This week’s collaborative read write prompt is brought to you by Read Write Poem participant Holly, from Lost Kite. Thank you, Holly, for the prompt! If anyone else has prompt ideas, we’d love for you to share them. Simply email us at prompt (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
I have been teaching the book Steppenwolf , by Herman Hesse, to my freshman students at Gainesville State College. This is a book that has influenced my thinking in many ways, and I never get tired of reading it. In the book, the main character, Harry, has a dualistic nature (man and wolf). He struggles with who he really is (or even wants to be), as though he has to be just one thing or another. Is he bourgeois? Is he an intellectual? Is he animalistic? We all have this struggle on some level-to figure stuff out, to “find ourselves.”
Another character, Hermine (who becomes Herman at one point in the book), is comfortable with the many sides of herself — intellectual, playful, shallow, deep, feminine, masculine, mother and daughter. She doesn’t necessarily think these parts of us have to conflict.
Hermine proposes that it is human for us to all have layers, like an onion — not just devil and angel, or masculine and feminine, or human and animal — but many, many souls inside of us. When we are peeled (or choose to peel ourselves), we reveal a new layer. We keep revealing layers throughout our lives.
Let’s get comfortable with our many layers by imagining ourselves as onions! (I wanna be a Vidalia myself. I’d better put on my contacts. I can’t peel an onion with bare eyes … ooo, I’ll cry.) Whatever type of onion you are, you have layers. Are you a student, parent, lover, child, poet, intellectual, activist? Are you shy, outgoing, self-conscious, alert, oblivious? Heroic, fearful, uncertain, confused?
Do you have other layers that define you? Of course you do. We could never begin to list them all.
Here’s how we’re going to do it, and how we’re going to make it collaborative:
- We each write a stanza (or stanzas if you want to write from more than one layer) the represents a layer of yourself. Don’t get too hung up on making something “perfect.” We are all just supplying raw material here.
- We leave those stanzas in the comments of this post. Posting will close at midnight Sunday (Central Standard Time).
- We are all invited to work with any or all of the stanzas left in the comments and do whatever we want with them in terms of revision. The sky’s the limit in terms of how we recast the pieces to create something new. Use all. Use some. Break stanzas apart and reconnect them with other stanzas. Change the order. Augment. Reduce. However you want to approach it is up to you.
- We all come back for the Get Your Poem On post Thursday and link to the revised work. Then the merriment ensues as we see how other people have handled and shaped the raw material.
Sound good? Good. Let’s all peel away.
Note: In case it’s not super clear, the topic we are writing about is not onions. The onion is the metaphor for how we are talking about the layers of self and writing from those layers. We are writing about ourselves.
by Tom Adam
How’d everybody do getting Gothic this week? Are we going to get some vampires, spirits of the night and drafty castles? I hope so!
Now’s the time to leave us a link to your work about the Gothic or whatever you came up with. Remember to leave more than one comment if you have more than one link.
Please, link back here in your posts, either with a hyperlink to Read Write Poem or by using the badge in your post. Sidebar links are great but it helps our “internet health” when you link in every post you contribute to the project. And please add “Read Write Poem” in your tags, if you don’t mind.
For the new folks: Please take a few moments to read the About pages, including our Copyrights page. If you have any questions about the project after reading through those pages, email us at info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
by Juliet Wilson
52 Ways of Looking at a Poem is based on the articles Ruth Padel wrote for the Independent on Sunday newspaper.
The idea behind the articles and the book is to encourage the reader to read poetry more closely, to pay more attention to both form and meaning. Fifty-two poems are chosen — one for each week of the year — and dissected, with Padel’s trademark informed intelligence. Poets represented include Seamus Heaney, Don Paterson, Colette Bryce and Vicki Feaver.
The poems cover a range of styles, forms and themes, though all are relatively short, given the original constraints of the newspaper column. The analysis of each poem runs to at least two pages, starting with a brief biographical note on the writer, a discussion of the context of the poem and then an in-depth study of the way rhyme and rhythm are used in the poem and how these work to support and enhance the subject matter.
It’s a fascinating read, I certainly felt I was finding more in the poems than I otherwise would have done (and I’m a fairly close reader to start with). However, can it become counterproductive to over analyze a poem? Does such close reading drain the poem of its immediacy? These are interesting questions to ponder reading through this book.
It is also interesting to reflect on ones own writing from the standpoint of this book. How would my writing stand up to such close reading? How about yours?
Wordle! Wordle! Get your Wordle prompt right here. This Wordle uses words contributed by Rethabile Masilo. Thank you, Rethabile! (Click on the image to see it larger.)
Remember: Leave a link Thursday to your Read Write Word piece, to your Read Write Prompt piece, or both. Poem on!
by Tom Adam
Ah, the word gothic. It has so many meanings. More than I had realized as a matter of fact, but the one at issue is: “Noting or pertaining to a style of literature characterized by a gloomy setting, grotesque, mysterious, or violent events, and an atmosphere of degeneration and decay.”
Not really suitable for spring (which is about renewal), or summer (which is all about beach volleyball) or winter (er … snowboarding? OK, winter is the pause, the looking back at the past and the looking forward to the future). Autumn, however, is the season for Gothic. We have the ready-made holiday of Halloween as well as the decline of vibrant life in the world around us.
In honor of this season, and my favorite holiday, Halloween, this week we explore the world of Gothic poetry. (Oh, and to anyone reading us from down under, just play along). Gothicism as an artistic movement is largely part of the Romantic era. The Romantics turned away from the science and realism of the Enlightenment and focused on more subjective areas of experience. Gothic art was toward the fantastic end of what they explored, but spooky. On the non-spooky but still fantastic end was Surrealism.
The realm of Gothic writing is probably most familiar to us in novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the later writings of Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but it had considerable influence in poetry as well. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” both fit within this genre. The gloomy and the grotesque, with an atmosphere of degeneration. But how did they do that?
Part of it is the environment. Often these tales are at night. Castles figure prominently. If the surroundings are important, they are mentioned early. Coleridge’s “Christabel” begins, ” ‘Tis the middle of the night by Castle-clock.” That lets us know right away it’s midnight and there’s a castle. When the details are not important, they are skipped, but when they become important they get mentioned. Gottfried Burger’s “Lenora” goes 90 lines during the day in some unspecified place, then we get night and most of the story happens. (And by line 235 end up in a graveyard with a skeleton.)
In Gothic literature, fantastic elements (the scary ones) are treated as if they were as real as anything else. “Fair Elenor” by William Blake immediately jumps into the Gothic mode: “The bell struck one and shook the silent tower; / The graves gave up their dead … ” Lord Byron’s “Darkness” has a similar immediacy: “I had a dream, which was not all a dream … ” Sometimes the strangeness takes longer to get to, but even then the author isn’t asking you to believe, he is just telling you what is. Or she: Mary Robinson’s “The Haunted Beach” begins at a spooky beach and soon (lines 25-27): “The fisherman beheld a band / Of spectres gliding hand in hand –- / Where the green billows played.”
Part of this genre’s effect is the spooky stuff in the poem: ghosts, witches, jilted lovers returned from the dead, skeletons, Death, the Devil, fairies and blood (lots of blood), not to mention murders.
And a large part of what makes the Gothic is what masters of terror have known for a long time: isolation. Many of these stories, novels, poems and stories in verse feature a mortal character being swept up the experience of horror. It keeps the reader in one person’s head for the duration. Sometimes the stories are in first person to give even greater immediacy.
Your prompt this week is to write your own Gothic poem. They tended to be on the lengthy side, but I think we can overlook if you lose a line or 200. If you need a little inspiration, here are a few to take a bit of a look at:
For the collaboratively minded, I suggest something the Romantic were fond of: with someone else, pick a spooky story and each write your own version of it.
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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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