Coaxing Poems 2: Eat the World

 

Hello, Poetry Friends, and welcome to the second of ten little poetry visits starting off the New Year at The Poem Farm. In each of these short videos, I will share a small something about poetry, and you will always be able to find the poem I read below the video. You may find the first visit (January 5, 2024) linked below and you may wish to watch that one first:

Coaxing Poems Visit 1: We Are Libraries

If you wish, enjoy a few seconds of the wood fire that heats our home! Each autumn when I stack pile after pile of firewood, I think about the trees who once offered shade, homes for creatures, and various nuts and seeds. In these trees' second lives, they keep our family snug and warm. (Our kitties especially like warming up on the floor nearby.)

Students - It is fascinating to look around wherever we are, to think about what we see and smell, hear and feel. And we are able to see, smell, hear, and feel more when we are not constantly looking at phones, tablets, and video games. One writing tip is to be sure to eat the real world, friends....not just the digital world. The real world will offer you many ways to learn and be. We are changed by our surroundings, and through making poems and other art bits, we bring new meaning to these surroundings.

From today's visit I hope you will remember that a poem can live in the empty space between you and any image or object. You create something new in that space. It may be a poem, or it may be another piece of writing or music or art. What you make is a bit what you observe...and a lot what you bring to it.

Remember, too, that a poem need not rhyme. It can fall down the page in lines broken up as we choose. A poem might include a bit of repetition (orange hands) and personification (waving leaves like a human's waving hands.)

So, what will you eat from the world before writing this week? You might

• Look around the space you are in now
• Go someplace and look around that space
• Select a book and write from any picture or words you read in it
• Write from an object you are wearing or in your bag
• Find inspiration in a piece of art
• Watch people to unlock ideas
• Find new ways to pay attention

Educator Friends: I would love to hear if you are writing along with me during this series. Please comment below, email me at the contact button above, or tag me on social media if you wish to share.

Tracey is hosting this week's Poetry Friday over at Tangles and Tails with such an interesting timeline about the history of Monopoly tokens ending with a delightful poem for Thimble. Each Friday, all are invited to share poems, poem books, poetry ideas, and friendship in this open and welcoming poetry community.

xo,

Amy

ps - Claude asked me to show you this photo of him all toasty by his favorite fire....

Cozy Claude

Photo by Hope LV

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16 - Poems Can Give Human Qualities to Nonhumans (Personification)

Welcome to my 2020 National Poetry Month Project
See My Last 10 Poetry Projects HERE

Each day of April 2020, I will share three things:

• A dice roll of three word dice
• A video explaining one poetic technique titled POEMS CAN... You can also find these at Sharing Our Notebooks as part of my ongoing Keeping a Notebook project
• A poem inspired by one or more of the dice words and the technique

Here are All of This Month's Poems:

10 Years of National Poetry Month History at The Poem Farm

April 1 - Poems Can Go Down the Page

April 2 - Poems Can Play With Space
April 3 - Poems Can Tell a Story
April 4 - Poems Can Compare Two Things

April 5 - Poems Can Borrow a Pattern from the World
April 6 - Poems Can Define a Word
April 7 - Poems Can Rhyme
April 8 - Poems Can Not Rhyme
April 9 - Poems Can be Written in Stanzas
April 10 - Poems Can Ask Questions
April 11 - Poems Can Be Circles
April 12 - Poems Can Be Songs
April 13 - Poems Can List
April 14 - Poems Can Repeat Words and Lines
April 15 - Poems Can Spell a Word with the First Letters of Lines

And now, for today's words! 

Day 16 Words

Photo by Amy LV

Thank you to Heinemann for giving away a copy of my book POEMS ARE TEACHERS: HOW STUDYING POETRY STRENGTHENS WRITING IN ALL GENRES each week of April. I will draw names from the previous week each Thursday evening at 11:59pm, and I will announce a winner each Friday. Please leave a way to contact you in your comment as if I cannot contact you easily, I will choose a different name. This week's winner is named atop the post.

If you would like to learn more about other National Poetry Month projects happening throughout the Kidlitosphere, Jama has rounded up many NPM happenings over at Jama's Alphabet Soup.  Happy National Poetry Month 2020.

xo,
Amy

Little Mouse's Heart Jumps Up

Photo by Amy LV

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A Poem Can Be Short

Two Tulips in May

Photo by Amy LV

Students - Yes, this IS a short poem.  

The weather here in Western New York has at last turned to spring, so I have been enjoying watching the new life everywhere.  The other afternoon, as I got out of my car at home, I was struck by these two tulips.  Don't they look like they are yawning?  When I spotted them, this was my first thought.  I took a picture because I knew these yawns would not last long.

Of course, this sight and observation caused me to wonder, Why would tulips yawn?  I figured it might be because they are so beautiful...but then I imagined other words for beautiful, at last landing on stunning. 

Two lines only, but you find a question, a possible answer, some personfication, and a wee bit o' play with sound.

Watch your world.  Look at things and imagine them as other things.  Attach unlikely verbs to objects.  Play.  And know that your poems may be short.  Your poems need not rhyme.

This week I was lucky enough to write with the second graders of Dodge Elementary in Williamsville, NY, to talk writing with the Pre-K through seventh graders at DeSales Catholic School in Lockport, NY, and to Skype with three thoughtful classes of third graders in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.  Thank you, schools and teachers, for welcoming me!

Liz is hosting today's Poetry Friday roundup at Elizabeth Steinglass.  Visit her place to celebrate her forthcoming, fun, energetic book --  SOCCERVERSE: POEMS ABOUT SOCCER, illustrated by Edson Iké, and to read an early poem draft from this book as well as an abecedarian soccer poem. Of course, Liz has links to all poetry happenings around the Kidlitosphere this week...we do this each Friday, and all are welcome.  Congratulations, Liz!

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or as part of a group with your teacher and class.

Personification and Poems and Woodstoves and Joy

Tonight's Fire

Photo by Amy LV

Students - Today's poem is about how I think poems might feel...if poems could feel. If a poem could talk, it would offer to be your friend. And it would offer to be my friend.  It would offer to be everybody's friend.  And it wouldn't show off or say rude things or act fancy or self-absorbed.  A poem would be a cozy friend, always there to listen or give you a foot rub when you most need it.

For me, that's what poems are and that's what poems do.  Poems keep me warm when I feel cold.

May it be so for you, sweet friends.

Violet is hosting today's Poetry Friday roundup over at Violet Nesdoly/poems. Please visit her place to learn about what's happening poetry-wise all around the Kidlitosphere this week.

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If you are under 13 years old, please comment only with a parent 

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Finding Questions and Wonders with Jeannine Atkins

Winter Chickadee

Photo by Amy LV

Students - Today's poem came from my own wonders about migrating birds (How do they KNOW?) and from the birds we see in our yard each winter. Today I share a questioning nature poem - from Chickadee's point of view - in honor of our special guest, a poet I admire so deeply.

Jeannine Atkins

Photo from www.jeannineatkins.com

It is my absolute honor to welcome Jeannine Atkins, author of, among other books, BORROWED NAMES, LITTLE WOMAN IN BLUE, VIEWS FROM A WINDOW SEAT, and her latest...gorgeous...FINDING WONDERS.  Stay tuned for her forthcoming STONE MIRRORS (later this month) but today, please enjoy Jeannine's words about FINDING WONDERS, a book that has received stars from both Booklist and The Bulletin of the Center of Children's Books, a book that has been named a Book that Makes a Difference by The Horn Book, a book that has made me cry and cheer out loud.

I asked Jeannine, "Do you feel that you BECOME these girls when you write about them?"

She answered, Yes, there is some sense of channeling, of reading enough and getting the details till I feel like I have a special key.

Welcome, Jeannine!  Please tell us about this latest book.

Available at Your Local Bookshop

Finding Wonders is about three girls who were born in earlier centuries and whose lives focused on the close looking needed in science. Poems often begin with close looking, too. I want to see past words, which sometimes seem in the way, to what’s in front of my eyes.

A Room in the Queen’s Gallery in London

Honoring the Plants and tools Maria Merian Worked with 

after Sailing from Europe to South America in 1699

Photo by Jeannine Atkins

Maria Sibylla Merian grew up helping her stepfather in his studio and learning to paint. She loved the colors of butterflies, moths, and flowers, but she was even more fascinated to watch how a small animal changed, from a caterpillar or silkworm to a chrysalis or cocoon, then to a butterfly or moth. Maria Merian’s paintings had to be still, but sometimes she painted all the stages of a life in one picture.

Maria Sibylla Merian’s Work on Display

in the Queen’s Gallery in London

Photo by Jeannine Atkins

To write some poems, I also wanted to show these small creatures in motion. I watched videos of silkworms spinning sticky silk around themselves, and weeks later, breaking open the cocoon. I wrote metaphors comparing the spinning to dancing and twirling a spoon around a cake to frost it.

Can you watch an action, such as a caterpillar crawling up grass or a spider making a web? Try comparing the motion to something from your own life.

Writing about Mary Anning, the first person to make a living selling fossils, meant I had to imagine her life, back before there was a word for “dinosaur.” In my mind’s eye, I saw Mary walking down the beach, picking up what she called curiosities. These stones with an impression of plants or animals are what we call fossils. I wrote about the questions these stones might have raised in her mind.

Trilobites and Ammonites 

Such as those Mary Anning Collected

Photo by Jeannine Atkins

Choose a scientist from the past to write a poem about. What do you know now that she or he wouldn’t know then? Can you write a poem as a conversation between you and this scientist, speaking about something now known that wasn’t known long ago?

Thank you so much to Jeannine for joining us here this week...and we are even luckier still because Jeannine is offering a giveaway of one signed copy of her book to a commenter on this post.  The winner will be posted in this same space next Friday, January 13, so please leave your comment by Thursday evening, January 12.

For more about FINDING WONDERS, visit here:

Doraine Bennett's post at Dori Reads, November 18, 2016
Linda Mitchell's post at A Word Edgewise, January 6, 2016

Linda is hosting today's Poetry Friday roundup over at TeacherDance.  Head on over and join the poetry joy.  All are always welcome.

Please share a comment below if you wish.

If you are under 13 years old, please comment only with a parent 

or as part of a group with your teacher and class.

Let it Happen - I Fell in Love with a Stone Bowl

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.  

Available through IndieBound

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.

Available through IndieBound

FEEDING THE FLYING FANELLIS by Kate Hosford is a joyful collection of poems from the perspective of a circus chef.

Available through IndieBound

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.

Available through IndieBound

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!

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Listening to Voices, Laughing at Ourselves, Learning

Grey Street in East Aurora, NY
February 4, 2016
Film by Amy LV

Students - Last evening, as I drove my daughter to a friend's house, we hit several traffic lights.  At one of them, this line flashed through my mind -

Someone is coming.

The streetlights

they whisper....

I liked the rhythm of this, and so I set to work, actually writing the draft of today's poem right in my van, sitting underneath a streetlight in a grocery store parking lot.

Draft 

Photo by Amy LV

The original draft, as you can see, continues describing the "streetlights," and I was happy with it.  Until.

Until I looked up "streetlights" to see if it is one word or two.  This is when I realized something that I already knew but somehow overlooked as I wrote.  This poem is not about streetlights at all.  This poem is about traffic lights!  Streetlights are the lights on the side of the road, the ones that hang a bit over the road, giving white light to pedestrians and drivers.  Traffic lights are the ones that change colors, telling drivers when to go, be careful, and stop.

Several weeks ago, I wrote about how reading and learning new things can make a writer realize that she or he needs to abandon an idea.  Well, today, I must share that sometimes a writer makes a silly mistake and needs to go back and fix it!  This is just what I did last night.  See the cross outs?  Please, never be afraid to look at something that does not work and change it; that's what we writers do.

Did you notice how the line breaks in today's poem move across the page?  I did that because I wanted the reader to feel, just a wee bit, like a rider in a bus or car.

And do traffic lights really whisper? No. That's just a bit of personification.  I do like to pretend that the lights whisper to each other,though, telling secrets about us humans coming by in our buses and cars.

So, remember!  Make changes when you need to .  And listen.  Sometimes a line of poetry will just sneak up and tap you on the shoulder, maybe even at a strange time such as when you are sitting in traffic.

Tricia is hosting this week's poetry party with Pablo Picasso's cat over at The Miss Rumphius Effect.  Visit her wise blog to find out who is sharing which poetry gifts and links, all around the Kidlitosphere, all week long.

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Sometimes I Sit and Wonder - A List Poem

Talking Barn

by Amy LV

Students - This, as you have likely noticed, is a list poem.  Yesterday I was sitting at a picnic table in our back pasture, writing as I looked around the world.  When my eyes landed on our barn, I found myself thinking about way back before our time, when cows lived in there.  I started wondering if the barn misses those cows, and...well...one thing led to another.  It was fun to think about the different things in my life that might wish to tell me something.

Do you ever just sit outside, look around, and think and wonder?  I highly recommend it as a neat way to find out what's rattling around up in your attic mind!

The winner of last week's giveaway of JUMPING OFF LIBRARY SHELVES, the latest beautiful anthology by Lee Bennett Hopkins, is Janet.  Janet - please send me your address in an e-mail to amy at amylv dot com, and I will get it in the mail to you.  Congratulations!

Visit Margaret at Reflections on the Teche for a beautiful summer swap gift share and today's roundup.

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A Bit of Personification on New Year's Eve

Old Year Lodge

by Amy LV

Students - Happy Almost New Year!  One of my 2015 resolutions is to spend more time writing in my notebook, finding new friends such as these old years in their number sweaters.  You'll see that today's poem turns years into people.  And while we all know that years are not people, as I wrote this poem...they became people. In poetry, this is called personification - giving something that is not human the qualities of a human.  Years do not wear sweaters.  Yet here they do.  Such is the magic of poetry.  You can make it so.

Today's poem is in free verse.  As I always say, writing in free verse causes me to read and reread over and over, listening for sound and rhythms that are not metrically regular, but still work for a reader's ear.

I am very grateful for this past year: for the healing of friends, for the healing of hearts in my life.  I am thankful for new friends young and old and for the many books and meals I have been lucky enough to take in over the past twelve months. I am grateful for family, for my health and for having been a living, breathing human in this year of 2014.  

I wish you and yours a year full of goodness, light, and warm enchantment.  May this woolen number of 2015 bring you joy.

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Two Couches - Poem #15 for April 2014 Poetry Project

LIVE!

Learn about this, my April 2014 Poetry Project, HERE!

Living Room Couch

Photo by Amy LV

Family Room Couch

Photo by Amy LV

Students - Today is Day #15 of my THRIFT STORE LIVE project for National Poetry Month, and as it is a day that's a multiple of 5, it is free verse day!  If you look back, you can read the other free verse poems from this month, a way for me to try to strengthen my writing of free verse.

#5 - Clock

#10 - Dancing Shoes

Today's poem is a two voice poem, two voices of two different couches.  We only have one couch in our home - an everything couch - but some people have one fancier couch and one more homey couch.  In today's verse, I try to let those two imagnied personalities shine through.  

Did you notice that the tag lines I use in today's dialogue match the couches' personalities?  While White Couch announces and declares, Orange Couch says and sighs.  What might this tell a reader about the personalities of these two objects, so similar yet so different?

I do like to trace back the family-idea-tree of poems when I write them, and if I were to guess where today's poem originated in my mind, I would say that it came from three mentors: "Famous" by Naomi Shihab Nye (read it here and you will know why), "Two Guitars" by Victor Hernandez Cruz, THE BEDSPREAD by Sylvia Fair, and I AM THE DOG I AM THE CAT by Donald Hall.  If you know any of these pieces of literature, you might think about which couch in my poem matches which shoe/person/pet in these pieces.  

It is a great thing to read a lot as each text we read deepens the well we draw from when we write.  We never know when our reading will show up, even in wee ways, in our writing, and so read read read we must!  As Gary Paulsen says, "Read like a wolf eats."

Here is today's longhand draft.  I did a lot of thinking about this throughout the day before writing even one word.  The idea of writing about two couches came to me in the shower yesterday morning, and so much of the thinking hummed along inside of me as I went about the day.  Later, sitting at the keyboard, I decided to indent the stanzas for Orange Couch, to make the different speakers more clear.

Two Couches - Draft Page 1

Photo by Amy LV

Happy happy second half of National Poetry Month!  Listen for poems everywhere...

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Mall Store Shirt - Poem #13 for April 2014 Poetry Project

LIVE!

Learn about this, my April 2014 Poetry Project, HERE!

Mall Store Shirt

Photo by Amy LV

Students - Yesterday I went to two thrift stores to stock up on photographs for the coming week.  It was such fun, but there was one problem.  I was torn between thinking about what to take pictures of...and what to buy.  I ended up taking lots of photos (some of which you will see this week) and buying four books, a cool garden sculpture, and a long sleeved blouse.  Oh, and a garden trowel.  Victory!

I love having a lot of photographs on hand this month.  It makes me realize that it is important to plan for writing by planning for having lots of ideas.  The more interesting (does not mean expensive or exotic) things we do, the more interesting things we will have to write about.  This means that one important part of being a writer is learning to become interested in things and thereby, interesting.

For the photo-taking part of this project, I stroll through thrift stores and just stare at everything.  I listen for things that want their pictures taken.  Somehow I just know which ones they are.  Then, while driving or walking, I choose whichever one is most meaningful to me at the time.  For some reason, this shirt - a very ordinary trendy shirt - rose to the top today.

Today's poem uses the technique of personification, or giving an inanimate or animal object human feelings and abilities.  Shirts don't think or have friends, but in my poetic head, they do.  

So far one of the best parts of this project is realizing that it is possible to come up with a new angle each day. Many of these poems have been complete surprises to me!

Below you can see the longhand draft work for today's verse.  It just got itself rolling.

Mall Store Shirt - Draft Page Spread #1

Photo by Amy LV

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Bicycle - Poem #9 for April 2014 Poetry Project

LIVE!

Learn about this, my April 2014 Poetry Project, HERE!

Bicycle at The City Mission

Photo by Amy LV

Students - Today's poem took a bit of time to write, and I kept circling around it like dog trying to settle into a bed.  I was home writing steadily, but it was slow.  You can see my beginnings here, not much that remained in the poem at all.

Bicycle - Draft Page Spread #1

Photo by Amy LV

Then, below, you can see where things got going.  The idea of a bicycle dreaming appealed to me.  I had to go back, though, to see if any of the other thrift store objects dreamed.  Nope.  Just the boy in his old fuzzy footie jammies.  So I decided to allow the bike to dream.

This is something I am finding myself paying close attention to this month - not just each poem on its own, but each poem in concert with the others.  I do not want to use the same words or the same rhyme schemes over and over.  Today's poem almost ended with "new" - but then yesterday's poem about the Navy uniform used "new."  So I wrote another and another ending.

Bicycle - Draft Page Spread #2

Photo by Amy LV

Yesterday I videotaped some of my writing process.  I am not sure there is much to learn from this, but I found the exercise both intimidating and interesting.  It was a little scary to write on camera, and I stopped the video every few minutes so that the clips would not be too long.  I did not keep this up throughout the whole writing session, but I did capture the sense (and the sound) of almost four minutes of being inside my writing head.  

If you choose to watch this clip, you will see me writing the left side of the page you just read above.

Below, these last pages are simply working on the ending.  Once again, this takes me a while.

Bicycle - Draft Page Spread #3

Photo by Amy LV

And guess who helped me write again?

Cali!

Cali Under My Desk

Photo by Amy LV

Please don't miss the wonderful post over at my other blog!  Seventeen year old writer, Alex McCarron, shares her journals, index cards, and process over at Sharing Our Notebooks.  Thank you, Alex. 

Please share a comment below if you wish.