#280 - Eavesdrop in the Lost and Found

This week, Tricia is back with one of her famous Monday Poetry Stretches over at The Miss Rumphius Effect.  These always push me toward new writing thoughts, and I am grateful to Tricia for introducing us to so many different topics for and styles of poetry.  This week's Poetry Stretch is "lost and found."

Students - before winter break, I took a peek at my children's school lost and found. This is a mountain of gloves, boots, and sweaters, hats, coats, and mittens.  I started to wonder about all of those pieces of clothing and why no one was coming after them.  This made me think two things.  The first is that we are an over-fortunate people if we don't miss our coats in wintertime.  The second is that it must feel sad to be a lost and lonely sock or hat.  So today, when Tricia proposed "lost and found" as a writing topic, I immediately knew what I would write.

I find it very helpful to keep a notebook, in my head and on paper.  One never knows when different images and life-minutes are going to come in handy (I did not try to make a hand-pun here!)

For a whimsical picture book about a little girl and a single mitten, read poet Kristine O'Connell George's ONE MITTEN.  While you're at it, don't miss her wonderful website.

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MyPoWriYe #127 - Daisy

This week, Tricia's Monday Poetry Stretch over at The Miss Rumphius Effect suggests that we write poems full of sound and listening. 

 

Students - For this poem I decided to write about remembered sounds rather than present sounds.  One way to plant a sound or a feeling or a thought in readers' minds is to tell them what is NOT THERE.  Then your readers will imagine the sound, feeling, thought before they make it disappear.  It's amazing what writers can make people's brains do: laugh, remember, weep, connect.  Try this sometime - write what you hear.  And then another time, write what you do not hear.

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Poem #106 - Just an Expression

Thank you again to Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect for her weekly poetry stretch.  This week's challenge encourages us to write about sayings.  You can read the poems as they're posted here at her blog.

While we're on the topic of idioms, sayings, and expressions, I am excited to share a new book with you which includes a whole chapter on this very topic.  Ralph Fletcher, writer of picture books, novels, poetry, and writing books for students and teachers, has done it again.  His latest book, PYROTECHNICS ON THE PAGE: PLAYFUL CRAFT THAT SPARKS WRITING, celebrates and encourages joyful romping through and exploration of language.  

Ralph's book (from Stenhouse) includes chapters on word play, craft lessons highlighting specifics of language, and a resource section chock-full * of definitions, book recommendations, useful lists, and texts for teaching.  I recommend it as a great summer read - not only to expand our own understandings of language but also to help us imagine communities of fascination and joy around letters, words, sentences, and the way they mix into meaning.

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Tomorrow is Poetry Friday and the final day of "Free Verse Week" here at The Poem Farm.

* "Originally a person or thing stuffed to the point of choking was choke-full. In modern speech this expression has become chock-full, or in less formal American English, chuck-full."  (from Paul Brians' book, COMMON ERRORS IN ENGLISH USAGE)

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Poem #92 - My First Abecedarian - Gifts

Today marks the three month anniversary of a daily poem here at The Poem Farm...hooray!

Congratulations to Mag, winner of the "Breakfast for Dinner" drawing for Ann Hodgman's funny book One Bite Won't Kill You.  Please send your mailing address to me at amy at amylv dot com, and I will send the book to you.

Thank you again to Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect for providing another poem-form inspiration.  This week, she asks to write an abecederian poem, or poem constrained by alphabetical order.  You can read the submissions over at Tricia's Monday Poetry Stretch post.

You will see that the first letters of each line of line up right along with the alphabet.

One enchanting abecedarian is also a picture book - A Shaker Abecedarius:  The Peaceable Kingdom.  You can see the cover and read it if you click and scroll down here at H is for Home Blog.  A friend and fourth grade teacher, Nancy Simmons of Newfane Intermediate School, once encouraged her students to memorize this poem.  The class did, and they performed it for the whole school.  Everyone was astounded and inspired.

I would like to memorize a few poems...

Tomorrow The Poem Farm is tickled to host Poetry Friday, a weekly roundup of  poetry sharing in the blogosphere.  Come by early to leave a note about what's happening in your neck of the woods, and I'll put it up in a post for all to read throughout the day.

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My Poem Writing Year - Day #62 - Fish

I am now officially one sixth of the way through MyPoWriYe, writing and posting a children's poem every day for one year.  What have I learned so far?  The poems are out there, and if one is insistent enough...they come out to play.  If you have been reading along, I welcome you to follow this blog (see small photos below right).  This way I can know who is reading and can also demonstrate to publishers that people actually read these crazy poems.

This past weekend found our family camping at Cayuga Lake with our friends.  Dave caught so many fish and generously shared them with all of us.  I write this post to the smell of pickerel cakes frying in the kitchen.  Thank you, Dave, for sharing your harvest...this poem is for you!

Thank you, Mark, for the word 'sautéed' and also for helping me turn my fish upside down.  Concrete poems are funny to shape, and it helps to have a wise friend's eyes on your side.

This week's Monday Poetry Stretch over at The Miss Rumphius Effect with Tricia challenges us to write an Ottava Rima, a challenging form with eight lines per stanza, iambic pentameter, and an abababcc rhyme scheme.  I wrote in with a strawberry-picking poem titled "Today".  You can find it at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

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MyPoWriYe #55 - Bonfire (two versions)

Yesterday, I again had the opportunity to work with fifth and sixth graders at Caledonia-Mumford Central Schools.  Together with teachers Katrina Hatch, Courtney Monahan, Kyle Leonard, and Deborah Bussewitz, we are studying and writing poetry about the local area as a part of a larger project, Buy Local Build a Future where each project hosts its own blog.  Soon, poems by these students will be bound into books and read along with music from Kyle's student ukulele players.  

As part of our book-making project, students will colorize photographs of the area and are also welcome to draw or paint scenes from their hometown to go along with the poems.  We will share copies of these anthologies with the school libraries, public library, local museums, and maybe even a town diner.  Spending this morning in the Big Springs Museum, I found part of myself wishing to be from Caledonia-Mumford too!

Somehow today, these students and I began talking about building bonfires.  At our home, Henry is in charge of this cookout-chore, and when I said so, one fifth grade boy said, "Sometimes I get to light the match."  I could not stop thinking about his words today, for with great responsibility comes new learning.  I believe that such rites of passage may be more valuable than we know.

Here is a second version of the same poem.  The first is the original, but this morning I got to playing with line breaks to see how it might work as a concrete poem.  I'd be interested in hearing which one you like better.  Sometimes concrete poems feel forced to me, and I'm not sure yet which of these I prefer.

This week, Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect offers us the challenge of math poems.  My poem is in the comments...about four leaf clovers.  Feel free to post your own math poem over on this week's "Monday Poetry Stretch".

Thank you, Garrison Keillor at The Writer's Almanac, for informing us that today is the birthday of poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Roethke.  Let their spirits guide us all...

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MyPoWriYe #48 - Gum for Free

Yesterday I wrote about how ideas are inside all of us, how we just need to climb ladders to pick them.  'Strange thing is that you never know where those ladders will end up.  When my family read this verse, one child said, "That's gross!"  One said, "I love that poem!"  And one just rolled her eyes heavenward, shaking her head with pity. 

This week over at The Miss Rumphius Effect, Tricia's Monday Poetry Stretch invites us to write poems about colors.  You can read the offerings (and add one of your own) in the comments.  I wrote and sent a poem about the color brown.  

Why brown?  Well, once while driving down a highway, looking out at the fields, my husband told me how much he loves the color brown.  At first I was surprised, but ever since that day I have come to see beautiful browns in all of nature.  Especially this time of year, Western New York is full of old cornstalks and freshly-plowed fields.  Thank you, Mark, for opening my eyes yet again.

Speaking of gorgeous colors, this classic 1973 book by Arnold Adoff, the first children's book to celebrate an interracial family, takes joy in all human colors through one family's deep  love.

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Spring Visits Western New York

When I was a little girl, I believed that everything could think, talk, and dream of past and future. As a teenager, I ran in forests and along creeks, wondering what went through the minds of rocks and water. Now grown-up, I still give personalities to non-living things because the whole world feels alive to me. Today at The Miss Rumphius Effect, Tricia encourages us to personify inanimate objects. Welcome, Spring!

Spring

Peeking out
from her crystal cocoon
Nature feels
the time is soon

to pop cold buttons
from coats of snow
warm Earth for birth
watch babies grow

crowns of crocus
squeezing leaves
chickadee chicks
bursting bees
hidden kittens
mare and foal

life
more life
her only goal.

© Amy LV