HELLO MY NAME IS - Day 8

 Happy National Poetry Month!

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Hello, Poetry Friends! This month I am sharing poems written in the voice of Little Red Riding Hood, and I invite you to join me in writing in the voice of someone else too. You might choose a fairy tale character or a book character or a person from history or anyone else real or imagined. These are your poems, so you make the decisions. Each April day, I will share my poem and a little bit about writing poetry. Mostly, we’ll just be writing in short lines with good words and not worrying about rhyming. Meaning first. Our focus this month will be adopting the perspective of another…for 30 days. I invite you to join me in this project! To do so, simply:

1. Choose a character from fiction or history or somewhere else in the world of space and time, and commit to writing a daily poem in this person's voice for the 30 days of April 2025. You might even choose an animal.

2. Write a new poem for each day of April. Feel free to print and find inspiration from this idea sheet that I will be writing from all month long.

Teachers, if you wish to share any HELLO MY NAME IS... subjects or poems, please email them to me at the contact button above. I would love to read what your students write and learn from how they approach their own projects.

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD'S POEMS SO FAR

April 1 - First Poem

April 2 - My Name

April 3 - Red

April 4 - Frank

April 5 - The Big Bad Wolf Had Been a Stray

April 6 - 8am on a Sunday

April 7 - Her Real Name is Orla Lola Bruin

And now for today!

Students - Today we learn a little bit about where Lou lives. I do not think that in a month's time we'll be able to meet everyone and learn their actual names or much about them, but at least we have a sense of Little Red Riding Hood's neighborhood. Did you know that all of these folks live near each other?

Today's verse leans very heavily on the double dactyl form. I do not follow all of the rules for a double dactyl today, only the meter...and it helped me! I adore playing with meters of different songs and poems, and writing in different rhythms and beats presses me into writing with different words and ideas.

Playing with meter today also made me very picky about which of Lou's neighbors to name today. Their names had to fit the double dactyl meter. I visited this His and Hers Bookclub blog post that lists nineteen fairy tale characters and chose from there.

Thank you for joining me on this eighth day of HELLO MY NAME IS...

To learn about more National Poetry Month projects and all kinds of April goodness, visit Jama's Alphabet Soup where Jama has generously gathered this coming month's Kidlitosphere poetry happenings. And if you are interested in learning about or writing from any of my previous 14 National Poetry Month projects, you can find them here. Happy National Poetry Month!

xo,

Amy

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Manderson Snickafreed & Double Dactyls

Apples and Fairy Tales

(DA da da DA da da)

Photo by Amy LV

Students - today's poems are double dactyls, a funny (and tricky!) form invented by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal in 1961. This form has many rules which you can find online or in one of my favorite new books, IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND, by Steve Kowit. Here are the rules, as described in my book:

A double dactyl has 2 quatrains.
The first three lines of each quatrain are dactyls (DA da da DA da da, example is Hickory Dickory).
The final line of each stanza is a single dactyl and a single accented syllable (DA da da DA).
The first line is a nonsense phrase which must rhyme with the second line.
The second line must be a proper name or noun.
The second line of the second stanza must be a single word (a six syllable word with stresses on syllables one and 4).
The last line of each stanza must rhyme.


The Poetry Foundation and Wikipedia indicate that some purists hold to the Hecht's and Pascal's original rule that the sixth line of a double dactyl must be a word that has never before been used in line six a double dactyl. Many do not.  Mine do not, I'm sure!

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On Saturday night, I found myself thumbing through this book and delighted in reading the double dactyls therein. That night, I wrote Manderson Danderson. Then, on Sunday, I was worried that I might not be able to do it again...so I tried and wrote Hickafreed Snickafreed.

Here are some double dactyls from a 2009 Poetry Stretch with Tricia over at The Miss Rumphius Effect.  This would be a brave challenge to try as a class. No need to finish the poem all at once either!  Simply begin it on a sheet of chart paper (I found it easiest to begin with line 2 or line 6) and then everyone can just keep thinking about it over a couple of weeks.  You might even wish to make a list of dactyls on a separate chart: CEN-ti-pede, UN-der-wear, SU-per-star....

Below you can see the drafts for my two double dactyls.  You'll see how in some places I marked the syllables and stresses to be sure that they were solid.

Double Dactyl Draft

by Amy LV

Another Double Dactyl Draft

by Amy LV

Yet Another Double Dactyl Draft 

by Amy LV

(My husband just asked how many of these I plan to write.  He said that he wonders if I am becoming obsessed.  Maybe so, maybe so.)

For a link to Hans Christian Andersen's THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL, click here.  For the story of Johnny Appleseed, click here.  And for information about Dav Pilkey's CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS books, click here.

Over at Sharing Our Notebooks (my other blog) Ruth Ayres offers a look into her notebooks and questioning process.  Thank you, Ruth!

HAVE a good MONday now!

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