by Dana Guthrie Martin
The Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge Anthology is coming along quite nicely and should be ready to go soon, though the process is taking slightly longer than expected.
In the meantime, you might recall that everyone who took the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge Pledge, regardless of completing that pledge, was automatically entered in a raffle to win a gently used poetry collection. The results of that raffle are in. The winners are:
- Ieisha
- Lori K. MacDonald
- Robin Reagler
- This Girl Remembers
- Alexis Yael
Please email your address to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org, and your poetry collection will be sent to you. (If we don’t hear from you in the next week or so, we’ll shoot you an email so you can collect your prize.)
by Dana Guthrie Martin
Here is the list of poets who will be included in the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology! For those who submitted work by the May 7 deadline, please review this list and make sure your name appears below and that your name appears the way you want your work attributed in the collection. If your name is not listed, or if your listing is incorrect, send an email to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org, and I’ll make sure you get added.
I also have several books to give away as part of the Read Write Poem Challenge Pledge raffle. I will announce those winners here at Read Write Poem within the week.
The contributors:
Amy Marie Taratus, Andy Sewina, Angie Werren, Barbara Young, Cara Holman, Cathy McGuire, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Christina Hile, Damian Caruana, Dan Rako, Derrick Armitage, E. Jason Riedy, Emily Manger, Erin Davis, Evelyn N. Alfred, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, Irene Toh, J. D. Mackenzie, Jaelle n’ha Gilla, Janet Hawtin, Jeeves, Joanne Johns, Joseph Harker, Julie Mehta, K.C. Koppy, Katharine Whitcomb, Katherine Hager, Kelly Eastlund, Lani Jo Leigh, Larry Patterson, Lawrence Congdon, Lee Lawton, Linda Cosgriff, Linda Jacobs, Linda Watskin, Lindsay Penelope Illich, Lori Wiens MacDonald, Maria L. Castejon, Marian Veverka, Marianne McNamara, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Matt Blair, Matt Quinn, Maya Ganesan, Meresha Crewer, Michelle Weaver, Neil Reid, Pamela Sayers, Pamela Villars, Rallentanda, Renee DeCarlo, Rhiannon Grant, Rob Kistner, Robin Morris, Robin Rosen Chang, Robin Turner, Ron. Lavalette, Sarah Sidney Coty, Shanna Germain, Shari Lynne Smothers, Simon Seamount, Sophie F Baker, Susan Sonnen, Tiel Aisha Ansari, Tim Keeton, Tina Celio, Todd Miller, Troy Kehm-Goins, Uma Gowrishankar, Veronica Hosking, Vivienne Blake, Wanda McCollar, Wayne Pitchko, Zeenat Arsiwalla
by Dana Guthrie Martin, director and founder
It is with regret that I inform the membership that Read Write Poem will not be moving forward under new leadership. My only option at this time is to close the site down. The community’s editorial, maintenance and technical needs have grown exponentially, to the point that instating another all-volunteer team with the skills and time to lead the site is impossible.
The site will remain live through April for NaPoWriMo and will post a member-authored writing prompt every day during the month of April as part of the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge. In late May, the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge Anthology will be published and will include work by those who complete the challenge.
The final editorial piece will be published on the site May 1. It will wrap up the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge and detail how to send in work for inclusion in the anthology. At that point, the site will be closed in terms of new editorial content and news items. When the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge Anthology is completed, it will be posted on the site, as well as at issuu.com.
After May 1, Read Write Poem will remain open as an archival record of the work that has been shared here since 2007. The social networking elements of the site will be removed May 1. Between now and then, members should retrieve any private messages or group posts that they want to preserve.
Thank you to everyone who took part in Read Write Poem over the years. Again, I am sorry that the site must close. If anyone has any questions, feel free to email me at info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org. I look forward to seeing other online communities and collaborative workspaces come into existence that build on the mission of Read Write Poem and expand that mission far beyond the groundwork laid here. Though this is the end of Read Write Poem, it is neither the end of poetry, nor of community.
 Dana Guthrie Martin founded Read Write Poem in 2007 as an extension of her work as co-founder of the Poetry Thursday site. She writes poetry and prose, and lives in the Seattle area with her husband, her robot and her two hermit crabs.
by Dana Guthrie Martin, director and founder
I have always loved the power and possibility of online communications. Back in 1995, I remember proposing that my university’s literary journal be created and distributed in an online format as opposed to a print format. The faculty adviser for the project scoffed at the notion. “Who would want to read poetry on a computer,” he asked.
Look how far we have come since then. Even though some still scoff at online literary journals and magazines, or at least eye them with suspicion, it’s clear that they are rising in popularity — and that audiences are gravitating to work delivered through this medium. Apparently, a lot of people want to read poetry, and learn about it, online.
I founded Read Write Poem in 2007 because of my love for and belief in the capacity for online communications as a means to lessen or remove barriers to information and resources, including art. I also saw the power of online communications in removing geographic barriers by making information available for free — anytime, anywhere on the planet. The goal of Read Write Poem at launch was simple: to leverage the power of the internet in the creation of an interactive and collaborative virtual space for poets of all levels to learn about and share poetry.
The community’s mission has grown out of the same premise on which is was founded. Read Write Poem facilitates a vibrant online community that gives readers the tools they need to make poetry central to their daily lives, both in virtual and real-world environments. The community encourages readers and writers of poetry at all levels to be more engaged with a wide range of traditional and contemporary poetry, with other poets, and with members of their local, regional, national and international communities. Read Write Poem works in tandem with and also outside of traditional frameworks such as academic institutions, providing an alternative method for learning, teaching, sharing and discussing poetry.
The site has also grown since its inception with the addition of profiles, wires, groups and other interactive elements, as well as a fully fleshed-out online magazine with new content every weekday. And, of course, we still have the weekly writing prompts that keep members challenged and engaged.
In short, Read Write Poem has evolved to the point that it is nothing other than a remarkable place. We would not be here without the participation of our more than 1,000 members, or without the talent and hard work of our contributors, senior contributors, managers and directors.
Especially deserving of thanks is Deb Scott for her tenacious dedication to the project and all her efforts, including managing the site for a year and a half and serving as a community director for the past 9 months. Special thanks also to community director Nathan Moore, without whom the energy of the community would not be what it is, and to technology director Andre Tan, without whom the social media elements and overall design of the site would have been inferior, if not impossible.
Three years and 900 articles and news items, 1,000 members, 11,000 comments, and 770,000 page views since its founding, it is clear that Read Write Poem has made a difference in the lives of many poets and of those who love poetry. There is clearly a need — and a desire — for an open, free, accessible way for anyone and everyone who loves to read, write and share poetry to have the means to do so.
The community has reached a point where it no longer needs my daily direction. At the same time, needs and opportunities in my life require me to step out of the lead director role. I have the chance to study information science at the graduate level, and to learn even more ways that barriers to information access can be removed so that those around the world, whatever their area of interest of inquiry, will have the tools they need to learn, to discover and to grow.
Deb Scott will be taking over as the community’s lead director, and that change is effective immediately. I am thrilled that Deb is taking on the role of lead director on, and excited to see where the community moves in its next phase of development. I also thank those who have come forward to help Deb manage the site. She will be making more announcements soon about the team she is assembling, so stay tuned to learn more as the new management group unfolds.
I also regret to announce that Nathan Moore must step away from Read Write Poem at this time. He has worked tirelessly on the site and has provided some of our most valuable, interesting and innovative content. The entire community will miss his presence and his voice. He is an outstanding poet, and an outstanding human being.
Thank you all. Together, we have helped change the face of poetry. Let’s keep going.
Dana Guthrie Martin founded Read Write Poem in 2007 as an extension of her work as co-founder of the Poetry Thursday site. She writes poetry and prose, and lives in the Seattle area with her husband, her robot and her two hermit crabs.
by Dana Guthrie Martin
I had the pleasure of meeting Anita Boyle and Jim Bertolino last year when they were reading individually and collaboratively written work as part of a poetry series in the Seattle area. I was taken by the writing that Anita and Jim have been doing together over the years and asked if I could talk with them about their collaborative work. They graciously granted me an interview. I hope you enjoy their thoughts about collaboration.
Dana Guthrie Martin: You all say that you started writing together because you were hanging out in bars and it’s hard to hear one another but very easy to write collaboratively by passing a piece of paper back and forth and writing line by line. What gave you all the idea to try this form of collaboration in the first place?
Anita Boyle: Writing poetry collaboratively started as a form of conversation. When you don’t know someone very well, and you’re really trying to talk to them, but you can’t hear a darn tootin’ thing they’re saying, and you happen to be a writer, you pull out your journal. A rational response. You write something in it, and pass it to the person you’re attempting to talk to. Maybe this is something we learned in elementary school when kids first start passing those forbidden notes back and forth. If you’re in a noisy bar, and you happen to be a writer AND a poet, when pen goes to paper there’s not much of a transition from conversation to poetry. So the idea was spontaneous.
Jim and I began writing collaborative poetry shortly after we met, since when we were dating, we often ended up in noisy places: bars, taverns, pubs. We went other places, too, and sometimes wrote collaboratively there: at a coffee shop, or in a park, or beside the Noon Road pond. These were usually quiet places, so once we began to write in the noise, it easy to write in the quiet. And we’ve kept it up because it’s fun to write this way.
Jim Bertolino: While it’s true that Anita and I began writing collaboratively as a way to communicate effectively in noisy bars, for me there were other aspects of the process that kept me interested, generated satisfaction. I am a poet who loves responding to what appears to happen randomly, and when your collaborative partner shares a passage, it can be like an unexpected gift handed to you by a smiling stranger. It calls for your best creative efforts to either create a verbal landscape that might be implied by what you’ve received, or willfully alter the direction of the burgeoning poem to shape a surprise or insist on contrast. Like the curse of tragic nostrils! Participating in a collaborative poem is an acceptable opportunity to release your rational mind from the responsibility of making something meaningful. A chance to get down and roll in language like a white mare in mud.
DGM: Jim, you say that collaboration allows you to willfully alter the direction of the burgeoning poem. Has that ever been a problem for you and Anita when you work together? Have you ever pulled each other too far, so far the poem lost its sense of where to go and how to recover from all the tugging?
JB: Part of the great fun of poetry collaboration is in trying to compose a passage that is imaginative or clever enough to seduce your partner into embracing a new direction. This is an especially useful strategy when you think the territory that the poem has moved into over several exchanges has been explored enough, or when some part of what your collaborator has just written switches the light on in another room, or in another part of town, or even in some other universe. And as for the poem losing its sense of where to go, one of the characteristics of lively collaboration is that you, or your partner, can always tug the poem back to its best direction.
DGM: And, Jim, you also talk about collaboration providing a means to “release your rational mind from the responsibility of making something meaningful.” How can that responsibility hamper a poet’s individual writing, and why is this freedom from responsibility so important?
JB: The reservoir of language and imagery every poet carries is fabulous, and while that source is always there to enrich and embolden what will embody meaning for the reader or listener, diving into that reservoir without a plan can not only be a pleasure, but may take us on currents of language and image to places we would have never visited otherwise. Both in my collaborative writing and in my intentional poems I have come to depend on eruptions that offer unexpected beauty: in deep connections created by the juxtaposition of certain words and phrases, and in images that can simultaneously seem both random and precise. I’m committed to sharing the experience of what I didn’t know was there.
DGM: Anita, so my question for you is: Shouldn’t there be a dating service that pairs people and sees if they are compatible based on their ability to write poetry together? Don’t you think poets would come to a workshop like that if you and Jim taught it? You could call it something like, “Write Together, Love Together.” Too cheesy? How about “Eat, Date, Poem”?
AB: From what I understand about dating services, Yes! Writing poetry together is a good way to interact even with an unfamiliar date, and can introduce a person to another in a unique way. Passing a journal between two poets offers each specific details about the other: handwriting style, type of humor, even political and social perspectives. Most poets have a few words they can’t stay away from (their personal lexicon). Mixing those words up with another’s adds a dimension to conversation that isn’t explored nearly enough. Especially now, with the huge number of communication methods available, it seems to me that collaborative communication will continue to become a norm in the arts, in the workplace and in simple conversation. There’s a lot of give and take in collaborating, and that’s not such a bad thing. For now, collaborative poetry is an opportunity for a extraordinary personal experience in a semi-intimate environment.
Titles are hard to come up with. As far as a title for a workshop like this? Your titles are fine, but how about: “Poetry as Duet” or “How Do You Do? My Name is Not Sue: The Poetry Date Experience”?
DGM: Anita, you also talk about the transition from conversation to poetry being a small one. Doesn’t this fly in the face of those who proselytize about how arduous and lonely poetry work is and by definition has to be? What a drudgery it is? How different poetry is (and should be) from “normal” conversation?
AB: I believe that writing poetry can be arduous and lonely, which often guides the inspiration for a poem and creates a tension in it that makes for great work. But if a poet thinks writing is a drudgery, they should perhaps call themselves a hobbyist and find a new one. Gardening, for example. Life is too short for unnecessary drudgeries, isn’t it?
Writing your own poetry is a similar to writing collaboratively, but is an entirely other experience. Collaborative poetry usually starts out quick and fast by comparison. Two people can write two to five poems in a matter of hours, which doesn’t happen for most poets on their own. (Revising collaborative poems seems to take about the same amount of time as revising one’s own poems. I believe in a revisionary god. That’s where the thing gets the spark.)
With your own poetry, it’s an inner struggle to find the right musical cadence, to construct a rhythm, find the perfect near rhyme, etc. You can tear your hair out for just one word, that one particular, yet elusive word. But in writing together, it’s a poem by committee. Committees are what they are. They can work as well as a rusty fat-tired bike, or as smooth as a professional quality road bike, but all committees depend on the input given from everyone. This is a relief, too, because some of the responsibility of coming up with something fantastic is alleviated, though committees sometimes add other elements of stress. When collaborating, while one poet is working on the poem at hand, the other can be thinking about where to take the poem next, or observing the one currently writing, or they can even be writing a grocery list. And if something from the grocery list makes it into the poem, so much the better.
There hasn’t been any pressure to be the greatest-poet-that-ever-lived when I write with Jim. Sometimes, I’ll finish my lines, set them down in front of him and say, “You can cross that out if you want. It’s terrible.” He never has. Well, maybe a word here or there, but that happens rarely. He makes things work. And when it’s my turn to add onto the poem again, sometime I think, “Oh brother. Where are we going with this?” But we keep going. At the end we read the poem out loud (very loudly sometimes, depending on where we are), and are almost always surprised by what came together. I can’t think of any that we actually ignore as poems or potential poems. When we go back through our journals, we type them up, revise, combine, shuffle, and make them work somehow. I find collaborating with Jim has been a relaxing, enjoyable, and sometimes a hilarious experience, and it’s shaped our relationship in very good ways.
If you like writing poetry, I don’t see any drudgery in that. Hard work, maybe. But it’s just a ton of fun, whether it’s collaborative or one’s own.
 Dana Guthrie Martin is the founder of Read Write Poem. In 2010, she is taking a break from completing poems so she can study their component parts, while at the same time learning a new musical instrument, most likely the oboe.
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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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