Writing the Life Poetic

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If you don't already subscribe to the Writing the Life Poetic Zine, I propose that you do so today! Why? Because you'll get information and inspiration designed to help you tune into the poetry of your life -- and get it down on the page. What better way to kick off National Poetry Month than attuning yourself to the possibilities and the pleasures of the life poetic?

Writing the Life Poetic Zine is free, it's fun, and every two months you will receive an abundance of insight and wisdom from some of my very favorite poets and people:

MINDING WORDS by Dale Favier
Wit and wisdom about the life and craft and spiritual way of writing poetry.

THE WRITE DIRECTIONS by M and Steve Williams
Fun and feisty prompts that will get your hand and mind moving.

POETS TO KNOW: Interviews by Dave Jarecki
Intimate dialogues with some of the most interesting and well loved poets today.

CRAFT LESSONS FROM PDX POETS by Sara Guest
A consideration and celebration of what contemporary poets are doing well - and what we can learn from them.

CREATING SPACE FOR WRITING by Toni Partington
Expert advice from a life coach and poet and how to cultivate a poetic life.

THE COOK, THE WRITER, THE GARDENER AND THE BUSINESS WOMAN by Brittany Baldwin
Musings on integrating many identities and types of work into a single creative life.

DISCOVER NEW MARKETS AND GET PUBLISHED by Shawn Sorensen
Fun, friendly, and extremely useful guidance on how and where to send your poems out for consideration.

THE POETICS OF COMMUNITY by Christopher Luna
A celebrated community organizer weighs in on why poets need community and how to go about creating our own.

THE WRITING LIFE by Sage Cohen
An exploration of how to stay engaged, inspired, evolving and attuned to the beauty of our writing lives.

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To your delight and discovery!

Sage and the Writing the Life Poetic Zine Columnists

The Writing Life: On Becoming Real

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room.

"Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.

"When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." -- The Velveteen Rabbit

When I'm not writing poems, I'm writing marketing content; that's my day job. For the past 10+ years, I've been paid to align business and consumer interests through captivating communications.

After a recent conversation with Noah Briar, genius of social and technology trends, about the potential of marketing as a peace-process intervention, I've been wondering if my poetry exists primarily as a marketing tool designed to convince me of my own legitimacy--as a person and as a writer.

Because the truth is, no matter what my resume (or my mother for that matter) may say about my accomplishments and worth, learning to believe in the Sage brand has taken nearly 18 years of thoroughly documented reflection--the most enduring multi-media campaign of my life.

Jen Lemen, one of the leading sources of inspiration and hope in the blogisphere, made me laugh out loud when she described the extrovert's process of needing to speak everything first before writing it, which she suggested was far less efficient than the introvert's process of moving directly from thought to paper or screen.

I suppose my process has been somewhat the reverse of Jen's, although I'm still not sold on its efficiencies. Most of the time, I need to write something down in order to know what I think. After I've seen the word-after-word-after-word manifest as an actual line in relationship to other lines in a poem (or essay), my thoughts find a way to establish their root system in me. Eventually, they come through in conversation.

If we are to consider our poems as our one-woman or one-man campaigns to get a little closer to who we are and what life on earth is all about, then maybe marketing and poetry aren't as disparate as I once thought they were. Both seem to be oversized mirrors that offer a way to more intimately know and reflect back the world through language.

Yet, poetry and marketing have different core objectives. Marketing is a forum for convincing and selling, and poetry is a forum for exposing the bare bulb of truth. The arduous work of writing poems loves our edges off. Poems soften us into who we are and who we are becoming. They demand of us something more authentic and complete than most other experiences in our lives.

A poem that doesn't enter the "real" space is not likely to connect with others or even resonate with the person who has written it. Poems hold us to a higher standard by which we become more visible to ourselves and more authentic in that unveiling. It is only by writing ourselves through this poetry prism that we arrive at the threadbare intimacies of "real."

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The Poetics of Community: Is the Poet Inherently Dissident?

By Christopher Luna

"Instead of trying to escape reality, plunge into the flesh of the world." -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Poetry As Insurgent Art"
 
Traditionally, many poets have seen themselves as dissidents. Many American poets have written about the promise of America, and its failure to live up to this ideal. Walt Whitman wrote prophetic poems about the liberation of the individual, and unflinching descriptions of what he saw as a nurse to wounded soldiers during the Civil War.
 
Kenneth Patchen courageously lamented the futility and meaninglessness of armed conflict during World War II. Later, Allen Ginsberg wrote poems in favor of psychedelics, gay rights, and peace. In addition, Ginsberg and others including Ed Sanders and Denise Levertov became directly involved in the anti-Vietnam movement. Amiri Baraka has written great poems about racism and the damage caused by American capitalism.
 
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the former poet laureate of San Francisco and founder of City Lights book store in San Francisco, encourages poets to see themselves as dissidents. In "Poetry As Insurgent Art," Ferlinghetti answers the question "What is the use of poetry?" with aphorisms intended to provoke and inspire: "If you call yourself a poet, don't just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a 'take your seat' practice. Stand up and let them have it."
 
In other countries, poets are regarded as statesmen and spokespeople for the populace. Poets including Julie Patton have returned from their travels with tales of poetry readings attended by thousands of enthusiastic listeners. Why doesn't this happen in the United States? Why are most poetry readings attended primarily by other poets? Why is our work devalued? How did we become marginalized? Is it because the politically conscious poet's existence represents a threat to the status quo?
 
Anne Waldman has written about an outrider tradition in American literature, which "rides through the chaos, maintaining a stance of 'negative capability', but also does not give up that projective drive, or its original identity that demands that it intervene on the culture. This is not about being an Outsider. The Outrider might be an outlaw, but not an outsider. Rather, the outrider is a kind of shaman, the true spiritual 'insider'. The shaman travels to zones of light and shadow. The shaman travels to edges of madness and death and comes back to tell the stories." In this culture, we become outriders simply by daring to bear witness.
 
In the 1960s, it was said that the personal is political. If this is true, then every poem is political. Each line is poised to move someone, convince them that they are not alone, or persuade them to take action. Once one fully groks the inevitable ripple effect that one's words create, it is difficult to look at one's writing, or one's place in the community, quite the same way again. One of my favorite poems by Allen Ginsberg addresses this belief quite eloquently:
 
"Well, while I'm here I'll/ do the work-/and what's the work?/to ease the pain of living./Everything else, drunken/dumbshow"
 
Everything we engage in, from readings to workshops to encouraging emerging writers, has the potential to make a positive impact on someone else's life. Poetics can be a utilitarian, healing practice that has the potential to unlock people's hearts and minds. This makes it a crucial tool of self-liberation.

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Christopher Luna is a poet, editor, artist, teacher, and graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Publications include Cadillac Cicatrix, eye-rhyme, Exquisite Corpse, and the @tached document. Chapbooks include tributes and ruminations, On the Beam (with David Madgalene), and Sketches for a Paranoid Picture Book on Memory. GHOST TOWN, USA, which features poems and observations of Vancouver, WA, is available through Cover to Cover Books  and Angst Gallery, or from the author.

POETRY AVAILABLE ONLINE
Poem in Exquisite Corpse
Poem in For Immediate Release
Profile for Here Comes Everybody: Writers on Writing

Email: christopherjluna@gmail.com
Blog: www.christopherluna-poetry.blogspot.com

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Discover New Poetry Markets and Get Published: December

By Shawn Sorensen

Hello everyone! The news swirling around (and up) is that more and more people are submitting work. Excellent! Also, more people are getting recognized. Stupendous!

A few acquaintances of mine just won in the prestigious Oregon State Poetry Association Fall 2009 contest (open to writers nationally), which I'll highlight in my next column. Plus, yours truly was published in the summer 2009 edition of Wild Goose Poetry Review (www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com), a publication I had recommended in an earlier column. Add a comment to this article and let us know where you're submitting and/or getting published!

It's heartening to hear about so many people submitting, even though the odds are usually against getting published. Journals, magazines and contests often get inundated with submissions, which is why you should take as a compliment any word you hear back from them.

If you get a standard (or 'form-letter') rejection notice, consider it a positive development in that: one, they're read your work; and two, they're an organized outfit. If you receive a personal rejection note, consider this a very good sign because it’s likely to mean that the editors read your work closely, appreciated something about it and may have even come close to publishing it.

In other words, there are many smaller victories on the road to getting published.

Here are some submission possibilities to explore this time around:

Print Journal: Burnside Review
Portland's own! This unusual print publication (approximately 80 pgs. in a 6” X 6” nicely bound journal) allows the Northwest literary scene to shine brightly. Published work is open in theme and imagery. Some would say the Burnside Review is “edgier than most”, but I would say “more unafraid” -- and responsive to all the work they receive. Their web site -- www.burnsidereview.org -- has sample poems. Burnside Review is published every 9 months and can be found at Powell's bookstore.

Online Journal: Stickman Review
I've been reading Stickman Review for years, admiring the poems that create vivid atmospheres, many with nicely-accomplished metaphor work. Check out their web site, www.stickmanreview.com, for all the details. They publish every few months, are open to new poets, don't mind simultaneous submissions and will pay you if you get published. 

Contest: 2010 Writers-Editors Network 27th Annual International Writing Competition
An annual contest awards three cash prizes and several Honorable Mention certificates. Well-run and open to new and more experienced poets alike. Accepts poetry of any form with an entry fee of $3-$5 per submitted piece. See www.writers-editors.com for more details. Deadline is March 15th, 2010.  

Get submitting and let me know about any victories large or small.

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Shawn Sorensen is a published, award-winning poet whose work can be viewed at manequinenvy.com, Winter 2008 edition. His poem called “The Yard” won 1st Place in the Oregon State Poetry Association's spring 2009 contest, New Poets category. Shawn's poetry submission goal is to send something in at least every other week and get published/recognized a few times per year.  He's written dozens of complete book reviews, many of them for poetry titles, on goodreads.com and braves a perilous river crossing to be the Community Relations Manager at Barnes & Noble in the hinterlands of Vancouver, WA. He plans and hosts an every-2nd-Wednesday Poetry Group event that's always at 7 pm, always features the area's best poets and always has a great open mic.

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The Cook, The Writer, The Gardener, The Business Woman: Finding Inspiration

By Brittany Baldwin

In my life as a writer, I’ve grown towards my muses. At 30 I find myself in the country in an old farmhouse atop a hill facing west. I don’t want children so instead I have a gentleman rooster named Silver, 13 hens named after famous writers and chefs, two cats and one Great Dane mix who set fire to my last apartment and later jumped out of a second story window without a scratch or a yelp.

Over my stove and my kitchen sink is a picture window facing west. While I make dinner at night I watch the sunset over the coast range, no house in sight, just a meadow that occasionally fills with elk. To my family each spring I add 25 tomato plants, 15 peppers and a rotation of greens, flowers, roots and peas. After work, sitting in the garden pulls me from the city and the commute home into my other world, the one with the poetry in it, the green thumb, the culinarian, the woods.

When I lived in the city, culture was my inspiration. Poetry readings, the ballet, the symphony, the museum, foreign movies. When I was unemployed, inspiration came in books, the library or loitering in bookshops. After a few hours, I would emerge to sit on the sidewalk watching people walk by. People tell much of their story in their dress, hairstyle, walk, cadence, eyes. Even if you block the rest out and take them as their shoes you feel you already know them. I often study shoes in a place I am unsure about. “What kind of shoes eat at this restaurant? What kind of shoes am I sitting with at the party? The feed store? On the bus?

In the city I found inspiration in my shitty boss, unrequited love and dreams of the life I now live. Now I have long walks or long weeding projects to sift things. I whisper under my breath, creating poems for the tomatoes and I just in that moment. I am not one to carry a notepad or rush to the house to jot down a line. I sit in the moment and whisper. In the city I would close into my hood and say them in my head, looking out the bus window or into my cutting board.

And living alone through much of it, I can’t say enough about finding inspiration in a few drinks and a couple hours dancing around the living room. The exercise is good for the body and somehow it always ends with those songs that bring you over to the couch with a few candles and a notebook.

Living in the middle of nowhere also gives me the freedom to tap into inspiration through music. These days, I dance in the garden, under the sunset with my IPod. The chickens watch through the fence, the dog patrols the yard and the kitties sit on the stairs swinging their tails.

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Brittany Baldwin runs a small catering and personal chef company that maintains its own organic garden. She has written poetry in Portland for eight years while starting her own business and self publishing her own poetry collection, Broken Knuckles Against Knives, Cutting The Food To Feed Me Through This (2005). In 2002 she received a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado. Her poetry has appeared in local poetry collections Ephemeris and Broken Word: Alberta Street Anthology Volume 1 and 2. She has appeared on KBOO's Talking Earth,  won an honorable mention in the Oregon State Poetry Associations fall 06 contest and was featured in the 2006 and 2007 Silverton Poetry Festival.

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Creating Space for Writing: Blending the Elements of Your LIfe

By Toni Partington

In my last column I wrote about the integration of roles. The concepts of integrating your role as a poet with other life roles. I suggested that compartmentalizing your life may keep you from tapping into the poetry juice that’s all around you. The key to integration is to see ourselves as a mix of roles, characteristics, and talents and to allow these to live together instead of segmenting them to proper place and time.  
When I speak about blending the elements of my life I’m literally considering how the various aspects of life, relationships, work, play, and interests inform my writing. The application of blending in the craft of writing starts by manifesting experiences into words, phrases, lines, and ultimately, whole poems.  

A sure way to see this materialize is to do a free writing exercise. Start with blank paper. Describe what you were thinking or doing today, before you started to write. Then, work backwards, what happened before that, where were you, who was there, what did you say? Continue on, be specific and detailed.  

What were your surroundings, how did they look, smell, feel? What about right before that? Write until you feel a natural stopping place. Read it once to yourself and a second time out loud. Now, go back and circle words, lines, phrases, or make notes in the margins. You’ve written about what you know and now have words that can be shaped into something else.

Here’s a short example. Last night rain filled the birdbath out back. It is cold this morning; the robins bathe anyway. Four are in the bath, one on the lilac branch overhead and one among leaves on the ground. They are plump with magnificent orange-red breasts. Their splashing reminds me of joy and a time when my kids were babies. Earlier, after making the bed, sheets cold since you left for work, I moved past our huge front window just in time to see crows on the front lawn. Then, in slow motion I caught sight of one perfect white crow gliding above the others. Can this be real? I’ve never seen a white crow. I must call the Audubon and ask. Head to the phone as it starts ringing; pick up, a recorded political message. I race back to the front window, white crow gone.  

I have several themes in this free writing that can lead to at least one poem. I can expand, embellish, remove, twist, or keep it straightforward. I can play with tenses, create sensory cues, make it about nature, love, or family. I can break a sentence into parts – shape lines, omit extras. This short piece draws from the images of a single morning.  

Imagine yourself blending the elements of everyday life. Don’t be shy about exploring where these elements may take you.

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Toni Partington lives and works in Vancouver, WA. Her poetry has appeared in the NW Women’s Journal, the Anthology of the River Poets’ Society, VoiceCatcher 3, the Cascade Journal, and others. Toni’s other work includes career/life coaching, editing services for new and emerging writers, and grant writing. This winter she joined the editorial collective for VoiceCatcher 4. She holds a BA in Social Work and an MA focused on Literature and Literary Editing.  Before that, Toni was a high-school drop out, pregnant and then married at age 16 whose life came faster than it should have and toughened her into a self-described survivor. Today, her circle includes family, friends, dogs and poets, not in any particular order.

Blog: www.poettone.blogspot.com
Email: tpartington@earthlink.net

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Catching Voices: Engaging the Broader Community Through Submissions

By Jenn Lalime and Sara Guest  

It is early 2005 in a cozy living room, steam rising from cups of tea, women in a rough circle on couches, chairs, ottomans and the floor. The facilitator, Emily Trinkaus—one of the original founders of the VoiceCatcher collective—launches a prompt. Pens fire up around the room and women start writing.  

Later, when we share what we’ve written, we access the raw materials of each other’s lives. And after a while, we start to realize the writing being shared around the room is powerful. More powerful perhaps—or at least in a different way—than the work we read in poetry and fiction journals or yearly anthologies. “We’ve got to start capturing this stuff!” we say. “We need to start sharing.”  

From this shared impulse, the VoiceCatcher anthology (soon to be publishing its fifth issue) was born. And the desire to feel connected to the authentic, powerful, emotional, raw collective voice we have been hearing howled into living rooms all over Portland has kept us going all these years.  

We want fledgling writers who are afraid to put their work in the world to have a logical place to send it. We want veteran writers from the area to find it worthwhile to place their work with our project.  

And since the first year, that’s pretty much what we’ve gotten back from the Portland women’s writing community. We’ve received gorgeous, heartfelt letters from writers taking a first stab at owning their collective voice. We’ve heard from women just moving to town looking for the best way to get connected. We’ve had the pleasure of publishing Oregon Book Award-winning poets alongside stories sent from Coffee Creek Correctional Facility (the prison in Wilsonville housing the entire women’s prison population in Oregon). Everything goes as long as it speaks to us.

Our submission window opens like a spring sidecar on February 1 and closes on March 31^st – just in time to get geared up for heavy doses of reading in April and May while many of us are tending our gardens. What women throughout the Portland, Oregon area have planted on the page in the dark days of winter blooms into our sunrooms and kitchen tables.

We take submissions at our PO Box (below), and also in-person at any of our spring readings. In addition to supporting authors from the previous year’s book, these events remind our very large audiences that the submission window is open -- and we encourage everyone to submit. (Please visit our website in January for a full list of spring readings celebrating the current issue – VoiceCatcher 4).   

Want to get involved? If you are a woman living in the Portland, Oregon area, send us the writing that’s hanging out in the dark clotted space on your desk, or in your dream journal, or on your hard-drive, or in your heart. We look forward to hearing from you.

VoiceCatcher submissions: February 1- March 31 at VoiceCatcher, PO Box 6064, Portland, OR 97228-6064.

More about VoiceCatcher at www.voicecatcher.org.

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Sara Guest, a native mid-westerner, has been tripping the light wowtastic in Portland, Oregon since 2004. A longtime producer and editor, Sara works as a program coordinator for Write Around Portland and volunteers with Literary Arts and VoiceCatcher (currently as board chair). She writes poetry and fiction and is a voracious reader and lover of Powell's City of Books.

Jenn Lalime is a northwest native, a writer and editor, a mother and a wife. She's lucky to work with the following organizations to bring the words of fellow writers out into the world: Portland Women Writers, VoiceCatcher, and Tin House Books. She thanks the universe every day for President Obama whose presence in the White House gives her the peace of mind to stay focused on her first and true love: reading great fiction.

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Get your WTLP Zine Holiday Gift Issue!

The Writing the Life Poetic Zine Holiday Gift Issue is our way of thanking readers for committing to their creative lives.

In place of each columnist's regular column, you will find a poem he or she has written. We hope it brightens your day and offers a spark or two to ignite your own writing.
 
May your cup and your heart be full in 2010!

Poets to Know: An Interview with Daniel Nester

Daniel Nester and I grew up in the same town in suburban New Jersey. But our first meeting was in our mid-20’s when we attended the same graduate creative writing program in New York City, taught poetry as a team in a residential hospital, and wandered around SoHo and the East Village experimenting with the urban chic of the life poetic. Daniel is one of the most approachable, prolific and community-minded poets I know. In the complexities of making a life and making a living, poetry seems to have stayed front and center for him in the fifteen-plus years that we’ve known each other. For this, I’ve held Daniel as a beacon of possibility for how I might stay true to my own course over the years.

Why do you write poetry? What brought you to it and what has kept you writing?

I was brought to poetry because I wanted to elevate my life with language. I think I wanted to use what I thought was a higher language than what I used every day. What has kept me drawn to poetry is the desire to make that higher language deceptively simple. I write poetry because I love to mess around with language and then see if it makes sense of my world. I like to make sense of my world and then see if I can mess it up with language. I like the sound of words, the way words that shouldn’t be next to each other sound next to each other.

 

You are a man of many literary talents and seemingly infinite energy! How does your relationship with poetry live alongside the work you do as journalist, essayist, poet, editor, teacher, and family man?

I am not sure about my energy level these days. I can definitely feel myself slowing down, especially to watch my kids do their thing and interact with them. I do like having a range of different projects in the works at one time time. That way, when I do show up at my desk to write, I don’t have any excuses. I can look at a poem, or an essay, look at my student’s writing, or work on some story I need to get done for somebody who wants me to write something. All these things use a different side of my brain, and keep my typing skills up to snuff.

 

These days, poetry lives around the edges of my projects. I love reading writer’s fragments, aphorisms, commonplace books. Random examples would be things like John Richardson’s Vectors, The Poet’s Notebook . New York Review of Books published a book from 18th century scientist Georg Lichtenberg called The Waste Books that is just terrific. 

 

You wrote an essay, Goodbye to All Them (that appears in your book) about your experience in the New York City poetry scene. I'm wondering if your relocation to Albany, NY has had any surprising influence in your poetic life.

Moving to Upstate New York was one of the best decisions my wife and I made. It gave me more time to write and space, mentally and real estate-wise, to do so. My years in New York City were terrific—I don’t regret living there for a minute. But I think my experience there ran dry. I was working too hard on jobs I didn’t really want. Moving out of the city gave me a chance to teach full-time, which I love to do.

I was growing tired of being around so many writers. The thing is, as soon as I moved to Albany, I started missing all those writers! The good news is there’s a good community of writers around Albany and upstate. There is enough of a scene to keep things interesting, and I have made friends with different writers I might not have met in the city. I also run a reading series at my college called Frequency North, which is a direct descendant of a reading series I started with Shanna Compton called Frequency. It gives me a chance to bring writers from out of town and have them visit classes.

 

What gets you in a poetic state of mind?

This might sounds smart-alecky, but: boredom? Silence? Also: a fresh legal pad page or Moleskin page. I still handwrite my poems, and I still think of poetry making as a very tactile experience. I need a good Uniball fine pen, a good notebook, and some time to myself. I just like making words with my hands.

How has your relationship with poetry shaped who you are today?

I am sure it’s kept me sane, as sane as I am, at least. It’s a cliché, but whenever I was feeling down or disturbed or couldn’t make sense of things, from a very young age, I would turn to writing. It felt it was a sacred, religious thing for me to write things down. There’s some on-the-spot self-mythologizing there, but we’re talking about me as an eight- or nine-year-old, taking out a notebook, and writing little rhymes.

 

How has your life poetic informed the development of your newest book, How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull Press, 2009)?

 

My practice as a poet, more often than not, has not been an organic one; I feel as if I loved poetry so much I sort of willed myself into being one. That being said, my life poetic has influenced how I see the world, how I translate that world into words. When I write poems, I look for what is seen by many as un-poetic: that includes popular culture objects, crudity, embarrassments.

 

The same applies when I write prose, which perhaps demands more of narrative and expository inclinations, sure. But there is still, ideally, a desire to compress language, make lasting images, and offer wisdom. There is a literal informing--there's the essay on leaving the New York poetry scene that you mention, and an essay on references to farts in poetry, which was in an issue of Humor: The International Journal of Humor Studies, guest-edited by one of my favorite poets, Denise Duhamel. There's an autobiographical informing--my life as an aspiring poet is covered in the book as well. I think when I thought about the sequence of the pieces, I thought like a poet; how, when writing a poem, I would think about images working before and after each other, foreshadowing and combining for the most effect.

 

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Daniel Nester’s newest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction. He is the author of God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen, and The History of My World Tonight, a collection of poems. His work has appeared Poets & Writers, The Morning News, The Daily Beast, Time Out New York, The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Bookslut. Daniel’s work has been anthologized in Lost and Found, The Best American Poetry 2003, The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and Isn't It Romantic? 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets. The former sestinas editor for McSweeney's, he teaches writing at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

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The Write Direction: December Poetry Prompt

By M and Steve Williams

As practicing poets, we work hard on our craft. As we toil, sweat, and agonize over our words, we can all take ourselves and our writing too seriously at times. So this month, we’re going to give ourselves a much needed break and play a party game -- one we found in The Everything Writing Poetry Book: A practical guide to style, structure, form, and expression by Tina D. Eliopulos and Todd Scott Moffett.

These kind authors introduced us to a poetry form we’d never heard of, and we hope it will be new to you too. It’s called “Bouts-Rimés,” and it started as a party game. Literally translated from the French, it means “end rhymes,” though the form doesn’t have to include rhymes at all.

The rules are simple. The foundation of a Bouts-Rimés poem is a list of words supplied to you by someone else. You must place these words at the end of each line of your poem. For example, if the word list supplied to you is suddenly, mouth, gut, eye, solar, in, more, indifference, cheek, then the first line of the poem must end with suddenly, the second line with mouth, and so on down the list. Given that list of words, you could end up with a nine-line poem like this:

All of a sudden passion suddenly
slaps you across the mouth
punches you in the gut
spits right in your eye
then cuts left of your solar
plexus and you take it in
and you ask for more
and your indifference
turns its other cheek

One of the rules of the game is that you can’t change the spelling of the words on your list – for instance, if you’re give the word light, you can’t alter it to lights or lightly. However, you are free to use the word as a noun (“I turned off the light”), a verb (“He’ll light / the fire”), or an adjective (“She has a light / touch”)." 

Following is a list of nineteen words we chose completely at random from a number of different poetry books by poets who have widely divergent styles, and therefore, widely divergent vocabularies. We simply closed our eyes, opened the books to any page and pointed, so we refuse to take any responsibility for these words: 

1. stragglers
2. clink
3. vulgar
4. reading
5. sundown
6. number
7. apricots
8. solar
9. wearing
10. park
11. California
12. sandwiches
13. ears
14. gray
15. walk
16. felonies
17. cadence
18. inconceivable
19. episode
20. ?

Your challenge this month is to write a 20-line poem using the list of words given as the ending words on each of your lines, i.e., stragglers should end line one, clink should end line two, etc. You can’t change the form of the word, but feel free to get creative with parts of speech (use the word as a noun, verb, adjective, etc.). What about the twentieth and final word? That one’s up to you. It can be any word you like or one you select at random. Just open any book like we did, close your eyes and point.

Since this is a party game, have fun. Don’t take the exercise too seriously. Be spontaneous. Strange things can happen when you let loose, and when complete control over the final product has been taken out of your hands by someone else’s list of words that you otherwise might never have thought to use. Think about children’s marvelous ability to be creative and free when they’re playing games.

You just might surprise yourself with how much you like the work that comes out of this exercise. While you may not end up with the perfect, finished poem, chances are good that you’ll get at least a line or two that you can use again.

If you're a member of a regular poetry-writing group, feel free to play this game at your next meeting. Just have everyone make their own list of words, and then pass them to another member of the group. It’s a great game to get your party started!

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M has served as an Associate Poetry Editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection for the past one hundred years or so. More than a few editors have found her poems acceptable, and included them in their journals. She received her B.A. in Literature so long ago, she’s pretty certain her diploma has crumbled to dust. She also serves as an administrator of on online poetry workshop called Wild Poetry Forum. If you cannot find her (she never answers her cell phone), call Powell’s Books. The employees there know exactly what room she’s in. And most importantly, she is very grateful for the enormous amount of love in her life.

Steve Williams lives and works in Portland with a lovely woman who writes and edits much better than he but refuses to admit it.

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