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:
- Bring to mind one of your most vivid dreams (preferably one you haven’t already spent a lot of time analyzing in therapy).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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