Recall the Words of Another

Breakfast Pear

Photo by Amy LV

Reading by Amy LV

Song by Gart Westerhout

Students - Happy New Year! I am finally back after a lovely holiday filled with visitors and visiting and so much food. I hope that your January is off to a warm and cozy start, and I wish you so much goodness as we make another trip around the sun together.

While you can always hear me reading a poem as above, today I am happy to also share my friend Gart Westerhout's lovely musical version of "Words Live On." Gart is a professor, composer, and director of a musical theater in Japan, and I am grateful each time he translates my small poems into song. Thank you, Gart!

Today's poem was inspired by my breakfast, shown in the photograph above, and the final stanza of this poem is a true one for me. My loving grandma Florence Ethel Conolly Dryer did say these words to my mom, and she keeps them alive so that now and forever...pears will taste like perfume to me. My grandma was a great teacher and a poet who loved theatre, battled depression, and brought so much kindness into our lives. Each time my mom tells me a story or shares something that Grandma used to say, I hold on to the words.

What about you? Whose words rise regularly in your mind, even once every long while? What did you eat for breakfast? Who do you miss? One of the interesting things about life is that one thought leads to another leads to another, and if we follow the crumbs, the trail can sometimes add up to a little verse.

Below you can see the happily scribbled draft of this poem, written in the wee hours of this morning before I drove my husband to school. Notice that even though the final words appear here, the line breaks are different. Often when I move from a handwritten draft to a typed one, this is something that changes. It is so easy to change line breaks on a computer, and I am thankful for that.

Draft for Today's Poem

(Click to Enlarge)

Photo by Amy LV

As I wrote the first two lines of this poem (four lines in the first draft), I felt myself remembering one of my favorite books, Lynn Reiser's CHERRY PIES AND LULLABIES, a list story sharing the ways that traditions change - and also stay much the same - through generations. The rhythm of this book still lives within me, just like my grandma's pear-words.

CHERRY PIES AND LULLABIES by Lynn Reiser

Available through thriftbooks

Might you be able to think of a book you've heard or read many times and write a poem or story or essay somehwat inspired by its story or rhythm? The world is strewn with good ideas, like the zillions of snowflakes covering our Western New York world.

Thank you to Kat for hosting this week's Poetry Friday roundup over at Kathryn Apel with a fabulous back and forth poem comparing cats and dogs. Each Friday, all are invited to share poems, poem books, poetry ideas, and friendship in this open and welcoming poetry community.

I wish you memories of words that you wish to keep. And too, a heart and mouth full of words to live forever in the people you love.

xo,

Amy

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Come on Over for Leftovers & Poem #244

Again!?

by Georgia LV

We bought a 30 pound Thanksgiving turkey this year.  You know what this means, don't you?  I don't have to cook for months!  Seriously, we have a lot of turkey in our refrigerator, and while we've eaten five meals of Thanksgiving dinner, this week the turkey will morph into different mystery dishes, starting with  turkey barbecue, a dish not mentioned in this poem.

Students - the idea for this poem came as I set out the platter of turkey for yet another meal.  The whole thing just made me laugh, and that laughter made me want to write a poem about turkey leftovers.  I am not the most creative cook, so I went hunting around the internet to find lists of real turkey recipes.  If you check out Mike's Leftover Turkey Recipes and Leftover Turkey Recipes from Razzle Dazzle Recipes, you will find some of the real recipe names I found!  I looked for recipes that rhymed and went from there.

Something interesting about this poem is that the shape of my first draft looked quite different.  You can see it here.

After looking at the poem this way, I began wondering how it would look with "Turkey" on a line by itself, over and over.  That seemed funnier somehow, so I printed it out both ways and took a poll of my family by asking, "Which version do you like better?"  The top version (my favorite too) won.  You may have a different opinion, and that's perfectly allowed.  Neither is right, but it sure is fun to go back and forth.  It sure is fun to revise.

What's important to note about this is that we can take our exact same words and lay them out on the page in different ways.  This is one way to revise a poem: switch up the line breaks!

For a rollicking read aloud poem, one which I am sure subliminally inspired me here, visit Poets.org to read Jack Prelutsky's "Bleezer's Ice Cream."

Today marks the 2/3 way point through my year to write and post a new poem each day...what a wonderful time it has been.  Many thanks to all of you for riding along with me!

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Soup's On! Come for a Slurp of Poem #230!

Yum!

by Amy LV

Students - this poem came from nowhere.  I had no idea what to write, but I had to write.  So I lay on my bed, clipboard and pencil at the ready...and I waited.  The first line came.  Then I couldn't think of anything else to say, and so I took a nap.  Later, the rest followed.  Sometimes I think that the mind just needs to take a little trip into dreamland to find those right words.

Try this sometime.  Don't try it at school (too noisy and you might get in trouble), but try it at home.  Begin writing, nap, write some more.  And let me know!

After writing, revising, and editing this silly poem, I was pretty happy with it.  I typed it up neatly and made it yellow for the blog.  Then I came back to read it later.  And I made changes.  Originally the poem was one long stanza, but I dove back in and turned it into three stanzas to show the three different parts of the poem.  This is something useful to try: after writing a poem, ask yourself, Could I arrange these same lines into a different number of stanzas?

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Let a Poem Rise...Break & Enjoy Poem #225

Dough in Morning

Photo by Amy LV

 Bread at Night

Photo by Amy LV

 

Yesterday we didn't have many groceries in the house, and I did not want to go shopping.  So...I made one of my favorite breads, the Easy, No-Knead Crusty Bread that I happily discovered in MOTHER EARTH NEWS two years ago, the bread that changed our lives.  With a cast iron dutch oven, three cups of flour, water, a package of yeast, and a pinch of salt, you have everything you need.  It rises all day long, so if you mix it in the morning, it bakes at night.  Delightful!  This bread is so perfect that we once gave the recipe to a friend as a wedding gift along with a Martha Stewart dutch oven.

Students - this is a how-to poem.  It teaches the reader a little bit about bread baking, and so it's really a nonfiction poem.  The idea came from something I do, something I know about.  What did you just do?  What do you know?  What might you teach someone else?  Our own knowledge bases can be joyful jumping-off points for writing.

I did have to do a wee bit of research into yeast in order to write this poem.  I didn't know that yeast are really fungi or how they die, so I went snooping around online to find all kinds of facts at KnowsWhy, Wikipedia,  and WiseGEEK.  Not until I began writing did I realize that this poem would follow the actual time line of dough to bread.

Here is a great book about baking bread, one I've had for a while.  This book has a wonderful website dedicated to all kinds of information about bread: games, recipes, activities, a DVD clip, you name it.

Shop Indie Bookstores

Now I am off to eat some bread with butter.  And maybe honey. 

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MyPoWriYe # 188 - After Dinner

The Largest Sundae at Friendly's

Photo by Amy LV

On Saturday evening, my father and children and I went to Friendly's for dessert.  At first, no one could decide what to order.  Friendly's ice cream menu is extensive, and everything looks scrumptious.  Then we saw it: a giant 12 scoop sundae, complete with 6 toppings of your choice.  The price was $12.49, and we were all awed by the idea of a 12 scoop sundae.  I wrote down each person's choices of ice cream and toppings on a napkin which we handed to our waitress.  Then we waited.  When our masterpiece arrived, I was amazed that music didn't start playing in the background.  It was beautiful!  We ate and ate and ate, spoons bumping into each other, asking questions such as, "Is this mint chip or pistachio?" and "Did anyone find the Heath bits yet?"

Did we finish the sundae?  Well, almost.  We left a bit of ice cream sludge at the bottom and perhaps a couple of Oreo bits.  Will we order this massive sundae again?  Of course!

Students - have you ever heard people say, "Ice cream just slides in the cracks"?  I have, and that's probably where this poem idea came from, from a saying I've heard several times before.  Poems can, indeed, come from phrases you hear, bits of conversation and sayings.  Listen carefully as you go through your day and words from others' mouths may inspire a poem idea.

The past two days found me away from home, working on a different computer.  After writing simply formatted poems with lots of movement, I hurried home to make each of them concrete.  If you would like to see revisions to the last two days' now-concrete poems,  click to check out "In My Pocket" and "When I Grow Up".  

Students - for me, concrete poems do not start out as concrete poems.  I do not think, "I'd like to write a poem about a cat so first I will draw the shape of a cat, and then I will fill in some cat-like words."  For me, the words always come first.  First, I write a poem focusing on the exact words for my story or list.  After the words match my wish, the question of concrete-ness comes as a revision question.  I ask myself, "Might this poem work in a different shape?"  If it is a poem with lots of movement, I try it out.  For me, the fun is in making each concrete poem a bit of a challenge to read.  I hope that readers will experience one split second of puzzle solving, one moment of wondering where to start and how to read.  Then, of course, I hope that the line of the poem will make sense and will follow the movement's meaning.

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My Poem Writing Year #143 - Hungry

This is one of our children's favorite breakfasts.  They can eat near a whole loaf of bread when it's Cinnamon Toast Day around here.  In fact, they pop so many slices in the toaster that I wanted to show it by repeating that stanza again and again and again.

Students - favorites, favorites, favorites.  What are yours?  Many writers like to make lists of all kinds of favorites.  This way, when we aren't sure what to write about, we can just check one of those lists to find something we love.

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