National Poetry Month 2013: Teens in the TechnoVerse

It's the last day of April and I'm saying TGIM. (Thank God It's May.) I should have known when I began a series on the TechnoVerse that life would go into Warp Drive this month.

When April 2013 began, my family was in Florida for spring break. In the last 30 days, we have:

visited The Wizarding World of Harry Potter;

On line for Olivander's.

celebrated a first birthday;

sent one kid off to California for a robotics world championship;

taught poetry in two elementary schools;

Fifth graders writing portrait poems in response to fine art.

got sick and missed a week of middle school, but

the show must go on (stage managed "The Little Mermaid" at said middle school);

sent Dad off to Nashville for a business trip;

various and sundry other joys and minor disasters.

As I am learning, this is a typical month when you have two teenage children. My teens are tech-buffs. They do their homework on laptops, watch anime in their spare time, and spend too much time on Reddit.

For them, and for the teens in your life, here is a great teen-focused poetry website.

http://www.powerpoetry.org/

PowerPoetry.Org -- "Write Your Own Life Story" bills itself as the largest mobile teen poetry community in the TechnoVerse.

A lovely lady, Alyce Myatta, from the NEA (which sponsors another great teen poetry program, Poetry Out Loud) tipped me off about this site. This is a place for young poets to upload and share their original writing. They are encouraged to browse through their peers' poetry and vote or leave comments.

There are great inspiration resources at PowerPoetry such as "5 Tips for Writing and Ode Poem" and "6 Tips for Writing about Music." Kids can learn how to make a multimedia poem, get hooked up with the local slam scene, even find an adult poet to be their online mentor.

But I especially love what comes up when I click a tab entitled "Why Write a Poem": 

"Every one of us has a story that is completely our own by virtue of the fact that each of us is unique and has an ever expanding collection of experience that are particular to the lives we lead.

"Simply put, no one is like you.

"Poetry is the means which we can express ourselves, it’s a way to vent, and to make sense of the world, to tell our stories in our own words."

Quoted from PowerPoetry.Org

Teachers, there is a spot on this site for you, too. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on EDUCATORS. You'll find out how to start a PowerPoetry group at your school.

Despite all the drama at home, I've had a great month exploring the TechnoVerse with all of you. Kudos to our excellent guest bloggers! You have all expanded my tech-tools and my thinking about how I can use technology to be a better, more organized writer. (Yes, even you, Dennis Kirschbaum.)

This month, I've experimented with SoundCloud, downloaded Scrivener, felt overwhelmed by Pinterest, revisited an email poem about seamonkeys in my underpants (it's a long story).

If you're not ready to say goodbye to the TechnoVerse yet, here is a full list of the posts in this series:

Invitation to the TechnoVerse (Monday 4/1)

Gloson Teh Compares Writing Poetry with Writing Code (Tuesday 4/2)

Linda Baie apps for inspiration  (Wednesday 4/3)

Barbara Morrison on Scrivener (Thursday 4/4)

Scott Slaby advises students with a text sonnet (Friday 4/5)

Danuta Hinc compares online poetry translations (Monday 4/8)

Carol Munro writes poetry with a friend via email (Tuesday 4/9)

Dennis Kirschbaum is a lovable Luddite (Wednesday 4/10)

Regina Sokas on global connections (Thursday 4/11)

April Halprin Wayland on RhymeWeaver.Com (Friday 4/12)

Amy Ludwig Vanderwater on SoundCloud& Pinterest (Monday 4/15)

Ken Ronkowitz  of Poets Online (Tuesday 4/16)

Moira Egan looks at the tech side of Sonnets (Wednesday 4/17)

Gregory Luce on Poetry Foundation’s Walking Tour of DC Poetry (Thursday 4/18)

Christine Amyot Hurley on tech based poetry projects for kids (Friday 4/19)

Irene Latham's Progressive Poem stops at Author Amok (Monday 4/22)

Diane Mayr explains Archive.Org (Tuesday 4/23)

Kay Weeks tests out a random poetry generator (Wednesday 4/24)

Clarinda Harriss uses texting errors to compose poems (Thursday 4/25)

Debbie Levy replaces her Roget's with Dictionary App (Friday 4/26)

Ann Bracken takes us to Tweetspeak Poetry (Monday 4/29)

TechnoVerse wrap up & PowerPoetry.Org for teens (Tuesday 4/30)

I am happily powering down the warp engines, everyone. If you'd like, leave a comment about the recommended apps, websites and programs you've tried as a result of our series.

Good luck as your school years wind down. It's been one for the yearbooks!

http://science.howstuffworks.com/warp-speed3.htm

National Poetry Month 2013: Writing Prompts at Poets Online

When I was first starting to send my poetry out, I needed a journal or e-zine that felt safe. Somewhere that I could submit work to without feeling too much pressure about being rejected or accepted.

Poet and educator Ken Ronkowitz, who I knew through the Dodge Poetry Program in New Jersey, had the perfect place. He was starting up a poetry website called Poets Online. The site had a new writing prompt based on a model poem every two weeks. I used the site -- writing response poems, sending them in, and occasionally seeing my work posted alongside other poets and poems.

Fifteen years later, Ken is still managing Poets Online. It's my go-to TechnoVerse site for great poetry prompts.

POETS ONLINE is a website that offers monthly writing prompts and offers you the opportunity to submit your resulting poem for online publication.

The site 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 a blog in 2005 so that we could continue the poetic conversations all month and expand upon the prompts. It also allowed poets 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.

Want more Ken? Check out his website on poetry, education and technology. Ken once featured a poem of mine, "Tomorrow is Going to Be Normal," as a Poets Online model for inspiration. You can read that prompt and the response poems here.


We are having a rough week at the Shovan house. Miss J has been out of school all week with the stomach flu. The teen left this morning at 4 AM (meaning, I got up at 3 to drive him to school). He is on his way to California for a Robotics competition. All the drama has put me behind on our TechnoVerse schedule. I hope to be caught up before this week's Poetry Friday. 

Our next tour guide in the TechnoVerse will be poet Moira Egan of Rome. Moira, co-editor of the anthology Hot Sonnets, is taking the classic form high tech in her post.

National Poetry Month: April Halprin Wayland Introduces Us to RhymeWeaver

Poetry Friday is party time in the TechnoVerse! Today's guest DJ is children's poet April Halprin Wayland, who blogs at Teaching Authors.

(What is the TechnoVerse? Read a description here.)

April's got some RhymeWeaver on her poetry turntable. I'll let her start this party off on the right track:

Okay, Campers…say you want to write a book in rhyme.  But there's just one problem:
you're a teeny tiny bit fuzzy about poetic meter and rhyme.  As in: HUH?

So…where to start?

You might start with the RhymeWeaver website www.RhymeWeaver.com

which claims that it will explain "some fairly complicated stuff in a really simple way."

…A massive understatement. 

I asked Rhyme Weaver's birth mother, author Lane Fredrickson, to meet me here for a chat.

Thanks for stopping by, Lane!  What compelled you to share your knowledge about poetry in this way?

The children’s writing community is one of the kindest, safest places to experiment with your creativity. But I felt like the rhyme and meter rules were muddled in that community.  There were a lot of question marks and none of us really knew the answers, so the conclusion was “Don’t write in Rhyme!” 

But a lot of children’s writers still feel compelled to do it. 

Academia is the vault where the rules are kept and I went to school looking for answers. When I finished my BA in English, I felt like I could explain rhyme and meter differently than I had ever seen it done. 

I have a strong background in developmental psychology.  Experimental psychologists study how people learn and grow, they research cognition and neural encoding.  I know that images augment learning so I wanted my site to be image based.  I wanted to work from the bottom up and make every component part of a system.  Depicting a concept as a system augments neural encoding and ultimately how thoroughly we understand integrated ideas.

STOMP slip.

Who designed your site?

I designed and built RhymeWeaver myself. I designed the simple graphics myself, but bought the illustrations from Shutterstock.  A professional graphic artist at DigitalCrayon.com designed the home page. 

What was the most difficult part?

Organizing the content.  I had all this information that I thought was relevant, but there was no blueprint for how to present it and I needed it to be integrated, a system. 

For example, I have never actually heard anyone break down meter into three constituent components: stressed and unstressed syllables, metrical feet, and metrical lines.  I learned it backwards, myself, by examining different meters, but I don’t think that’s the best way. 

I also had never heard anyone specify that all rhymes must contain a parallel stressed syllable.  It was hard to decide if that particular fact belonged under rhyme or meter.  But I needed to integrate the relevance of meter to rhyme.

Tell us about your first book (and congratulations!)

Watch Your Tongue,Cecily Beasley, illustrated by Jon Davis, (Sterling) is a cautionary tale.  It’s about a girl with poor manners who suddenly realizes that her behavior can be hurtful. 

I wanted to write about a less-than-perfect kid because I wasn’t exactly a parent’s dream when I was little.  I always loved books where the kid was kind of naughty, but still loved and still good at heart.  I was pretty much Max of The Wild Things, except I was a girl, which is why Cecily had to be a girl.  Boys-will-be-boys is a totally unfair rationalization.

And finally, quick! What are three of your favorite-sounding words? 
(I blindly stole this question from PF blogger Robyn Hood Black)

Parsnip (probably because it sounds like its getting cut off just as it's getting started), Hrothgar (from Beowulf because it sounds like you're coughing it up as you're saying it)

and gorgonzola.  No reason.

April Halprin Wayland’s books include Scholastic's Best Seller, ToRabbittown a free-verse picture book, Knopf's It'sNot My Turn To Look For Grandma! (recommended on PBS's "Storytime"), the Sydney Taylor Gold Award-winner New Year at the Pier, and the multi-award-winning Girl ComingIn For A Landing—an illustrated novel in poems for teens (Knopf).  Her CD/MP3 of stories and poems (http://www.aprilwayland.com/books-cds/cd-17-poems-and-5-stories/ ) won the National Parenting Publications Gold Medal for storytelling; her poetry appears in numerous anthologies, and she's a seven-time recipient of SCBWI'S Magazine Merit Award for Poetry.  April has taught in over 400 schools across America, in England, Italy, Germany, France and Poland.  She blogs with five other children's authors who also teach writing on TeachingAuthors.com is a founding member The Children's Authors Network and has been an instructor with the Writers’ Program of UCLA Extension for over a decade. Her website? www.AprilWayland.com  where you'll discover she's ½ author, ½ poet, ½ not good at fractions.

I'm taking a break for the weekend to attend Baltimore's CityLit Festival. Monday, another Poetry Friday regular is joining us in the TechnoVerse. Amy LV of the Poem Farm is going to tell us about SoundCloud and Pinterest.

Our Poetry Friday host is Diane Mayr. Stop by her blog, Random Noodling, for more poetry posts. And come back here on April 23, when Diane takes over the TechnoVerse!