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 Dave Jarecki
Another Pennsylvania sunset
backed down the local mountain
spraying the colors of a streetfighter’s face
onto the narrative wallpaper of a boy’s bedroom
The fragment comes from the poem “The Homeowner’s Prayer,” in David Berman’s collection, Actual Air (Open City Books, 1999). I’ve been addicted to this book since 2001, gave my copy away to a friend, tried living without it for a short time, then had to go get a new copy.
Reading “The Homeowner’s Prayer” recently, I found myself being pulled into the scene of the boy in the bedroom. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in Pennsylvania and can remember the way the sunset would inject light into my western-facing windows.
This week, I encourage you to find the “narrative wallpaper” that resides in your home, apartment, memory, etc. Maybe you’re the child in the bedroom watching stories burn in the sun. Perhaps you can wander into a remembered or even fictional place and let the poem jump off from there. Or maybe you’ll take this fragment of Berman’s poem and run with it.
Whatever you do, have fun stripping and repapering the walls.
 Dave Jarecki writes poetry, prose and strategic communications from his home office in Portland, Ore. Read and listen to his work, as well as the work of guest writers, at DaveJarecki.com.
by Nathan Moore
What is going on in this photo? Why is the figure staring at a three-legged chair? Why is the figure wearing a hood? What is keeping the chair from falling down?
This image appeals to me because of its enigmatic nature. In terms of writing, you might want to stay with the questions the scene elicits, linger over them, hesitate before rushing to an answer.
Or, as is often the case when faced with an enigma, you might start to symbolize. Is this is picture about facing a problem, contemplating mystery, the incomplete and frail work of human labor in the face of nature’s grandeur?
Offer ideas about what you see here in the comments section of this post. Next Thursday, leave a link to what you wrote in the comments section of the Get Your Poem On post.
(Note: If you include this photo in your post along with your poem, make sure you credit the artist.)
 Nathan Moore is community director and columnist for Read Write Poem. In his spare time, he plays with his children and with fire. Never at the same time. He blogs at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.
by Dana Guthrie Martin
I am going to let you in on a little secret about my own writing process this week: The prompt I am about to share is one of my favorite ways to write. It’s called transliteration.
What the heck is that, you ask? Transliteration is the process of selecting a text in a language you don’t know and then doing a faux translation of the work based on what you think the words mean. The key is not knowing the language you are translating from so that your faux translation won’t be sullied by knowing what the words actually mean.
Some people get very scientific with their transliterations, looking at letter groupings and repeated words, and trying to make sure the words they are creating from the original language match up with those groups and repetitions. For example, a word like the Old English “wrecen” would be translated as the same word wherever it appears in the text being transliterated.
That’s a great approach, and I applaud anyone who attempts such a degree of accuracy. I am, however, far less scientific with my approach. What I tend to do is read a word or a group of words and think about the effect they have on me. What do those letter combinations feel like in my mouth? If I were coming up with words in English based on the way those strange words feel when I say them, what would those words be?
Another way I transliterate is to make the foreign words into a similar-looking or similar-sounding English counterpart. I know that’s a bit of a stretch in terms of transliterating, but it can yield interesting results. For example, one of my poems, “Old Ladies,” opens with the following line:
We hate the gardenias in the garden.
That line is a transliteration of the following Beowulf line:
Hwæt we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum.
You can see the connection between the two.
If you feel transliterating an entire poem is too daunting, no worries! Simply transliterate a few phrases and see how you might work them into your poem. “Old Ladies” works in that manner. I think that, in the end, about half the poem was based on transliteration, and the other half was what I needed to write to create the connections and context I felt the poem needed.
Stumped about where to find poems in a language you don’t know? I’ve already revealed one source — texts written in Old English. Why not try your hand at transliterating sections of Beowulf? It’s worked well for me as a source text. You could also transliterate Latin or Greek poetry if you don’t know those languages, or from any contemporary language you don’t know. Why not look at collections in bilingual editions of poetry you own or that are available at your local bookstore or library?
Another great way to create source texts is to take a poem — yours or someone else’s — and drop it into an online translator. The translator will churn out a terrible translation of the poem in whatever language you select. Since this is an exercise in transliteration, not translation, it doesn’t matter if your source material is translated well. You just need something in a foreign language to get you started.
That about covers it. I can answer any questions in the comments section of the post, and feel free to share ideas for source material and additional takes on ways to transliterate. I can’t wait to hear what you all come up with.
 Dana Guthrie Martin is the founder of Read Write Poem. She resolves to focus on process and craft in 2010, both in terms of poetry and classical music. She also resolves to join a flute choir and to dream only in music and verse.
by Deb Scott
This week’s words were offered up by community members Joanne Johns and Neil Reid. In addition to some of the words they left in our Wordle Word Bank, I purloined an extra word from each of their blogs, grabbing just one from their last post.
To write to this prompt, pick as many (or few) of these words as you want and write a poem using them. (And if these words don’t suit you, pick your own. Just write a poem.) If you want to share some of your favorite words for an upcoming Read Write (Word) Prompt, head on over to the Wordle Word Bank, in the member site and contribute in our “General Words” forum. (Do it!)
Enjoy this week’s words, no matter whose you chose.
 Deb Scott is a community director for Read Write Poem. She also co-manages the Read Write Poem Virtual Book Tour. In past lives she used to borrow her friends clothes all the time. She doesn’t do that anymore, but she does steal her husband’s dessert on occasion. Deb blogs at Stoney Moss.
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.
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get the read write poem badge! 
Wear it loud, wear it proud! Display the Read Write Poem badge on your site. Just click here or on the image above to get the code! read write poem news- yes, yes, here’s another virtual book tour stop for ‘a walk through the memory palace’
February 6, 2010 | 11:37 amFind the latest tour stop for Pamela Johnson Parker’s debut collection, A Walk Through the Memory Palace at Jillypoet, Jill Crammond Wickham’s blog, where you can find an interview with Pamela that discusses how she creates manuscripts.
Previous stops include Daniel Romo at his blog, Peyote Soliloquies and James Brush at his blog, Coyote Mercury.
You can find all our plans for the tour here.
- the best of the web is in our ranks
February 6, 2010 | 11:35 amSarah J. Sloat’s poem,”Attending the Tasting” (published in The Literary Bohemian) has been selected for Best of the Web 2010. Congratulations, Sarah!
- another (w00t!) read write poem member on the joe milford poetry show
February 6, 2010 | 11:34 amOn the Joe Milford Poetry Show tomorrow (Feb. 6): W.F. Roby at 9 AM (PST). Find the show here!
Joe describes Will as a “great language poet and bad-ass.”
- ‘literary podcasting made simple with wordpress.com’
February 6, 2010 | 11:33 amDave Bonta has published a how-to article that might be of interest to WordPress users: “Literary Podcasting Made Simple with WordPress.com,” based on his and Beth Adams’ experience at Qarrtsiluni.
Thanks, Dave, for continuing to help make the community aware of technological resources that can expand our art.
- the latest (virtual) book tour stop for ‘a walk through the memory palace’
February 3, 2010 | 3:53 pmThe latest tour stop has been posted for Pamela Johnson Parker’s debut collection, A Walk Through the Memory Palace. Find out how Daniel Romo responded to the work at his blog, Peyote Soliloquies.
James Brush provided our first tour stop at his blog, Coyote Mercury.
You can find all our plans for the tour here.
- planning for napowrimo in april, and you are invited!
February 2, 2010 | 6:12 pmHello, hello dear Read Write Poem community members! We are in the planning stages for NaPoWriMo. (What? Is that a groan I hear, or an excited exclamation?)
We are planning another prompt-every-day for those folks who love to write a daily poem in April (which is, as most of you know, National Poetry Month in the United States — although there is an international following of writing poetry every day in April, too, so it is not just about the States).
Anyway! This is a call for prompts because we want to run your ideas, one every day, in April. So here’s what to do:
- Prompts must be no more than 250 words, and we will take the first 30 that we receive.
- Include “NaPoWriMo Prompt” in the subject line of your email as well as your username (e.g., the name you use when you log in) so we can match you up with your prompt and give you the link love.
- Email your submission (in the body of the email — no attachments please) to prompts (at) readwritepoem (dot) org!
We’ll let you know when we’ve got the 30, but don’t delay because it takes a lot of time to format the posts and we want to be ready come April Fools’ Day. Woohoo!
- new senior contributors at read write poem
February 2, 2010 | 11:51 amWe are thrilled to announce that Ren Powell and Dave Jarecki are moving into the senior contributor role at Read Write Poem. Both have been writing feverishly for the site, as well as providing ideas for content and for the community as a whole. In short, they make this site a more lively, and better, place.
Ren and Dave will fill the roles vacated by Carolee Sherwood and Jill Crammond Wickham, who have moved into the manager role.
Everyone please thank Ren and Dave for their hard work and commitment to Read Write Poem.
- rounding out the virtual book tour of sarah j. sloat’s ‘in the voice of a minor saint’
January 31, 2010 | 1:53 pmOur last stop on the Virtual Book Tour of Sarah J. Sloat’s In the Voice of a Minor Saint is with Ren Powell. Find Ren’s review at More Babel.
Joseph Harker provided our first stop in December, and you can find David Moolten’s review at Edible Detritus. David’s was followed by Dave Jarecki’s. Dave’s review is at his blog. Find Jill Crammond Wickham’s at Jillypoet: Mom Trying to Write.
In case you missed the introduction, we are (virtually) hosting Sarah J. Sloat’s In the Voice of a Minor Saint. For complete tour information, such as how you can get your own copy of the collection or how you can get involved in future tours, read this post.
- make your own book: get off the computer and onto the paper
January 30, 2010 | 4:19 pmBeth Adams has posted her latest project at The Cassandra Pages. “A Handmade Book” may not explicate all the details of bookbinding, but Beth shows readers the “Secret Belgian Binding.” It’s a beautiful as well as inspiring post.
If you would like more detailed instructions, Google “secret Belgian bookbinding” and find sites such as this one. Or look for a local book arts class for hands-on instruction.
As Beth says, ” … it did me good to get away from the computer and feel my hands at work!”
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