Stone in My Garden
Photo by Amy LV
Students - We have had a spell of spring weather here in Western New York, and yesterday found me raking a few garden beds, including the one you see above, the front garden with so many snowdrops and an old stone bowl. In his poem Aimless Love, Billy Collins writes about falling in love with all kinds of inanimate objects, from a dead mouse to a bar of soap. And so it is. Yesterday I fell in love with this stone bowl.
Isn't erosion amazing? I love looking at stones with small hollows and with rivulets of pattern on their backs, adore seeing wind-changed land forms and feeling the smoothness of beach glass. No matter what we do, wind and water keep on keeping on. I know that I can learn from this.
You might want to try learning from nature too, as a writing exercise, and as a life exercise. Go outside. Fall in love with an inanimate object. And then write. Write about what you love and what lesson you might learn from this object. Let the silence of the object speak to you. (Yes, this is personification.) And let me know how it goes.
This week was a very happy week for me and for my first book! On Tuesday, the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators announced that FOREST HAS A SONG won the first ever SCBWI Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award.
For those of you who know that Lee Bennett Hopkins has been one of my life and writing mentors, you will understand that FOREST winning this award is very meaningful to me. I am grateful.
I am happy, too, to share this happiness with two wonderful poets and honor books.
DEAR WANDERING WILDEBEEST by Irene Latham is a rich collection of poems about animals gathered at a waterhole on the African grasslands.
FEEDING THE FLYING FANELLIS by Kate Hosford is a joyful collection of poems from the perspective of a circus chef.
Margarita Engle won a great SCBWI award this week too! Her beautiful ENCHANTED AIR: TWO CULTURES, TWO WINGS: A MEMOIR won the Golden Kite Award for Nonfiction.
Much gratitude to SCBWI and to Lee himself for giving awards to poem books. I am thankful.
Over at my other blog, Sharing Our Notebooks, I am happy to host high school teacher Stacey Dallas Johnston from the Las Vegas Academy of the Arts with a post about her students' notebooks. Please stop by, check out the notebooks, and leave a comment to be entered into a drawing to win Anne Lamott's BIRD BY BIRD.
And if you missed my Monday post here, featuring Irene Latham's latest...FRESH DELICIOUS, you'll want to go back and write a persona poem with Irene. I will draw a name this evening for a book winner,donation thanks to WordSong!
Robyn is hosting today's Poetry Friday Roundup over at Life on the Deckle Edge. Everyone is always invited to these Friday fiestas, and we hope you will join us!
Please share a comment below if you wish.
