Poetry Slam

Coda The last piece of music, the last stanza, the last closing remark. It's December, and that means it's time for the last poetry slam. This year we didn't focus on forms as much as techniques - I hope everyone learned something to take away, even if it's not for...

Have you ever read a story, certain you know where it's going, only to have the author take a sharp turn at the end? It's like walking through the forest and suddenly coming upon a pristine mountain lake. A turn like this can open your eyes to an entirely different...

I have a pretty good visual memory... for reading. In fact, not only can I tell you what I read, I can tell you where on the page it was. And the shapes of the letters line up in my brain and make sense to me. So much sense that I was the state spelling champion. Five...

Imagine me and you, and you and me... One of the standard exercises for fiction writers is to write a story from the point of view of an inanimate object. It's rather hard to do well, honestly, largely because so many new writers can't resist the temptation to hide...

It all hangs together When I was a kid, my dad would take us down to the river, or the lake, and he'd go fishing. In the days when I was still too little to hold even my own downsized pole (the one that sits in a corner here now, in case my niece is ever...

Anchors When you think of an anchor, what does that mean to you? Is it an object that holds you back, or one that keeps you grounded and safe? Can it be both? In this month's technique-focused poetry slam we're going to explore how time and place are used as anchors...

I'm counting on you. Okay, I didn't pick this month's poetry slam for all the puns, but I sure could have. I could use a little humor these days, don't know about you. Anyway. So about June. I've been thinking a lot these days about relations, and connections, and the...

Roger. Copy that. Let's talk tech. Technique, that is. Technique is about more than just copying a poem's form, although we've been having a lot of fun doing that and building muscle memory while we're at it. Technique is the building blocks to make your own poetry,...

I remembered! Y'all, I have forgotten National Poetry month for like... mumble of the mumblemumble years I've worked with YeahWrite. You have no idea how excited I am that I remembered this year. I thought about making this month a poetry free-for-all but then I...

April Fools! No, kidding. April slam. April poetry slam. It's purely a coincidence that this slam went live on the last day you have to get something on the fiction|poetry grid for the first day of April. ANYWAY. For 2020 our poetry slams are exploring technique,...

It's rhyme time! Yes, you heard me right. After all those months bagging on sonnets, I'm giving in. Let's talk about rhyme. Rhyme is probably the first thing you learned about poetry: it's just words that end in the same sound. Usually that sound isn't an isolated...

Cliche One of the most frequent pieces of advice given to new writers is to avoid cliche. Of course, we also tell them to learn the rules of grammar and syntax, structure their persuasive essays "Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion," and avoid long sentences. You'll...

Welcome to 2020 We've been running the poetry slam for, oh my gosh, five years now? That's five times twelve, minus the critique post, carry the haiku... um... at least fifty different types of poetry. And it occurred to us that we'd spent so much time on "how to...

Well, it's December again. Like every year, I had the best intentions. I was going to write more. Specifically, I was going to write more poetry. I like what the process of writing poetry does for my brain. It makes me more concise, more richly metaphorical, and it...

That doesn't count How many times have you said that? But counting is one of a poet's best tools. Even in poetic forms without rhyme or meter, we're often counting words in a line, lines in a stanza, stanzas in a ... you get the picture.  The most famous thing that...