, we are listening to them: from close friends and family, from media outlets, from advertisements and marketing campaigns …
Suddenly, I was put in mind of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”:
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Shelley is telling us a story here, both a narrative and metaphoric one. The story he is telling us, however, is not the story of the traveler, but the person hearing the traveler. We hear the traveller’s tale, but with a certain distance. We’re told about the statue in a second-hand way, and the framing changes our perceptions of the story.
As writers and artists, we’re the ones telling the stories. Sometimes the stories are narrative, sometimes they are ephemera. As Kristin points out, we are also absorbing stories from others as we go through our day.
Your prompt this week is to write a poem where you are being told a story. Perhaps you’ll choose to be as literal about that as Shelley, perhaps you’ll find another way to frame it, but do not let the “I” of the poem tell the story. For this one, let someone else tell the tale.
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read write poem news- read write poem napowrimo anthology
June 20, 2010 | 1:36 pmThe Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology is still in production. Selection, placement, layout and copyediting are taking longer than anticipated. Thank you for your patience. I hope to have the piece completed in July. For those who have emailed asking if they can be included, the May 7 deadline for submission of work stands. Those who met that deadline will be included. Please check the post on this site listing who I received submissions from by that date. If you submitted your work by the May 7 deadline in accordance with our guidelines and your name is not listed, send an email to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
- read write poem napowrimo anthology
May 5, 2010 | 3:09 pmRemember that Friday* is the deadline for submitting work to the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology. Check out the guidelines for submission in the main column (to the left). On May 8, we’ll post a news item listing everyone we’ve received work from. If you submitted work and your name is not on that list, please let us know. Thanks!
*I initially said “tomorrow,” but I meant to say “Friday.”
- napowrimo congratulations, and a reminder
April 24, 2010 | 12:05 pmIt’s the final week of the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge! Just 7 days left. With that, a reminder that Read Write Poem will culminate with the anthology featuring work from those who complete the challenge. A post with details for submitting to the anthology will be published May 1. Be sure you remove any information from the site that you want preserved — such as group content and personal messages. Those elements of the site will be removed May 1 as well. The main site will remain up as an archive.
- ‘underlife’ tour at january gill o’neil’s blog
April 20, 2010 | 8:11 pmJanuary Gill O’Neil’s virtual book tour has moved to her site and is underway now. Check out the lineup at Poet Mom.
 Archive for read write poem news »
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thank you and farewell As of May 1, 2010, Read Write Poem is no longer active.
In late May, an anthology featuring work from those who completed the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge will be published here and on issuu.com.
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