The World Drops By Poets Online

I enjoy looking at the widget on this page that let's you see the recent visitors to the blog and see that fans of poetry from around the world are visiting.

Although doing the PoetsOnline.org website since 1998 and this blog since 2005 has connected me to many poets, I have not literally met very many of them.

A few of the poets who submit poems and some of the featured poets are people I know from workshops and readings from the east coast of the United States.

I do feel like I know some of the regular contributors too. I have been reading their poems for years and have seen their writing change and grow. But, I will probably never meet them in person.

In this age of Facebook and social media "friends," I have a pretty wide circle of poetry friends. People follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest.

One of those virtual poetry friends is Mary Kendall who has been submitting poems for the past eight years. I know that she has been a familiar name in the submissions folder, but I know more about her because she has emailed me about "non-submission" topics, and because via those social networks, I discovered her own blog.

Mary is an American transplanted to London. She started blogging in 2012 when she was headed to the UK "for four months" but she is still there and I get to follow her European travels through her blog.

from Mary's visit to Monet's gardens and house at Giverney

She visited a place I have on my bucket list - Monet's gardens and home at Giverney.was

But the post that I enjoyed the most was one about her own poetry and Poets Online story. Those are the stories that I hope are out there, but I don't expect to hear.

Here is an excerpt:

In 2005 I discovered a website that I quickly grew to love: POETSONLINE (www.poetsonline.org). It is a website with an accompanying blog that never fails to interest me (the blog can be reached through the main website). I am very indebted to this site and blog. After a 20 year hiatus in writing, I slowly started writing again in 2001. It was a strange experience (to be saved for another time) to start writing once again after so long. So, how did this site and blog help? This site presents a poem as a prompt (often several poems) along with some carefully constructed thoughts about the works. This leads the editor of the site, Ken Ronkowitz, to present that month's prompt idea. The prompts are varied and always interesting. The blog adds many details and comments. I often write in response but don't send the poems in. This past month I spent days writing a poem about a willow tree to send in, but when the deadline came, I knew the poem wasn't ready. It is now, but it is relegated to my quiet folder of poems not shared with the world. Who knows where it will land. When I read the poems then published to the prompt, I realized mine was quite different and perhaps it was a good thing I didn't submit it after all. We writers are our best self-critics, aren't we?
Anyhow, starting in 2005, I've submitted and published a number of poems, some ok, some good, and one or two that have become some of my favorites. Occasionally I will get an email from someone who has read a poem and they make a private comment to me. Once, a composer, Paul Carey, asked to use some winter haiku he had read from the site. That was a lovely surprise. I never got to hear the resulting work, which was my only disappointment, yet the fact that another person wanted my words for his music is touching. 

My thoughts today made me think back to the first poem I wrote for poets online seven years ago. The prompt asked us to think about who our reader is and what they would be like, how they would read the poem, how they might respond. I'm going to share this poem with you here today because I have been wondering who my readers are in all I have ever written. They will always be anonymous just as I am a reader of poems, novels, blogs, etc. and unknown to so many authors, many of whom I love.

It's a nice bit of serendipity that her first submission was to a prompt about the reader you imagine when you write. I have several idealized readers for my poems. One is a radio voice - that of Michael Silverblatt. For some poems, I have a single person that I am writing to and for.  But for most of the poems I have written based on my own prompts, I imagine the poets like Mary who are out there also writing a poem to that prompt. I imagine that, like them, I want the other poets reading the poems that are in the Poets Online archive (and that's a lot of poems at this point) to like my poem.

Sometimes poets and readers will reach out by email, as Mary mentions, and connect because of a poem online. Most of the time that doesn't happen. Most of the posts here don't get comments. That is typical for most blogs and websites. I have been teaching for more than 35 years, so I know that most students won't tell you about a good experience they had in your class, but you do cherish the few that do.

Writing poetry can be a lonely craft. Doing the Poets Online site is also a quite solitary job. But when I do hear from poets, it makes it worth it.

I Ask My Mother to Sing

I Ask My Mother to Sing


She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.

I've never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.

by Li-Young Lee

via The Writers Almanac
from his collection, Rose

Tenth Annual Celebration of Literary Journals May 19

              

Join 12 literary journals and their editors for the free tenth annual POETRY FESTIVAL: A CELEBRATION OF LITERARY JOURNALS in New Jersey. This annual event, organized by poet Diane Lockward, includes readings throughout the afternoon by poets featured in the journals.

Books by the poets will be available for sale and for signing and the 12 journals will be displayed and available for purchase. This is a great opportunity for poets to talk with the editors about their publications. Each journal will be represented by two poets who have published in that journal.

Sunday, May 19, 2013
1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
West Caldwell Public Library (30 Clinton Road, West Caldwell, New Jersey, 973-226-5441)

The journals that will be represented:

1. Adanna
2. Edison Literary Review
3. Exit 13
4. Journal of New Jersey Poets
5. Lips
6. Painted Bride Quarterly
7. Paterson Literary Review
8. Raintown Review
9. Schuylkill Valley Journal
10. Stillwater Review
11. Tiferet
12. US 1 Worksheets

Scheduled poets reading throughout the afternoon:
ROBERT CARNEVALE
MIKE COHEN
LORRAINE DORAN
JUDITHA DOWD
SANDRA DUGUID
MARTIN FARAWELL
ANDREW “INK” FEINDT
JIM GWYN
MIRIAM HAIER
ERIC HELLER
ERNEST HILBERT
LINDA HILLRINGHOUSE
JANET KIRCHHEIMER
DAVID KOZINSKI
FRANCESCA MAXIME
KATHY NELSON
KATHE PALKA
WANDA PRAISNER
ED ROMOND
LINDA STERN
CHUCK TRIPI
EMILY VOGEL
JOE WEIL
EDYTTA WOJNAR

Ample Parking; Refreshments Available; #33 NJT Bus Stop Within Short Walking Distance; Many Area Restaurants

Directions to Event

Festival Information

Figurative Language

These days, many people associate formal poetry with "old poetry."  Forms, like sonnets, and rhyme schemes are often seen as those things we had to study in school.

When many readers see lines like

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?

their eyes get cloudy - and they stop reading.

Diane Lockward is the author of three poetry books, most recently, Temptation by Water.  Her free monthly poetry newsletter (subscribe here) has reviews, writing tips and a poetry prompt. She is collecting some of those prompts and model poems in a new book, The Crafty Poet, due out later this year.

In one issue, I was struck by Diane's suggestion that literal language is not always enough for a poem.

The just-right use of the figurative—moving beyond the dictionary meaning of words—can open a poem to both broader interpretation and greater exactness. Metaphor and simile are what we first think of when we consider figurative language, but there are enough other rhetorical figures to boggle the mind. 

Five of the figurative tools that she suggests (beyond the familiar metaphor and simile) are apostrophe, personification, hyperbole, metonymy, and synecdoche. They are all good tools that poets should know and use.

To use apostrophe, as John Donne does, for example, in his sonnet “Death, be not proud,” is to bring to the subject an immediacy not otherwise possible. Direct address achieves this feeling of being up-close and personal.

Personification creates a similar effect of immediacy. It can enliven a poem and heighten its emotion, as Philip Levine does in “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives,” a poem in which the pig speaking is given human qualities: It's wonderful how I jog / on four honed-down ivory toes. Personification can be tricky; the key is knowing when to use it and how much is enough in a poem.

Frost, in “After Apple-Picking,” finds a surprisingly convincing way to get across the idea “I have had too much / Of apple picking” with the hyperbole “There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch.”

Metonymy, with its substitution of an associated word for the intended one, shortwires the way we think of the substituted term and thereby offers an efficiency of language. In “How She Described Her Ex-Husband When the Police Called,” poet Martha Clarkson ends with, "He’s the joker pinned in bicycle spokes / vanishing down the street." Because it’s common knowledge that a joker is a playing card, the substitution works.

Synecdoche, with its substitution of a part for the whole, is a type of metonymy, providing that same efficiency. T. S. Eliot uses synecdoche in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the lines "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."  In doing so, he gives us claws as an intentional disembodiment.

Learning Poems by Heart

Caroline Kennedy writes that, “If we learn poems by heart, we will always have their wisdom to draw on, and we gain an understanding that no one can take away.”

For the Poems to Learn by Heart collection, Kennedy chose more than 100 poems that can speak to all of us.

The Poetry Foundation has collected a few poems from the book and offers a Poems to Learn Teacher Guide which includes activities aligned to Common Core Standards for grades K-12.

Sample Poems

Grades K-3“Don't Worry if your Job is Small” by Anonymous
“Some Words Inside of Words” by Richard Wilbur

Grades 4-6
“Invitation to Love” by Paul Laurence Dunbar
“A Blessing” by James Wright

Grades 7-12
“Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes
“Bilingual/Bilingüe” by Rhina Espaillat
“If—” by Rudyard Kipling
“Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall

The 4 Days in Nature Writing Prompt

How about this as a way to get out of a writer's block, a creative rut, or poetic funk: unplug and get out into the natural world..

A study published in the journal PLOS One found that spending four days in nature - away from electronic devices - is linked with 50 percent higher score on a test for creativity.

I am one of those people who spends too much time in front of a screen (computer or otherwise) but who also loves to take a hike.  The study looked at people who did electronics-free wilderness hiking trips for four to six days. (The hikes were organized by the Outward Bound expedition school.) 

They gave creativity tests to some the morning they started their trip and others on the fourth day of their trip and found the day 4 group scored higher. (I'm not sure why they didn't test all of them before and on day 4.)

Maybe it was being in nature, or maybe it was being unplugged. Maybe its both things. 

Another study was also cited that found that just seeing the color green before being given a creative prompt yielded more imaginative answers than seeing the color white before the prompt. 

Anyone willing to experiment and report back to us?

Today Is Poem in Your Pocket Day

As part of National Poetry Month, you should celebrate national Poem in Your Pocket Day today, April 18, 2013.

All you need to do is select a poem, carry it with you, and share it with others throughout the day. You can also share your poem selection on Twitter by using the hashtag #pocketpoem.

Poems from pockets will be unfolded throughout the day with events in parks, libraries, schools, workplaces, and bookstores.

For more information, scheck all the National Poetry Month information at www.poets.org


     

Looking Back at Poets Online

Today's post is a cross-posting from a guest post I did on Author Amok. That's the blog by my friend, the poet and teacher, Laura Shovan. Poets often do guest posts on other blogs during National Poetry Month, so I wrote a little history of Poets Online.

POETS ONLINE (the site, not this blog) started in 1998 as an e-mail exchange amongst four poets. At a writing workshop that summer, I asked three other poets if they wanted to continue exchanging poems by email beyond the workshop. After a few weeks, we decided to take turns suggesting a writing prompt idea. In that first iteration, we gave ourselves a week and then e-mailed our poems to each other.

As more poet friends of the group wanted to join in, it became awkward using email. So, I created a website where the poems could be posted and I became the person who received the poems from participants. I titled the site Poets Online.

The idea of poets being online in 1998 was very new. The site grew in number only by word-of-mouth and poets who stumbled upon it in a web search.

The one week deadline proved to be too short for most people and too much compiling for me, so we moved to once a month.

In early 1999, I added a mailing list to remind people to check on the latest prompt and poems. The list still exists and now has over 500 "subscribers."

The site was originally located on a free web server service (Geocities), but when I was told in 2001 that "Your web pages have exceeded your account's total data transferred quota," I knew that popularity was forcing me to rebuild the site elsewhere.

I bought the domain poetsonline.org and redid the site and it has continued to grow for these fifteen years.

The intent has always been to provide inspiration through a writing prompt that remains open for about a month. Poets can try the prompt and submit that poem for possible online publication. I've had emails from lots of people who try the prompts but don't want their poems online.  A number of teachers from elementary level through college have told me they use the archive of prompts (more than 200) with their students and use the poems archived online as models.
 
The site has remained pretty much a one-man operation with me doing all the web work and just asking a few poet friends to read through the submissions.

We try to accept as many poems that respond to the current prompt in a serious way as space allows. We realize that we receive poems from poets of varying ages and experience. We receive poems every month that "appear" to be written by young people, but if they address the prompt in an interesting way, they have a good chance of being posted.

It has been very encouraging to receive mail from poets around the world saying that this was their first publication or letting me know that their poem in is a print journal or even that their first book has been published. I know of at least a dozen poets who submitted in years past that now have more than one book out in the world.

This, like many poetry efforts, is certainly a non-profit operation. We include Amazon links to books and poets featured and if in a year the referral fees from that cancel out the cost of the domain and online hosting, it has been a good year.

For anyone submitting poems to Poets Online or any other publication on or offline, a few rules apply. First, read some of the poems they have published recently and see if your poem fits the selections. This especially applies to most print journals. Haiku have a much better chance in a haiku journal (or for one of our haiku prompts).

Second, read the submission guidelines. Every publication has something like our submissions page which gives you information about formatting, deadlines and genre preferences. We only want to receive one poem in response to the current prompt. When a group of 8 arrive, none will be read. 

Third, know your rights. Some journals purchase the first rights to your work and some retain further rights for republication. Can your work appear in other places simultaneously? How long do they retain those rights? Our page on copyright is a good start in your author education. PoetsOnline.org  retains first electronic rights at time of publication, after which all rights revert back to the author.

A fourth rule applies very much to Poets Online. In the fifteen years of offering prompts and reading poems, we have rejected more poems than we have accepted for one reason. They don't address the prompt.  No matter what the prompt says, there are always submissions that have nothing to do with it.

Many of the poems that are off-prompt are ones I would consider for publication if we just accepted poems on any topic or in any form. Love poems, religious and political poetry comes in every month even if the prompt was for poems about opposition or a call for odes or for poems about where we find our inspiration. 

Unfortunately, we can not respond personally to every poem submitted, acknowledge every submission except for an auto-response, or offer critiques of your work. Subscribing to our mailing list will notify you of when new poems appear.

Which doesn't mean that I never correspond with poets who submit. You have the option to have your name linked to an email address or your own website and a number of poets have connected via the site. Occasionally, I will email poets with some encouraging rejection note. (Yes, there is a such a thing. I have received them myself.) Sometimes we suspect that it is a young poet in age or experience. Rejection is tough on poets.

We added this blog in 2005 so that we could continue the poetic conversations all month and expand upon the prompts. It also allows you to comment on the poems and prompts.

And Poets Online went social early on when Facebook first allowed groups to have pages. We have an official page on Facebook and also a group page where anyone can post and comment on poems, prompts or things poetic.

We also have a Twitter feed @poetsonline for daily bursts of poetry news, a Pinterest site for things visual, a GoodReads page to share what we are reading and we publish a Poet & Writer Evening News online daily.

You still have time to submit to our April prompt on the prose poem which features poems by Louis Jenkins and Jim Harrison.  The current prompt is always the one open for your submissions, but there are plenty in the archive to keep you busy.

Sharon Olds Awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Sharon Olds has been awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her twelfth collection of poems, Stag's Leap. The collection had previously won the Eliot Prize in England.

In a recent interview, Olds spoke about writing the poems in the book which came out of a difficult time in her life as her marriage of 32 years was ending.

"I wrote these poems the way I always write, which is immediately. I have to write a poem the moment it comes to me, or sometimes half an hour later, or the next day if I’m in the middle of something. Only then do I have the feeling that is so full in me that it feels the need to spill over into an expression of itself. The poems were written in 1997, 1998 and 1999, and then maybe one in 2000 and one in 2002 and one poem may be written in 2006. But 90 percent of them were written right at the time.

In terms of this book being difficult, I really enjoy writing. I can’t sit down and just write a poem. I have to wait for it to come to me, and I’m grateful when it does, and I do the best I can with it. But it’s a pleasure – particularly the poems in this book – to take something painful and real and educational and try to make some kind of pleasure out of it – musical pleasure, or imagery pleasure, for myself, for the reader. That is fun."

B.J. Ward and Louis Jenkins Poetry Workshops May 11 in Paterson

Jenkins

Ward

On May 11, 2013, there will be poetry workshops offered at The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College (Paterson, NJ) by Louis Jenkins and B.J. Ward. The workshops have a $15 fee and pre-registration is required. The workshops will run from 10 a.m. – noon.

At 1 pm that day, there will be a free and open poetry reading by Louis Jenkins and M. L. Liebler.

Both events are at the Hamilton Club Building, 32 Church Street, Paterson.