Forum seeks to spark poetry

June 3, 2007

By Katie Haegele

Recently, I made a friend online who likes to take pictures and write haiku. I noticed she kept linking her poems to a blog called One Deep Breath (http://onebreathpoetry.blogspot.com/), which provides weekly suggestions for haiku topics. When I saw how interesting the ideas were - dirt, sleep, dusk - I wrote some of my own.

I wrote my friend to tell her how much I was enjoying the blog. She said she thinks it's fun, too, and added, "Some people call these kinds of sites sparks."

Hmm.

I did some online searching and found a number of poetry Web sites, many with participatory forums. The one actually using the term Poem Spark was the discussion forum of Poets.org, the Web site of the Academy of American Poets.

The forum's administrator is Christine Klocek-Lim, a poet and photographer who lives in northeastern Pennsylvania. At the time she joined the forum as a volunteer moderator in 2005, it offered things like listings of conferences and grants and a workshop in which writers post their work for critique by other participants.

"After looking at some other online workshops, I realized that many of them had exercises that they used to prompt the writing of new poems," said Klocek-Lim. She wanted to add a feature like that, but didn't want to use the term "exercise."

So the Poem Spark was born.

Past sparks have included: Write a poem based on a familiar rhyme, such as a Mother Goose nursery rhyme; write a cento, a poem composed entirely of lines from other poets (the name is the Latin word for "patchwork"); write a zeitgeist poem (think "Howl"). Klocek-Lim said the spark for February 13-20 of 2007 - love poems - has been the most popular so far.

At first she wrote all the sparks herself, but she has since been joined by moderators Gary Charles Wilkens, who teaches composition and literature at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and Larina Warnock from Corvallis, Ore., who edits, with Wilkens, the online literary journal The Externalist (www.theexternalist.com).

Prompts like these have long been used in writing classes and workshops, and their most obvious use is as a jump-start out of writer's block. But Warnock points out other benefits.

"Our poem sparks always use references of other poems and poets. Aspiring poets become exposed to work they might not have otherwise come across, expanding their overall poetic knowledge," Warnock said.

The sparks also serve as learning tools for various aspects of the craft, she said.

"For example, a poem spark might incorporate a particular literary device like alliteration and challenge poets to learn how to use such a device."

She also sees a potential pitfall in "the tendency for poems to be 'over-workshopped.' "

"Poets, especially beginning poets who haven't yet built a lot of confidence in their own work, often change their poems significantly based on the comments of a huge audience. Over time, many poems begin to sound alike and poetic style can be seriously harmed.

"As they begin to build confidence in their work, though, they also begin to discriminate between comments and learn when to take advice and when to simply thank their peers and leave the poem alone.

"It's a fine balance."

Klocek-Lim sees the Internet benefiting the world of poetry by connecting poets to one another.

"On the Poets.org forum we regularly have people from all over the world interacting. People who are 12 years old discuss and critique poetry with 73-year-olds."

"I have never been one of those who thought that poetry was dead," she said. "It's not that poetry wasn't part of the people's lives before, it's that the Web helped those whose interests were similar to connect with each other easily."

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