by the Read Write Poem Staff
You might have noticed that things look a little different around here. And you’re right: A lot has changed since yesterday. What a difference a day makes.
We now have participant profile pages, groups, forums, personal messaging, personal and group newswires — and other fun features that will allow you to get involved in Read Write Poem in new and creative ways. For a summary of the new features, check out this post: Bigger and Better.
Then go to the Help tab in the navigation bar to learn more about how to create your free member account and start taking advantage of all these great new features. We have detailed the basics in three easy steps.
- Step 1: Sign up for an account, get your bearings and set up your profile.
- Step 2: Learn about private messaging, your personal wire, the friend feature and ways to check out member activity.
- Step 3: Learn how to use the site’s forums (including the new critique forums), and set up and participate in groups.
Starting today, we also offer poetry-related content almost every day of the week. Take a look at our lineup, which we summarize in this post: The New Read Write Poem. The schedule includes a new monthly Read Write Prompt written by a “celebrity” poet.
What is a celebrity poet, you ask? The poetry equivalent of Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie: a poet you would stalk if you could, because they have done so much in and for the world of poetry, and their work is life-changing. Just take a look at our first prompt (below) that we’re sharing today by celebrity poet Dorianne Laux. As always, we invite your feedback. So let us know if there are any poets you would like to see included in this series. We’ll do our best to stalk them cordially invite them to share a prompt.
by Dorianne Laux
 Dorianne Laux discusses Ruth Stone “Ruth Stone invites us into her personal universe using the language and images of her particular life.”
Today, I’m thinking about Ruth Stone and how she’s able to say so much in a few lines. Ruth Stone was born in 1915 and won the National Book Award in 2002, when she was 87 years old. Her poem “Pokeberries” appears in What Love Comes To, published in her 92nd year by Copper Canyon Press.
Pokeberries
I started out in the Virginia mountains
with my grandma’s pansy bed
and my Aunt Maud’s dandelion wine.
We lived on greens and back-fat and biscuits.
My Aunt Maud scrubbed right through the linoleum.
My daddy was a northerner who played drums
and chewed tobacco and gambled.
He married my mama on the rebound.
Who would want an ignorant hill girl with red hair?
They took a Pullman up to Indianapolis
and someone stole my daddy’s wallet.
My whole life has been stained with pokeberries.
No man seemed right for me. I was awkward
until I found a good wood-burning stove.
There is no use asking what it means.
With my first piece of ready cash I bought my own
place in Vermont; kerosene lamps, dirt road.
I’m sticking here like a porcupine up a tree.
Like the one our neighbor shot. Its bones and skin
hung there for three years in the orchard.
No amount of knowledge can shake my grandma out of me;
or my Aunt Maud; or my mama, who didn’t just bite an apple
with her big white teeth. She split it in two.
This poem could only have been written by Ruth Stone. Her voice is clear, singular, unmistakable, the details so particular that it’s difficult to imagine how it could strike such a universal chord. Look at the specificity of Stone’s personal universe: Virginia, Vermont, Indianapolis. Pansies and dandelion wine. Greens, back-fat and linoleum. Pullmans and kerosene. She also uses phrases and colloquialisms particular to her time and place: “I started out,” “ready cash,” “like a porcupine up a tree.”
Somehow Stone manages to take us through an entire lifetime in a mere 23 lines, choosing carefully from among her many memories to give us a family portrait, a community portrait and a self-portrait. Stone creates this sense of self through the details and images she chooses to highlight. The Virginia Mountains in the first line give us a sense of the grandeur of place, but moves quickly to the bed of grandmother’s common pansies and Aunt Maud, who makes wine out of weeds.
Stone continues in this vein, concentrating on the qualities of simplicity and stubbornness in the women she’s come from. Her father’s hands contribute a sense of risk and wildness, which merges with her mother’s “ignorance” and fiery red hair. The money her father loses seems to be Stone’s gain as she saves what she earns and buys a house, moves away from the family and community that raised her, and makes a place for her own life.
But in spite of uprooting herself from her rural past, gaining a more worldly education and becoming a poet, the last line confirms the deep connections that remain as Stone remembers and honors her lineage, that stubborn willfulness and inborn strength that has been passed down to her on a genetic level, an animal level, in the form of her mother’s hard, horse-like teeth.
Ruth Stone invites us into her personal universe using the language and images of her particular life. Choose 20 words that describe your personal universe, and be sure to include the five senses. Use concrete words that represent the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches of your life. Represent your past in the first eight words, your present in the next eight words and your future self in the remaining four words.
Make sure you maintain distillation. Not a tree, but an elm or a maple. Not shoes, but platforms, leather work boots or scuffed flats. Include both sides of the self: light and dark.
Stone’s poems are filled with life and movement. Choose a word of movement. Then find an abstraction, a word you might use to define what most motivates or controls your life. For Ruth Stone, it might be stubbornness. What is it for you? Joy, guilt, fear, love, shame, pride, anger, regret?
And last, choose a few words drawn from these categories: seasons, times of day or night, astrological signs, totems, heroes and heroines, nicknames, places in the universe, invented words or sounds, snippets of dialog. Use this list to write a 23-line autobiographical poem, or a poem about one of your heroes, using the words you’ve chosen. Make the title of the poem your abstract word.
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai. It was also short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States and chosen by The Kansas City Star as a noteworthy book of 2005. Laux is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990) introduced by Philip Levine, recently reprinted by Eastern Washington University Press, What We Carry (1994) and Smoke (2000). Superman: The Chapbook was released by Red Dragonfly Press in January 2008.
Note: Read more about Laux’s thoughts on poetry in the Read Write Interview Dana Guthrie Martin conducted with Laux last year.
“Pokeberries” shared with permission from Copper Canyon Press. Order What Love Comes To from Copper Canyon.
by Dana Guthrie Martin
Happy Get Your Poem On day! And happy One Day Until We Launch the New Read Write Poem day! Please read the three posts below this one to find out about the new site and learn when you can expect some downtime as we get shop all set up over at the new joint.
Were you all enchanted/haunted/creeped-out by this week’s image prompt? What did these two figures, crouched in a cemetery, have to tell you? However the image affected you, we’d like to hear about it!
If you participate in a Read Write Prompt, we ask that you link back here in your posts, either with a hyperlink to Read Write Poem or by using the Read Write Poem badge in your post. Sidebar links are great but it helps others find the site when you link in every post you contribute to the project. It’s not a lot to ask in acknowledgment of the work everyone is doing in providing prompts for members to use.
For the new folks, please read all the information included under out About page. If you have any questions about the project after reading through those pages, email us at info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
 Dana Guthrie Martin is the founder of Read Write Poem. She writes things and stuff. Most of the time, her things and stuff happen to be poetry, or at least they call themselves poetry. She has a robot named Feldman. He’s writing a book of poems.
by the Read Write Poem Staff
 The new Read Write Poem — it's coming! This is our last announcement post about the big launch this Friday. That’s right, the launch really is this Friday!
A launch wouldn’t be a launch without some good old downtime. We’ll have at least a few hours of that, beginning at midnight Eastern Daylight Time and ending (we hope) at about 6 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. We know you will be absolutely lost without Read Write Poem for those 6 hours, but we’re sure you can console yourselves with some ice cream or a bad movie or by wandering aimlessly along dark streets all night like a cat, moaning “Read Write Poem, Read Write Poem! Where is my Read Write Poem!”
If anything gets incredibly messed up and delays our launch, we will let you know through our Twitter account and Facebook group.
Everyone buckle up and drive safely. We’ll see you there in just a little bit!
Note: We are thrilled to announce that we are incoroprating the artwork of Charlotte Peys into the new site, in accordance with her generous Creative Commons license. Kamil, the base for the image above, has been our header on this site for nearly a year, but most of you have probably never seen the entire piece.
by the Read Write Poem Staff
Hello again, everyone! This is our second post about the new Read Write Poem site, which we’re aiming to launch July 31 — just three days from now!
One thing we should mention is that there will be some downtime as we move all the information to the new site and get it up an running. In the next couple of days, we’ll give you more details about exactly when to expect that downtime.
But for now, would you like a sneak peek of the new features you will see on the site after we launch? We thought so. Here’s the rundown:
Profile pages
These pages will replace the list of participants that we have been manually updating on the site. Now, you will be able to create your own profile page in a matter of minutes. Your profile will include not only your website, but also a photo, information about you, what type of poetry you like to read, and links to other places participants can find you online, such as Facebook, Identi.ca and Twitter.
A personal news wire
The wire is associated with your profile and will allow you to post status messages, short poems, announcements about publications, poetry news and the like. You can use this feed to share just about anything poetry-related — and even things that aren’t poetry-related.
Forums
We will offer several forums on the new site, where participants can discuss poetry, share poetry news, post calls for submissions, connect with one another for collaborative projects and more. If it’s poetry-related, you can discuss it on the forums.
Critique forums
We have created a special group of poetry-sharing and critique forums, with designations for different levels of sharing and critique. This is our first foray into critique, and we wanted to offer it as an option for our participants who might love sharing work written to each week’s prompt, but who also want others to dig into their work a little more. We believe the critique forums will be quite popular, based on the results of our recent poll asking what functionality participants want to see on the new site.
Groups
Hooray for groups! We are thrilled to offer this feature, which is a way for participants to connect with those who have similar interests in poetry. Do you love prose poetry? There’s a group for that. How about formal poetry? There’s a group for that as well. And if you don’t see your groups listed among all the choices offered, you can start your own group. Each group has its own wire for group-related news. Some groups will have forums associated with them, so you will have even more ways to communicate with group members.
Private messaging
We know from our recent poll that this isn’t the most anticipated function on the new site. But it comes bundled with all our other new features, so you’re getting it.  No worries, though. You can forward Read Write Poem messages to your personal email account so you don’t have to check two sites.
Friending
You will be able to friend people on the new site. Friending someone allows you to email one another and see each other’s wires. It will also help us keep track of one another as the site grows.
Subblogs
This is one of the features of the new site that we are most excited about. The feature won’t be available at launch; we are hoping to roll it out by the end of the year. We will offer a handful of blogs linked to the main site that provide more content on specific types of poetry and poetry interests. We will keep you in the loop on this feature as it evolves.
Now, if you have read through all of these fantastic features, and it’s just not what you want — no worries. We strongly encourage participants to become members and take advantage of any and all of these ways to engage with the community. But it’s completely and totally optional.
Even without becoming a member, you can still read and respond to all the content we will be sharing on the main site, as well as participating in our Read Write Prompts. Just remember: Getting an account is free, and it’s easy. Why not explore everything the community has to offer?
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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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