by Zachary Schomburg
 Zachary Schomburg setting off a few sparks The spark that happens from these two unrelated tropes will be the heart of this poem.
One of the tenets of surrealism from Andre Breton’s Le Manifeste du Surréalisme is the concept of manufacturing a “spark” set off by touching together two images/words that have no logical relationship with one another. This creates a third thing, the space between those two points, that has never before existed, something a reader has no way of intellectually compartmentalizing. While Breton is mostly talking about the spark between singular images, I think a similar electricity, that third undefinable thing, can happen while putting whole tropes together, clashing metaphors, etc.
This is not a new idea — the Italians were way ahead of the French here. Almost all sonnets have some kind of volta, some turn of logic about three-quarters of the way through the poem (depending on whether it is Petrarchian or Shakespearean) that puts the poem’s last lines in emotional, narrative, conceptual contrast with what preceded them. It is where the poem gets turned on its head never to return to its original uprightness; it is where the poem hinges. I believe that without some sort of volta, a poem falls flat and is one-dimensional because it has nothing to butt up against.
So, what I propose is that we write a poem in two parts and then later combine those parts at its volta.
Part one
Write a missive to someone you knew, personally, who died a while ago, someone for whom you haven’t grieved in some time. Tell them about a very specific memory between the two of you, perhaps one that they wouldn’t even necessarily remember. This shouldn’t take up more than five to seven lines or so. For example, I would tell my grandpa that I remember being a child and sitting on his lap, watching the Kansas City Royals on television, that he had a glass of ice milk, and that his chewing tobacco smelled minty.
Part two
Make a minor confession, something you haven’t told anyone before (but that isn’t necessarily a major secret — or hell, confess what you want). Perhaps you’ll write about something you’ve stolen, some small moment of indiscretion, transgression or weakness, something for which you hold some guilt. This should only be a few lines long. Maybe the last of those lines can address how it made you feel to steal this thing (or whatever your confession might be).
These parts have nothing to do with one another. In other words, your confession does not relate to your memory of your lost loved one. When putting both parts together, find a turn of phrase that creates a narrative shift — something like “I wanted to tell you … .”
Also, I should be clear that what we’re doing has nothing to do with Surrealism. In fact, what will be created with my suggestions will be far from it. But that spark that happens from these two unrelated tropes will be the heart of this poem. Hopefully, you’ll be able to get at something that you can emotionally understand but not articulate.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean, 2009) and The Man Suit (Black Ocean, 2007). He is a co-editor of both Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. A collaborative chapbook with Emily Kendal Frey, “Team Sad,” was published in 2009 by Cinematheque Press. He lives in Portland, Ore. You can find out more about his poetry at his blog, The Lovely Arc.
by Mary Biddinger
 Mary Biddinger heads to the spa Most importantly, have fun with your poem, and try to surprise yourself with the decisions you make.
Routine can be a good thing, in many situations. However, writers often get the sense that they are drafting the same poem over and over again, in different variations, and have no way to break out of the pattern. If you think you may be one of these poets, indulge in the spa experience below. These procedures are bound to help free your writing circuits of excess, thereby allowing room for new invention.
Part I: The dietary analysis
Print off one copy of each of your newest poems. Make it a significant chunk of no fewer than eight, but perhaps no more than 20 poems. Locate a clear, somewhat clean floor that contains no pets or pedestrians. Spread the poems out in front of you, and try your best to read them simultaneously. With colored pens or highlighters, underline repeated words or stylistic/craft elements that appear in numerous poems. If you are feeling particularly ambitious, try to categorize poems in stacks based on shared tendencies (i.e., a stack of bird poems, a pile of poems in couplets, a handful of poems that use questions).
Part II: The mud bath
Please follow the following steps in order to fully benefit from the therapeutic properties of this exercise:
- Identify five words that you use often in your writing, based on the research undertaken in the dietary analysis.
- List the settings found in your poems, if place is an element of your work.
- Note the point of view used most frequently in your writing.
- Create a list of stylistic decisions — both good and questionable — that you make in many of your poems. (Use of the same stanza length or form, writing an unnecessary, throat-clearing first stanza, having a random, disconnected title, ending a poem too soon, and so on.)
- Discern whether your poems have a primarily lyric sensibility, or a narrative approach, or a combination of both (and if so, measure the proportions).
Part III: The whirlpool
Cleanse yourself of all the remnants of the mud bath, but hang on to your notes.
Write a poem that uses:
- None of the five words that most frequently appear in your work.
- A setting that you have never used before, or that you haven’t used lately.
- A point of view that departs from your usual tendencies.
- None, or very few, of your usual stylistic decisions. If you usually have a brief title, try a long one.
- If you always write in one long stanza, try dividing the poem into smaller groupings.
- If you often write lyric poems, try a stronger narrative, and vice versa.
Bonus
Do something in the poem that “puts you outside your comfort zone.” Interpret that however you would like.
If you do not have the time or inclination to indulge in the complete spa package, consider a jump into the whirlpool minus the preliminary stages, using your intuition in place of the research. Most importantly, have fun with your poem, and try to surprise yourself with the decisions you make. Best wishes for a happy, healthy new year of poetry.
Mary Biddinger is the author of Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and the chapbook Saint Monica (forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press). Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, The Collagist, Copper Nickel, Diode, Gulf Coast, Passages North and many other journals. She is the editor of the Akron Series in Poetry, co-editor-in-chief of Barn Owl Review and director of the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She teaches at The University of Akron and blogs at Wordcage.
by Matthew Zapruder
Directors’ Note: This week’s Read Write Prompt is based on Matthew Zapruder’s poem, “The Elegant Trogon.”
 Matthew Zapruder's 'Mechanical' Prompt I have certain nearly religious beliefs about language.
The Elegant Trogon is a type of bird. I wrote this poem as I often do, using a process: That is, I begin with a task that is purely mechanical, designed to produce words or phrases that must be used in the poem. After I do the process and generate the “raw material,” I come up with a subject or situation along which I can string those words in a way that feels natural and authentic.
I really like the simultaneous centripetal and centrifugal feelings of these words that want to go in different directions, but also somehow always seem to in the end belong together. I have certain nearly religious beliefs about language: that it expresses the collective historical intelligence of human beings, that it is the accumulated wisdom of all language users. Therefore I also have a great faith that my little humanity, plus the great wisdom of language, in the right combination and with the right degree of humility and attention on my part, will result in poems.
In “The Elegant Trogon,” I began in a certain place in the dictionary, and chose words moving backwards through the book until I reached another specified point (this process is taken directly from the one Matthea Harvey invented to create the stunning series “Terror of the Future” and “The Future of Terror” in her most recent book, Modern Life). I required myself to use the words in the order I found them. To be honest, I can’t remember what the exact original starting and ending words were, but along the way I came across the words trogon, tooth, supinate, spectacles, special effects, spadefoot, rictus, quantum, oral cavity, object lessons, moral law, loggerheads, lodestone, locked.
I had no idea what I was going to write the poem “about.” I just tried to pick words that seemed interesting and had a lot of different possibility but also specificity. Once I looked up the first word, “trogon,” and saw that there was a type called Elegant, I began to build something, and to both use and be moved around by the subsequent words I had chosen.
This is a not uncommon way for me to write poems, but it’s not the only way I write them. Usually I just sit down in the morning — either at a desk if I’m not traveling, or at a café, hopefully in a sunny spot where there is some but not too much conversation and music, and see what starts to happen.
This week, try writing a poem using the mechanical process outlined above and see where it takes you.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of two collections of poetry: American Linden and The Pajamaist, as well as co-translator from Romanian, along with historian Radu Ioanid, of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including The Boston Review, Fence, Alaska Quarterly Review, Open City, Bomb, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The New Yorker and The New Republic. His third book of poems, Come On All You Ghosts, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2010. He lives in San Francisco, works as an editor for Wave Books, and teaches in the low residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert. More information is available at matthewzapruder.wordpress.com.
by the Read Write Poem Staff
Did you get it on in the car, even though Nick said not to? Did you get it on by using nonsexual words in a sexual context, which Nick recommended? Did you take it off to get it on? Did you like taking it off? Did you run away in horror, unable to get your garments lines arranged fast enough?
Whatever you did wrote this week, we guarantee everyone’s interest is piqued. So show us what you got by leaving a comment with a link to your poem or the poem itself.
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by Nick Carbó
 Nick Carbó on 'The Sex Poem' No cars and sex, overdone!
The topic for this week’s Read Write Prompt is: the sex poem.
The example directly below is rather mundane in its artistry and can be compared to what is being shown on the internet everyday. Yes, there is nudity, there is love, and there is some touching. But the words do not transcend the act(s) and the reader is left with a handful of crushed petals.
Beautiful Flower
Your petals open like a flower
and I think of you by the hour.
How I long to pull back each bare petal
to reach the pollen inside.
Let me graze against your silk,
breathe your sweetness in like air,
for oxygen is not enough
once one inhales the scent of love.
How does one make an intimate, powerful act/event into a poem that can give the reader the “big O,” or any “O?”
One solution would be to use more metaphors. Simple simile is fine as long as you don’t bring it down to the level of like and ass. But what if you can make that ass tremble like an old steam paddle boat on the Mississippi on a half moon night? More interesting. That ass is not just an ass anymore; it is infused with Southern charm, the sound of water whirling, a steam boat whistle, and the hot air making beads of sweat on your back.
Another tactic would be to use the language or specific terminology of an activity completely unrelated to sex, and apply those words to the act itself. The permutations of this clash of different worlds creates a tension that can be erotic, comic or just plain absurd. No cars and sex, overdone! How about your mortgage application? Instructions on how to use your iPhone? Lots of unique finger movements right there.
In the following poem, I use the language of a grammar text to substitute parts of the body. They may be boring structures of a sentence but you clearly recognize the parts of the body.
Grammarotics
by Nick Carbó
The angle of delight is best
achieved while rubbing
the pluperfect button
in tiny syllabic circles
while the glottal stop needs
firm accentual strokes
for copulative conjunction
to occur. The placement
of the preterite tense
at the entrance
of a lubricated sentence
assures the inevitable
apostophe. However,
if the apostrophe occurs
prematurely the result
is then a dangling
modifier, also
commonly known as
a pathetic fallacy.
Now why don’t you give the sex poem a try? Make it good. Leave our mouths gaping in a giant O.
Nick Carbó is the author of four books of poetry, the latest just published this year: Chinese, Japanese, What are These? (Pecan Grove Press). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Asian American Literary Review and many others.
The first poem shared in this piece was written by Read Write Poem staff to illustrate how not to write a sex poem. The second poem is shared with permission from the author. Contact Nick Carbó before using or reproducing the piece.
Directors’ Note: What we perhaps love most about this post is the fact that Carbó’s photo came in with the image title “nick carbó beef.”
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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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