Zachary Schomburg setting off a few sparks

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 [...]]]> 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.

Mary Biddinger heads to the spa

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 [...]]]> 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:

1. Identify five words that you use often in your writing, based on the research undertaken in the dietary analysis.
2. List the settings found in your poems, if place is an element of your work.
3. Note the point of view used most frequently in your writing.
4. 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.)
5. 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.

Matthew Zapruder's 'Mechanical' Prompt

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 [...]]]> 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.

Nick Carbó on 'The Sex Poem'

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 [...]]]> 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.”

Bruce Covey Explores Dreams and Poetry

Dreams are so entertaining! But the structure of dreams makes for lousy poetry — the associational and tangential but linear structure of the form is so [...]]]> by Bruce Covey

Bruce Covey Explores Dreams and Poetry

“The structure of dreams makes for lousy poetry — the associational and tangential but linear structure of the form is so overdetermined.”

Dreams are so entertaining! But the structure of dreams makes for lousy poetry — the associational and tangential but linear structure of the form is so overdetermined (a rhetoric everyone experiences daily, then tries to repress!) that the imagery quickly becomes flat and dull. Or we tend to bring our Freud- and Jung-inspired critical tools into the fray, producing a piece that is tiresomely analytical.

These hurdles, however, don’t require that we abandon our dream lives entirely when writing poems; instead, we might consider rassling one out of its own structure and into an inherently poetic form, out of its visual world and into word.

This prompt (thank you, Dana, for inviting me to participate!) won’t yield a well-honed masterpiece, but the odds are good — if you’re honest with yourself and the text you’re producing — that you’ll create something which sparkles in its own unruly way.

Here goes:

1. Bring to mind one of your most vivid dreams (preferably one you haven’t already spent a lot of time analyzing in therapy).
2. Choose 8 to 12 “moments” of varying narrative significance from the dream (i.e., one might be a brief flash of an image that seems to have no significance, while another might represent the dream’s central theme) and record them in a numbered list.
3. As you develop that numbered list, let each dream moment find its own independence as a separate poetic line; if you have to, spend a day or two or a week or two on each line. During that time, work only on that individual line.
4. When you’re finally happy with all of the numbered units as a line of poetry, turn back to the piece as a whole and see if the lines belong in a different order. Play with different potential sequences until you’re happy with the order of the poem (no longer the dream).
5. At this point, if you have to, remove the numbers. If you’re really into polish, form them into stanzas, play with line breaks and transitions, remove an overly unruly line or two and add another. Or you can just sit back and revel in your new poem’s messiness.

Here’s one I made recently using this technique. I like to think of it as garnet-speckled rubble. I like rubble.

X=13, Y=21

Where there are coins, there’s matter,
A narrow strip of over 700,000 in this province.
Today the birds are green and the roofs are woven
Of string. You pick the spot, please:
Its zoo built with moment upon moment of cola fountains
(although the one at the center sprouts ginger ale), or
The checkerboard landscape with a single checker making me sweat.
A nest of spiders spins its lines of code — where something is and isn’t —
underneath the netting, the surface para-graph,
A wooden barrel in front of every scrap.
Half kangaroo and half gorilla would be very versatile,
Especially here, where rain has turned the road to muck.
Next to the thicket and upon a rock, my translator
Teaches card tricks to all the babies, changes their diapers.
Later we played an asphalt fight until the killer bees,
Digitally enhanced, came — an extensive natural race
That brings the good in night, its tropical players.

I hope you have fun!

Bruce Covey is the author of three books of poetry, The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires, Elapsing Speedway Organism, and Ten Pins, Ten Frames. His recent poems also appear or are forthcoming in Aufgabe, Verse, LIT, Columbia Poetry Review, Jacket, Sonora Review, Lungfull, Cimarron Review and other journals. He edits the web-based poetry magazine Coconut.

The poem included in this post is shared with permission from the author. Contact Bruce Covey before using or reproducing the piece.

Matthew Hittinger Gives Us the Mash-Up

If you listen to dance music you know all about the mash-up: two or more songs thrown together by a DJ, sometimes taking the vocal track of one song and throwing [...]]]> by Matthew Hittinger

Matthew Hittinger Gives Us the Mash-Up

“My favorite result is the tension of having two voices speaking back and forth to each other.”

If you listen to dance music you know all about the mash-up: two or more songs thrown together by a DJ, sometimes taking the vocal track of one song and throwing it over the rhythm of another. In the cleverest of mash-ups, a DJ will take songs that somehow relate to each other lyrically and blend them together, sometimes in amusing ways, sometimes in fierce ways, sometimes in poignant ways (see DJ Earworm’s work, or on Madonna’s recent tour how she mashed her hit “Rain” with the Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again”).

I’ve found in my own work, when I have two or three poem drafts that seem to be speaking to each other but none of which seem to be able to stand on their own as a fully formed poem yet, that “mashing them up” often creates surprising results. My favorite result is the tension of having two voices speaking back and forth to each other, which I sometimes indicate through italics or by giving the “mashed-in” poem its own spatial logic on the page.

So here’s an exercise for you: Take two poems that you’re not totally satisfied with and try mashing them together. That might mean alternating lines from one with the other, italicizing the one and having it break in throughout the course of the other so that it appears as if two voices are speaking, or simply taking your favorite lines from each and recombining them in ways that might startle you into an altogether new poem.

I have included a couple of examples of my own poems that use this technique. The first is a mashed-up poem titled “Skin Game,” and the second is one titled “The Alchemists Dissolve and Coagulate.”

The first example is a true mash-up, in which I took two poems and put them together to create the resulting, third piece (examples linked as PDFs). The two poems I mashed were “Skin Game” and “Skin Shift.” The final product can be seen here.

The second example, “The Alchemists Dissolve and Coagulate,” is not so much a mash-up of two poems but a mash-up of two different types of language: the poem’s story on one side and this juxtaposed list of a different kind of language that gives some sonic and semantic texture. The poem on the left-hand side came first and it always seemed to be asking for more. So I did some research and found these words really beautiful and wanted to somehow weave them in.

“Skin Game” and “The Alchemists Dissolve and Coagulate” are two distinct approaches to the prompt — the first mashing two drafts together and the second mashing a draft with found language. There are many other ways to approach this prompt as well.

Good luck with your pieces, and mash away!

Matthew Hittinger is the author of the chapbooks Pear Slip, winner of the 2006 Spire Press Chapbook Award, Narcissus Resists (GOSS183/MiPOesias, 2009) and Platos de Sal (Seven Kitchens Press, 2009). Shortlisted for the National Poetry Series, the New Issues Poetry Prize, the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, and twice for the Walt Whitman Award, Hittinger’s honors include a Hopwood Award and The Helen S. and John Wagner Prize from the University of Michigan, the Kay Deeter Award from the journal Fine Madness, and three Pushcart nominations. His work has appeared in many journals, on Verse Daily and in the anthology Best New Poets 2005. Matthew lives and works in New York City.

All poems included in this post are unpublished and shared with permission from the author. Contact Matthew Hittinger before using or reproducing the poems shared in this post.

Joseph O. Legaspi shares a prompt related to memory and identity

1. Write down the first five words, images or phrases that arise in you from looking at this photo. (Give yourself 1 minute.)

Light & Trees [...]]]> by Joseph O. Legaspi

Joseph O. Legaspi shares a prompt related to memory and identity

“I want to create a narrative of the self. I believe every life is worth mythologizing.”

1. Write down the first five words, images or phrases that arise in you from looking at this photo. (Give yourself 1 minute.)

Light & Trees by Greig Fraser

2. And this photo. (Give yourself another minute.)

Light Window by Greig Fraser

Then:

• List things/events that you want to remember, as many as you can jot down in 5 minutes.
• List things/events that you want to forget (again, 5 minutes).

I want to create a narrative of the self. I believe every life is worth mythologizing. Specifically, I want to explore and to illustrate the functions of memory in writing, in poetry. Memory, as a selection of images — elusive at times, but imprinted indelibly on the brain — serves as a vital tool in the creation of poems.

And memory happens! “It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time,” novelist Barbara Kingsolver once said. We accumulate memories as we live, breathe and walk on this earth, and in turn we are an accumulation of our memories. We are our memories, as the saying goes. Memory is time-shifting, malleable and can even be said to live outside of time. A smile happens in a flash, but memory can last a lifetime.

Then how does memory serve us? How much of our memories are true? Memories are a kind of truth, but we can change the meaning and power they have over us.

The above mini-exercises are components: The collected words and lists of remembrances are raw materials, and here we proceed with the prompt even further.

• Pick an item — a memory — from “what you want to remember,” but write only about, or rather concentrate on, the odors, scents. Incorporate many of the words, images or phrases you invoked while musing at photo #2.

Free-write for 10 minutes.

• Select a memory from “what you want to forget,” and write in this scenario: You are in the future, in bed, dreaming. The forgotten memory appears, haunting you, perhaps. A magical animal also crosses your path. In your narrative, incorporate images invoked by photo #1, the light through trees.

Free-write for 10 minutes.

Hopefully you’ll complete this exercise with two worthwhile drafts. Try to compare the two to determine and muse at how memory works in each free-write. The poems should be rooted in autobiography, but not strictly so. What we remember and/or don’t remember is open to multiple interpretations and possibilities. Be honest, and the poems will be, too.

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago (CavanKerry Press, 2007), winner of a 2008 Global Filipino Literary Award. Born in the Philippines, he currently resides in New York City. His work has appeared in numerous journals, online publications and anthologies. A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he co-founded Kundiman, a nonprofit organization serving Asian American poets. Visit him at www.josepholegaspi.com.

Dorianne Laux discusses Ruth Stone

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, [...]]]> 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.