Tuesday, May 4, 2010

MyPoWriYe #34 - Poem Double Header


Our son Henry's first baseball game of the season was this evening, and the game offered a second poem.  So, this makes today a poem double header, in honor of baseball season.  At the Baseball Almanac, you can read Casey at the Bat and also learn all of the words to Abbott and Costello's Who's on First?.  My children were working on that one the other weekend, and it's quite a way to spend a Saturday morning!  So here's to baseball...

(click if this is too small to read)

Did that poem take a while to read?  I hope you were able to figure it out.  It's in that "puzzle" category, much like that mohawk poem from a few weeks ago. 

Students - here is a fun thing to try.  Write a poem as you normally would, and then afterward ask yourself, "Might this work in a different shape?"  Usually the answer will be 'no', but sometimes you will stumble across an interesting idea.  Neither of these two poems started off as concrete poems; they just had regular good pausing line breaks.  But I asked myself, "Hmmm...what might I do with the words to help their shape match their meaning?"  This is different than writing a bunch of any words in the shape of a cat or a tree.  Try to make the shape match the meaning...it's a game.

On another note, there's nothing like finding an interesting object with no obvious purpose. 


Over at The Miss Rumphius Effect, Tricia offers us a new 'Monday Poetry Stretch' - this time she challenges us to write a Korean sijo.  You can read the poems, including mine, at The Miss Rumphius Effect.  This Monday stretch is a usual feature over at Tricia's blog.

Play ball!

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