Velcro Stories Want to Become Poems

One Adored Dog

Photo by a Loved One

Students - This poem is based on a true story.  I only know a little bit of the story, but I filled in the rest, inventing details that felt real and possible to me. Sometimes we see or hear or learn a story and it never ever leaves us. When I heard about this story, I could not let it go.  Or maybe...it could not let me go.

Stories that stick to us like velcro in our hearts are ones that want to be written.  A writer can write any story as a poem, and even if you've written a story out in long form before, you can try rewriting it as a poem.  Story poems are called narrative poems, and as is true with all poems, they need not rhyme at all.

I enjoyed playing with this new meter and as usual tap, tap, tapped as I wrote. Tapping syllables on a table or on my cheek helps me feel the rhythm of a poem in my body.

Visit my notebooks blog, Sharing Our Notebooks, to find out who won the Decomposition Notebook. And stay tuned, as there will be a new notebooks post coming this weekend.

Thank you to Rebecca who is hosting today's Poetry Friday over at Sloth Reads, a post celebrating a day I never knew existed with a poem I never knew existed - double fun! Please know that the Poetry Friday community shares poems and poemlove each week, and everyone is invited to visit, comment, and post.  And if you have a blog, we welcome you to link right in with us.

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High Chair - Rituals, Routines, and Small Places

Sage Investigates

Photo by Amy LV

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

Students - Watching and thinking about animals is funny!  Our children use special voices when they imagine what our dogs and cats would say if they could speak English.  This poem comes from an old collection about a new baby, and I just found it and cracked right up.

Like us, animals have rituals and routines that they follow through their days.  A pig belonging to a friend of ours begins each morning at sunrise roaming beneath apple and pear trees.  Our dog Eli used to always spend each morning roaming under the high chair.  Can you think of any rituals that an animal you know follows?  What about you?  What do you do again and again, the same way each time?  This repeated action might be a neat idea for a poem.

Did you notice how the middle lines of today's poem goes back and forth?  I like to do that in a poem when there is movement between two beings or happenings.  You might have also noticed that the first two lines and the last two lines rhyme.  They're like bookends, tying this whole wee oaty circle poem together.

Today's verse is titled after a place, one piece of furniture that we have not had in our home for years.  Each place deserves its own poem.  Don't you think so?

Did you know that Cheerios are the most popular breakfast cereal in the United States?  The Cheerios company is 72 years old, and you can find the factory in Buffalo, NY, only about thirty minutes from where we live.  If you drive near the Cheerios factory, you can smell Cheerios.  Really!  (Buffalonians can even wear shirts displaying this fact.)  Once, several years ago, the factory donated many old Cheerios boxes to me for a bookmaking project.

Here is another baby and cereal poem from The Poem Farm archives, titled Baby Cereal. Can you tell that feeding babies was a theme of my life for several years?

Would you like to make a guitar or a dollhouse out of a Cheerios box?  Well, you can. These instructional videos by Joel Henriques are sponsored by Cheerios, but you could use almost any light cardboard box for the crafts.  Joel's blog, made by joel, is full of neat things to make.

Laura Purdie Salas is hosting this week's Poetry Friday extravaganza over at writing the world for kidshttp://www.laurasalas.com/blog/pf-buckled-bricks/.  Don't miss the new and old friends and poems!

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Watch The Iditarod in Poem #348

Today's poem is dedicated to librarian Cecilia Driscoll's third grade students at Elma Primary School in the Iroquois Central School District.  They are studying the Iditarod and asked for a poem about it.

Students - It's a healthy stretch to write a poem for someone else from time to time.  In life, we all have days and experiences when we must write about things we might not normally choose or know a lot about.  In order for me to write this poem, I needed to do a bit of research.  

A note about revision.  I wrote this poem early in the day yesterday and revisited it several times throughout the day.  Doing this helped me to put some words "back on the shelf" and to "put some new ones in the cart."  For example, line 3 originally read, "on the heels of the ghosts."  Changing 'the' to 'old' allowed me more word variety and also another echo of the long 'o' sound in that first stanza.  As writers, we must reread our own writing with a listening ear, never certain that "this is good enough."

At The Official Site of the Iditarod, you can find out anything you'd like to know about the history, mushers, trail, and current race standings.  What I loved learning was about how The Iditarod Trail is actually the real trail that sled dogs ran long ago to move supplies in and out.

Here is an article about some recent news from this year's race.

I am grateful to the Mrs. Driscoll and her third graders for this stretch.  Let someone stretch your writing today!

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