by Nathan Moore

How long have you been writing poetry?

I started writing in 1989, during the second half of my 7th-grade year. I wrote throughout high school — won a couple of poetry contests and had one poem published besides that. And my first poetry rite of passage came when I was 17 — I got scammed by the National Library of Poetry. Thank God I never bought the anthology that I was supposedly selected as a semi-finalist for.

But throughout college, I didn’t write very much. I was too busy trying to finish a degree and trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life. I also had some personal tragedies during this time. I tried writing again in 2004, but I didn’t really start moving my pen again until about 2007.

Then in 2008, I started my blog, Ravens Wing Poetry, and started open-micing around Columbus. I’ve read at Writer’s Block Poetry, Writing Wrongs Poetry (formerly Black Pearl Poetry), The Poetry Forum and Poetry in the Park, plus a few gigs here and there. There are a few more open mics I plan to check out around Central Ohio — if you want to find a place to read in C-Bus, there is certainly no dearth of poetry nights in which you can do so.

What’s your favorite line you ever wrote?

I have a hard time picking a favorite. I’ll share my favorite of the moment:

“you run away from a meaningless life
as if you robbed God on the subway at gunpoint
and you hear his breath burning brimstone
into your heels.”

Do you schedule time for writing or do you write when “inspiration” strikes? Do you have a writing “ritual?”

I don’t really schedule time to write. I mostly write by inspiration — although the prompts do help me. And I’m currently taking a creative writing class at Columbus State, so if nothing else, I am forced to output something each week.

And I have no rituals. I just write.

Has blogging changed your writing or the way that you write?

Yes, very much so. It’s forced me to think of my work partially in terms of understandability and dare I say it, reader consumption. I also have tried hyperlinking my poems and adding artwork or visuals if I feel it would add to or enhance the poem.

Why are you interested in participating in Read Write Poem?

I found RWP about a year ago — and I am definitely happy I did so. I’ve been writing more frequently and steadily thanks to RWP — and I think by extension this has helped improve my poetry. I think the moderators put a lot of time into their choice of prompts, and this helps us turn out some good work.

Have you ever collaborated with another poet or artist?

Outside of RWP, no — but I am certainly open to collaboration.

What do you think of collaborative poetry?

I am not that experienced with it, but I would say that I enjoy the couple of times I’ve collaborated as part of a RWP prompt. My favorite would have to be the skeleton prompt from last year — I almost considered it a higher form of Mad Libs (which I loved as a kid). Very fun and challenging. I also birthed one of my favorites from a collaborative prompt, the borrowed first line one from back in March — “When Godzilla Flattens Your Car on Monday Morning” — which is on my blog.

Where’s the weirdest place you ever wrote a poem?

I have written in my bedroom, at the various placed I’ve worked, out in a park, in a restaurant, in the audience at open mics, in cars, in churches. Probably the weirdest place I’ve written to date was in a public restroom.

How do you revise (if you do)?

I either revise as I write or I let the poem cool off for a couple of days before I re-approach it. I usually won’t hack a piece to death until I really feel a need or reason to.

What’s the most important thing a poem does?

Good God, poems can do MANY things — tell stories, convey feelings and thoughts, etc. But I feel that poetry’s greatest gift is that of the opening of a door — to another perspective, dimension, place, or time. We can learn things from poetry. Experience things from poetry. Read souls from poetry. And the list goes on and on. If you walk away from a poem having felt or learned or experienced something new, then IMHO, the poem has done its job.

Name your three favorite poets.

Okay. I’ll do that and tell you why for each (in no particular order):
1. Maya Angelou — she is the reason I even began writing. I first read her work when I was in junior high and it caught me by the eye and by the ear. I walked away from her work with a desire to effectively use rhythm, pulse and rhyme the way she does, because those things stood out to me the most from her poetry.

2. Barbara Fant — Good God, this woman is a powerhouse! If you’ve never heard her read, then you are missing out. When I first heard her slam, it was as if her work caught me by the throat and would not let me go. Like Maya Angelou, she has a strong sense of rhythm in her work. As for her imagery and metaphor — “Pain” and “Black Feathers” come to mind — it is very original, fresh, and she tends to use unexpected comparisons that work very well together. I can’t say enough good things about her.

3. Jim Morrison — Until I began reading his poetry, I like many others, dismissed him as a singer/songwriter/rock star. Then I discovered that unlike many other songwriters, he was more influenced by literature — Rimbaud and Blake, for example — than by music. What I find in his poetry is a certain musicality, created by his particular rhythm and language. Also, his poetry is written less in ideas and more in strings of images, which I find intriguing.

I find now that like Barbara Fant’s and Maya Angelou’s words, his are sneaking into my ear, sliding themselves down my fingers or ink reservoirs, and then ending up on my page. It’s really fascinating.

Can poetry save the world?

Dear God, I hope so.

Have a question or thought to share? Let us know in the comments section of this post.

Community director Nathan Moore found The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and left the academy. He once lived in a house with three walls. Nathan shares his writing at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.

by Nathan Moore

How long have you been writing poetry?

I started taking creative writing workshops as an undergraduate when I studied history and literature. I didn’t write at all from 1990 until 2006, when I began working on an MFA in poetry. That was life-changing.

Do you schedule time for writing or do you write when inspiration strikes?

Sixteen years of waiting for inspiration to strike led nowhere. I now have a work ethic.

Do you have any writing rituals?

I write in my head/pace out a poem before I commit it to the page. I usually have two or three lines and a rhythm before I know it’s a poem I’ll take to the desk/kitchen table/Post-It note. I write by hand. When I write or revise, I have to have a pen with a micro-fine nib and a pencil with a dull point. Weird, I know.

What is your process for revising a poem?

I type it up, put it in a drawer/computer file, and retrieve it in a month. The only first draft that satisfies me is when I write a check! I’ll revise until the original poem is no more than a palimpsest. One of my poems took two decades to reach its final form.

Has blogging changed your writing or the way that you write?

Blogging has made me less afraid to shake up structure and send out work. It’s also let me discover many fabulous poets whose work I wouldn’t know at all.

Have you ever collaborated with another poet or artist? What did you think of that experience?

I collaborated with artist Kevin Morrow; our work is featured in the April 2009 Broadsided series. It was an amazing conversation of words and images. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. (Here is a link to the QA and also to the image if you want to include it — it’s in the public domain.)

What line of poetry do you love the most?

“And after many a summer dies the swan.” It’s from Tennyson’s “Tithonus.” The syntax is sublime. That swan glides all the way to the end of the line, as he should.

What line of your own poetry do you love the most?

I’m really fond of my titles. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackboard” is currently my pet.

Name your three favorite poets.

My MFA mentors: Daniel Anderson. Brian Barker. Philip Stephens. I think their work is first-rate, and their kindnesses toward their students are innumerable. I know I can never repay them. But you can — buy their books!

Among the illustrious predecessors to the Big Three above: Elizabeth Bishop. John Keats. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I have huge poetry crushes on Walt Whitman and Marianne Moore. I guess it’s the hats.

What’s the most important thing a poem does?

It seduces with sound. Trompe l’oreille, I guess.

What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever written a poem?

I wrote a poem at work, in an elevator, stuck between floors for over 2 hours.

What interests you about participating in Read Write Poem?

Discovery: New poems to read and new ways to read them.

Can poetry save the world?

I can’t speak for the world, but it’s saved me. I had an illness this summer that affected my speech, coordination and memory. My neuropsychologist was amazed that I could immediately recall poems, whole stanzas of them. I made one of the quickest full recoveries he’s ever witnessed. I give credit to Shakespeare, Bishop, Keats, Frost, Browning, Cummings — and also to Mrs. P., the 7th-grade teacher who made me memorize poems as a penalty for talking in class.

Have a question or thought to share? Say something in the comment section of this post.

Community director Nathan Moore found The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and left the academy. He once lived in a house with three walls. Nathan shares his writing at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.

by Nathan Moore

How long have you been writing poetry?

I was in second or third grade when I started filling notebooks.

Do you schedule time for writing or do you write when inspiration strikes?

Both. I’m a big believer in keeping to a writing discipline, but I certainly don’t turn down inspiration when it finds me. Actually writing during the time I schedule for writing is my greatest challenge — now more than ever, what with the abundant delights and distractions of the Internet always at hand.

Do you have any writing rituals?

Sit down at the computer. Jump up. Quickly load the dishwasher. Sit down. Check Facebook. Check Flickr. Write one word. Check Facebook again. Write three words. Check the latest Read Write Poem poll. Vote. Write two words. Check Salon. Check my email. Write four emails. Begin IMing a dear friend in Minnesota about how poorly my writing time is going. Pound my head repeatedly against my desk …

What is your process for revising a poem?

See above.

Has blogging changed your writing or the way that you write?

I’m not blogging at this time.

Have you ever collaborated with another poet or artist? What did you think of that experience?

I haven’t had a lot of experience with collaboration.

What line of poetry do you love the most?

From Jack Gilbert’s “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”:

“How astonishing it is that language can almost mean
and frightening that it does not quite.”

What line of your own poetry do you love the most?

It depends on the day. Today I’ll say it’s this line from a poem of mine called “Dancing in a Foreign Language”:

You speak in the arabesque of your hands
shifting into the damp hollows your mouths leave
on each other’s skin: the shape your words would make
if you were able to pronounce them.

Name your three favorite poets.

I have two: Jack Gilbert and Jane Hirshfield. There are many, many other poets I love tremendously, but these two occupy another stratosphere entirely in my personal pantheon of poetry gods and demigods and godlets.

What’s the most important thing a poem does?

There are lots of important things done by different types of poetry, but much of the poetry I love best conveys a deep, resounding truth or wisdom that would be lost or diminished if the writer tried to articulate it in any other form. I also love poems that offer sheer delight with their musicality, inventiveness, strangeness, beauty.

What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever written a poem?

This summer I was sitting on a riverbank, scribbling a draft of a poem. There was a strong wind. I had to fish the poem out of the river and wait for the paper to dry in the sun before I could continue writing.

What interests you about participating in Read Write Poem?

I’m a loner longing for community. A misanthropic humanist, a deeply suspicious optimist, and an antisocial haunter of social networking sites. I’m just here looking for others like me, kindred spirits, like-minded souls.

Can poetry save the world?

Define “world.” Define “save.” Poets know better than to save the world. Don’t they? Most of the history’s greatest horrors have been committed by people trying to save the world, according to their own vision of how it should best be saved. One man’s savior is another man’s fascist, terrorist, dictator, demon. The Apocalypse has very different meanings, depending on your point of view.

Read Ingrid’s work at her site, The Secret of Durable Pigments. Have a question for Ingrid or something to say about her interview? Use the comments section of this post.

Community director Nathan Moore found The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and left the academy. He once lived in a house with three walls. Nathan shares his writing at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.

by Nathan Moore

How long have you been writing poetry?

I’ve been writing poems for as long as I can remember. The oldest poem I have on hand is one I wrote when I was eight.

I began to take writing poems seriously in college, when I took my first writing workshop as an adult. Going to Bennington in 1997 for my MFA gave me permission to really immerse in writing; I’m incredibly grateful for that.

Do you schedule time for writing, or do you write when inspiration strikes?

I try to write a little bit every day, though not always poetry; sometimes I work on prose projects or blog posts. Over the last 18 months or so I’ve been blogging one “Torah poem” each week, a poem which arises in dialogue with that week’s portion in the weekly Jewish lectionary. Writing (and sharing) that one poem a week seems to be a good discipline for me.

Do you have any writing rituals?

Nope! Sometimes I listen to music (without words, or at least without words in any language I understand) and I’ve been known to light a stick of incense, but really nothing’s critical.

What is your process for revising a poem?

When a first draft of a poem is finished, I print it out and stash it in my “poems: 2009″ folder, which lives on my desk. A few days later I’ll return to it, read the printed version, and see what leaps out at me. Usually after a few days away from the poem, I can see what’s essential and what needs to go. Often I discard the first few lines of the poem, up to the first third, because those turn out to be the ladder which got me into the poem but don’t necessarily need to stay there. Usually I trim material away and then figure out what I want to add.

Some poems only need one or two iterations of revision. Others take much longer. The nice thing about the weekly Torah poems is that I have to post that week’s poem by Friday afternoon before Shabbat rolls around, so I have a deadline each week. Deadlines turn out to be great motivators for me.

Has blogging changed your writing or the way that you write?

Over the years that I’ve been blogging (I started Velveteen Rabbi in 2003), I’ve come to see the interconnections between my religious work and my poetry work more clearly. I don’t know that blogging has changed my poems, per se, but it’s changed my willingness to share those poems with the wider world even if they aren’t “perfect” yet.

Have you ever collaborated with another poet or artist? What did you think of that experience?

I love collaboration! Most recently, back in December I had the opportunity to guest-blog at the Best American Poetry blog for a week. I decided to write a poem a day and post them to the blog, and I asked seven friends to give me one line or couplet apiece. The borrowed lines went into the daily poems. It was a great experience for me; I wound up writing seven poems which I think were far more different from one another than my poems tend to be, and I think that’s because each one had a piece of someone else at its heart.

What line of poetry do you love the most?

One line? That’s tough. Maybe “We must love one another or die,” Auden, from “September 1, 1939.”

What line of your own poetry do you love the most?

Right now, maybe the answer is, “My heart thumps want to know / don’t want to know,” from my poem “First Visit,” which is in an as-yet-unpublished manuscript called Manna.

Name your three favorite poets.

Jane Kenyon, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mark Doty.

What’s the most important thing a poem does?

Sanctifies the ordinary. By which I mean: A poem can cut a new facet into something mundane, which allows that ordinary thing to refract amazing light. The light was always there; we just don’t see it, most of the time. Poems can offer us new ways of seeing.

What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever written a poem?

On the back of a receipt at a dairy bar (that’s the local name for what some folks might call a fish fry) at a bright pink picnic table, waiting for my order.

Why are you interested in participating in Read Write Poem?

I love being part of a community of people who take poetry seriously, even if we don’t always take ourselves seriously.

Can poetry save the world?

Absolutely. Or, at least, it can inspire us to do so, and that’s really what counts.

Read Rachel’s work on her site, Velveteen Rabbi. And if you have any questions for Rachel (or anything else you want to say about this piece), leave them in the comments.

Community manager Nathan Moore found The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and left the academy. He once lived in a house with three walls. Nathan shares his writing at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.