Mittens and Friends and Metaphors

Woolen Mitten

Photo  (and Mitten) by Amy LV

(Sound Cloud is giving me troubles...audio to follow)

Students - I am not sure if this poem is finished yet, but I still wanted to share it with you. I often struggle to know when a poem is finished, and again this week I thought of this quote:

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."  - Paul Valery

It is difficult to know when a poem is ready to share, and this one may still be at my workbench, but I do like the idea.  It came to me as I was driving somewhere earlier this week. I started to think about looking for mittens, how difficult it is  to find a match sometimes.  And then I thought about how good friends are like that too; soul mates a gift.

What I like most about this poem is how the whole text is about one thing - finding mittens - and then, at the end, it turns.  At the end, a reader might realize that the mitten-finding part is really a metaphor, or a comparison, to finding a friend.  There should be a bit of a feeling of surprise here, and surprise always makes me happy when I read a poem.  I like thinking about all of my mitten-friends too....

You may wish to consider this in a poem you are writing.  Are you surprising yourself or your reader?  Might you wish to?  How?

This poem is a free verse poem with no special meter or rhyme.  I read it many times to myself to see if it sounded right to my ear, and I made many many changes.

This week I am so happy to have artist and writer Kateri Ewing at my other blog, Sharing Our Notebooks.  Please swing by her post to be inspired by Kateri's art notebooks.  You may win two notebooks if I draw your commenting name!

Teachers and Parents - If you share my concerns about what is currently happening in education, you might be interested in a copy of Barry Lane's new CD - MORE THAN A NUMBER.  This CD is full of Barry's songs such as: "I Write the Tests", and "Superficialunrealisticrigorisatrocious" written by Paul Hankins and Barry.  I wrote the lyrics to "More Than a Number," and I'm selling the CD's for $10 to benefit the Opt Out movement.  If you are interested in a CD, please private message me through The Poem Farm Facebook page or send me an e-mail (see contact button above).

Renee LaTulippe is our fabulous hostess of this week's Poetry Friday party.  Visit her beautiful No Water River to take a dip into poetry-land today.

Please share a comment below if you wish.

To find a poem by topic, click here. To find a poem by technique, click here.

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Drawing the Everyday to See Something New

Welcome to Day 7 of Drawing Into Poems, my daily drawing/seeing/writing study into poetry.  You can read more about this month-long project here on my April 1 post.  Feel free to read the books with me and pull out your own sketchbook and jewelry box full of metaphor too...

Day Seven - My Glasses

Click the drawing to enlarge it.

Students - Today I am back home again, and yesterday I decided to draw something very daily, a normal part of my life: a pair of glasses.  I was looking about my house, trying to choose a subject, and this old pair of glasses just looked up at me from a shelf.  You can see where I was trying to draw the shadow.  You can also read how I am making comparisons between what I draw and other thing in the world, as THE PRIVATE EYE asks us to do when drawing and thinking.  These little notes may give me poem ideas.  (I really like the idea of glasses being like pretzels!)

My friend Nancy March (if you missed the Poetry Peek with Nancy and her neighbor Olivia, please do check it out and leave a comment for this young poet) just shared a very inspiring sketching blog with me.  If you like peeking into others' sketchbooks, check out Sketchbook Wandering, a lovely place to spend the morning, afternoon, or evening!

Teachers - It's Week 2 of National Poetry Month, and if you are looking for more wonderful ways to share poems this month and all year round, this post at Teach with Picture Books will inspire you greatly.  It's a great one, chock full of books, links, and ideas.

Please share a comment below if you wish.

To find a poem by topic, click here. To find a poem by technique, click here.

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Building Nests, Making Metaphors

An Artist
by Amy LV

Click the arrow to hear me read this poem to you.

I received a lovely note from Musician and English Professor Gart Westerhout who "has a regular habit of doing what might be called a cold singing of poems, in other words singing the poem before even having read it." Below you can enjoy Gart, who runs a community theater ((osugimusicaltheatre.com) in Japan, singing "Robin." 

Students - Robins won't be back to Holland, NY for a while, but that doesn't keep me from thinking about them.  Around our house, trees are getting browner and browner before the world will (soon) turn white.  We'll all stay hunkered down for a many months, feeding the fire with wood and ourselves with chili and crusty bread.  And then...many months from now...we will once again see that little red chest of a hopping robin, pulling spring up from the south in her beak.

Today's poem is not about something I can see outside right now, but it is about something I can see in my heart's eye.  One of the great gifts of poetry is that through the lines of a poem, we can relive our best moments and resee our favorite people and times.  The robin may not be in our yard...but I can still keep her close.  Can you think of something that is not happening right now, maybe something from a long time ago, something you would like to hold onto?  Close your eyes and try.  You can hold that thought, that place, that person...with a poem.

You may have noticed that today's poem compares a robin to an artist.  Making a comparison in a poem like this is called a metaphor, and if you read and listen carefully, you will find metaphors everywhere.  Life and writing is made more interesting when we can learn to see things as other things, when we can tie different experiences together in magical and unexpected ways.

Did you notice the repeating line in this poem?  It just appears twice, but it's there.  

For any of you wondering about the title of "Robin," this is a case where the title gives a reader a wee bit of information than the poem.  The poem does not actually name the type of bird at all, though careful readers would probably guess from one particular clue.  Which one?

Please share a comment below if you wish.

To find a poem by topic, click here. To find a poem by technique, click here.

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Flames are Horses - Metaphors

Heat

by Diane Mayr

 

Click the arrow to hear me read this poem to you.

Students - Here you can see another partnership between Diane Mayr and me. I regularly participate in Amy Souza's SPARK, a regular way for artists, musicians, and writers to share work and inspire each other.  This is a poem that I wrote quite a while ago, and I have come back to it again and again...making changes here and there.  Diane's art above was inspired by today's poem, and I think that the way she layered words and images over each other is just hauntingly lovely.

Sometimes we all look at objects or places and think, "This looks just like...."  or "This makes me think of...."    or "This is a...."  When we compare two things in such a way, we are thinking metaphorically, allowing one thing to become something else in our minds.  In today's poem, you can see that the flames really do become horses: galloping, cantering, riding night, leaving hoof prints.  That is so because in this poem, I wanted to hold one comparison in my hand (flames are horses) and carry it all of the way through every stanza.

You might wish to try this sometime. Stare around the room you sit in right now, or out of your bus window, or into the night sky.  Does something make you think about something else?  Is the connection strong enough that you might weave a whole poem around it?  Your class might like to try this together first.  If you do, please let me know!

Our other pairing (with Diane's photograph inspiring my poem) is posted here at SPARK, and I also posted it last Poetry Friday. I thank Diane for our collaboration and look forward to SPARK 18!

Today is National Punctuation Day!  Here are a few poems from the archives to help you celebrate: Inky Flyers, Emily Apostrophe, and Nolan the Colon.

This week over at my other blog, Sharing Our Notebooks, Barry Lane shares his notebooks and offers a generous giveaway of two of his books about writing and a CD.  A winner will be drawn on Sunday, September 30...the beginning of Banned Books Week!

Please share a comment below if you wish.

To find a poem by topic, click here. To find a poem by technique, click here.

Like The Poem Farm on Facebook for more poems, articles, and poemquotes!