by the Read Write Poem Staff
Did you repeat yourself this week along the lines of Rethabile’s prompt? Did you repeat yourself this week along the lines of Rethabile’s prompt? Did you repeat yourself this week along the lines of Rethabile’s prompt?
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by Dave Jarecki
 Moist Meridian, by Henry Hughes “If you write all the time, you’re going to get more of those “bonuses,” as Stafford calls them.”
Henry Hughes is a very hard working poet, and the evolution of his lines and style is a product of the amount of time he puts in. His second book, Moist Meridian (2009, Mammoth Books), has amazing sea legs as it crosses through some of life’s more interesting passages. During an interview, I asked Hughes about a specific line in one of his more aerial poems, “Flight,” in which he details the fatalistic musings of a traveler aboard an airline. I wanted to find out about his choice to be playful in that moment.
There’s a line in the second-to-last stanza that reads: “The invisible captain speaks of seat belts, / weather and time — and that’s fine if we’re coming back to earth.” You could have started that in so many different ways, but you wrote, “Invisible captain.” Was that phrase ever anything other than “Invisible captain,” and how do you as a teacher get your students to be playful in their writing?
I don’t think the line was ever anything else but “Invisible captain.” Plenty of lines get changed quite a bit, as you well know. Sometimes they even get better.
Just the way it’s there in the sentence structurally, it sounds like the kind of thing I do a lot, especially in my first drafts. If I’m going to modify something, I’ll do it kind of crazily. If I get one out of 10 of them to work, then it’s worth it.
Rereading it, the line feels like it was probably that way since the first draft. Lots of other things in this poem were probably revised, however.
The poem is about religion and God, and the indifference of the universe when you’re up there in a plane. You’re at the mercy of this crazy craft and crew. “Invisible captain” works nicely as a God-thing. And I was just being playful. And I got lucky.
Stafford talked a lot about luck, but I like the Arnold Palmer quote that you’ll find in writing books here and there. He makes this incredible shot, some sort of sand-trap-to-green thing. Someone says, “Lucky shot, Arnold.” And Palmer says, “Yeah, the more I practice the luckier I get.”
If you write all the time, you’re going to get more of those “bonuses,” as Stafford calls them. You’ll pick up extra points here and there.
In terms of getting students to be more playful, I’ve talked with plenty of art professors about this. You can encourage playfulness, you can lighten up on kids a little bit, and you can be conscious about not making them write like you write.
A lot of writing teachers and artists admit to the fact that, unconsciously, we want our students to write like us. We know it’s bad, but unconsciously we do it. We encourage a kind of aesthetic that we love.
One thing you can do is be better about lightening up on your students, letting them do more of whatever the hell they want to do without being careless and stupid. Of course they still need some guidance.
I do think a lot depends on the way we grow up, and who we are, and the way our minds form. There are a million reasons why some people are good at math, or music, or good at finding their way through a crowded city, for instance.
There are also those students that don’t need play. Maybe they need structure. I have some students who just absolutely gush — they bring in five-page poems that are just wild sprawls. I say, “Man, there’s a lot of really neat stuff here, but there’s no form, there’s no care.”
It’s always a paradox. You want to be free and original and organic, but you also want to be artistic and controlled.
Order Moist Meridian from Amazon. Find out more about Hughes’ work at his website.
 Dave Jarecki writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction from his home in Portland, Ore. Read and listen to his work, as well as the work of guest writers, at DaveJarecki.com.
by Nathan Moore
For this installment of Games Poets Play, we’re going to have some fun with randomness and chance. Specifically, we’re going to play with the Random Sentence Generator over at the Creativity Tools site.
Here’s what we’ll do: Generate a random sentence and use that sentence as part of a short paragraph. Post what you come up with in the comments section. We’re not making masterpieces, and we’re definitely not writing poems — but we are practicing our writing skills by using unexpected language as a springboard for our own writing. The idea is that we get a chance to let language surprise us. My hope is that we can experience the way randomness can make us lose our bearings and, for a moment, we can be thrown out of our usual modes of thinking.
Here are three examples. Each uses a randomly generated sentence as the first sentence of a short paragraph:
The disturbance pauses around the goodbye. Its footprints mark the snow as it turns down an alley and gets lost. A velvet sack of money is hidden behind a dumpster. The disturbance stops and slips a lighter from its coat pocket. The bag burns.
The snag calculates! The snag knows your middle name! The snag wonders why you’ve been out so late and what it can do to save this relationship. The snag stretches between the couch and the living room. Why is the carpet damp?
Can a pure stray graduate? To set goals, write a numbered list. These are achievements best attempted when you’re covered in chalk dust. Look, we adore geometry but we’re suspicious of cubes. Please show your work.
Remember, we’re playing. Don’t worry so much about making sense. We’re not making an argument. We’re not trying to sell anybody anything. We spend so many of our hours trying to “communicate.” Here is a chance to make friends with absurdity. Have fun!
 Nathan Moore is community director and columnist for Read Write Poem. In his spare time, he plays with his children and with fire. Never at the same time. He blogs at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.
by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006
The first two lines of this poem pose a question many of us may have thought about: how does snow make silence even more silent? And notice Robert Haight’s deft use of color, only those few flecks of red, and the rest of the poem pure white. And silent, so silent. Haight lives in Michigan, where people know about snow.
How Is It That the Snow
How is it that the snow
amplifies the silence,
slathers the black bark on limbs,
heaps along the brush rows?
Some deer have stood on their hind legs
to pull the berries down.
Now they are ghosts along the path,
snow flecked with red wine stains.
This silence in the timbers.
A woodpecker on one of the trees
taps out its story,
stopping now and then in the lapse
of one white moment into another.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1996) by permission of the author. Poem copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
by community member Rethabile Masilo
Repetition is a useful tool. Perhaps one of the finest. Anyone who wishes to make a memorable point uses repetition, be they poet, scholar or person on the street. As poets, we repeat everything and anything: sounds, words, sentences, rhythms and/or ideas.
Some poets use this technique more than others, and a poem I read recently reminded me just how good it can all get. That poem was Albert Goldbarth’s “Marble-Sized Song,” in which he repeats an idea. The overall effect is pleasantly disturbing, like a rubber hammer thumping the same thumb over and over. The effect penetrates, the message reaches in.
Does she love you? She says yes, but really
how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion
It is that very undressing that never leaves. In every possible way, the reader is reminded to take off covers, to get at some underlying truth, something sorely needed and therefore peeled, denuded, uncovered.
A single word, like a lilting rhyme, does the trick as well, as evidenced in Rustum Kozain’s “Kingdom of Rain.” Kozain is one of my favorite poets, and I suggest you read his work at Poetry International and listen to him read it at the same time. He says in the second verse:
At the highest point of the pass
we stop to eat, and he, my father,
this strict and angry, fearsome father,
my father whom I love and his dark face,
he pries open a universe that strangely
he makes ours, that is no longer mine:
a wily old grey baboon, well-hid
against salt-and-pepper rock, eyeing us;
some impossibly magnificent bird of prey
rarely seen, racing to its nest as the weather turns.
And we are up there close I think
to my father’s God, the wind howling
and cloud rushing over us, awed
and small in that big car swaying in the gale.
Dorianne Laux also uses repetition with great expertise, as in “Dog Moon,” a poem in which she describes the moon’s appearance in many different ways. Laux repeatedly depicts the object. Each picture is as forceful as the next, each true about the object under her microscope: It’s “as big as a kitchen clock,” a “manhole cover sunk in the boulevard of night,” a “monocle on a chain,” a “frozen pond lifted and thrown like a discus onto the sky,” etc.
To the prompt for this week: Look through your archive and pick up a poem that doesn’t seem to work. You might have to look over a few. Settle on one that allows you to either do an action repeatedly in different words (as Goldbarth does, going in), or elevate a character or object by repeating the same word(s) (as Kozain does about his father), or discuss something by means of as many appropriate figures of speech as allowable (as Laux and her moon).
If you feel gutsy, go ahead and write a new poem. If you feel gutsier, write three poems, each based on one of the techniques above.
 Rethabile Masilo is the father of two. He enjoys writing, reading, playing soccer and cooking. His poems have previously appeared in Orbis, Kintespace, Canopic Jar, Poetry Friends and Ascent Aspirations and are forthcoming in The Mom Egg. His website is Poéfrika.
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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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