Science Poems. Poetry Month. Poetry Friday. Oh, My!

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Howdy Campers!

1) Today is the first day of National Poetry Month, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary!
2) Today I'm sharing "a treasury of the greatest science poetry for children ever written"!
and
3) Today is Poetry Friday! (a poem by Steven Withrow and the link to Poetry Friday are both below.)

Lions and tigers and bears--oh, my!

HAPPY National Poetry Month (held in a month near and dear to my heart)! I'm celebrating by climbing a tree and singing praises for Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell's marvelous new anthology, The Poetry of Science: The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science for KIDS. (Full disclosure: TeachingAuthor Esther Hershenhorn and I both have poems in this book...as do a TON of poets in the kidlitosphere. Poets, give us a shout out if you're in this anthology!)

News Flash...Janet just sent me the whole list of poets...ready? The 78 poets in The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science are (can you say all their names in one big breath?):

Joy Acey, Alma Flor Ada, Linda Ashman, Jeannine Atkins, Carmen Bernier-Grand, Robyn Hood Black, Susan Blackaby, Susan Taylor Brown, Joseph Bruchac, Leslie Bulion, Stephanie Calmenson, F. Isabel Campoy, James Carter, Kate Coombs, Cynthia Cotten, Kristy Dempsey, Graham Denton, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Shirley Smith Duke, Margarita Engle, Douglas Florian, Betsy Franco, Carole Gerber, Charles Ghigna, Joan Bransfield Graham, Mary Lee Hahn, Avis Harley, David L. Harrison, Terry Webb Harshman, Juanita Havill, Esther Hershenhorn, Mary Ann Hoberman, Sara Holbrook, Patricia Hubbell, Jacqueline Jules, Bobbi Katz, X.J. Kennedy, Julie Larios, Irene Latham, Renée M. LaTulippe, Debbie Levy, J. Patrick Lewis, George Ella Lyon, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, Heidi Mordhorst, Marilyn Nelson, Kenn Nesbitt, Lesléa Newman, Eric Ode, Linda Sue Park, Ann Whitford Paul, Greg Pincus, Mary Quattlebaum, Heidi Bee Roemer, Michael J. Rosen, Deborah Ruddell, Laura Purdie Salas, Michael Salinger, Glenn Schroeder, Joyce Sidman, Buffy Silverman, Marilyn Singer, Ken Slesarik, Eileen Spinelli, Anastasia Suen, Susan Marie Swanson, Carmen Tafolla, Holly Thompson, Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, Lee Wardlaw, Charles Waters, April Halprin Wayland, Carole Boston Weatherford, Steven Withrow, Allan Wolf, Virginia Euwer Wolff, Janet Wong, and Jane Yolen.

218 Poems from the Teacher Edition + 30 Fun Bonus Poems =
A Whole Lot of Science Learning

Co-editor, publisher, author, and poet Janet Wong, who has been appointed to the NCTE Commission on Literature, the NCTE Award for Excellence in Children’s Poetry committee, and the IRA Notable Books for a Global Society committee, and her partner in crime, co-editor, professor, best-selling author, former chair of the NCTE Poetry Award committee and consultant to the Poetry Foundation, Sylvia Vardell write:

Teachers and parents asked us to make a Children's Edition of THE POETRY FRIDAY ANTHOLOGY FOR SCIENCE (Teacher Edition) with the poems grouped by theme--all the Ecosystems poems together, Lab Safety poems together, Math poems together, etc. (instead of grouped by grade level). So we did, and this is it--with 30 more poems than the Teacher Edition! Kids always ask me, "What is your favorite (of your own) books?" For now I have to answer: THIS ONE! Maybe because this one is the brand-new baby, or maybe because I think the illustrations by Frank Ramspott and Bug Wang really fit the text perfectly. I hope you agree!

Well, the National Science Teachers Association sure agrees. Here's what they say about the teacher's edition: "This is a treasury of the greatest science poetry for children ever written, with a twist—it can be used to ignite the spirit of students in a different, out of the box way. ” (NSTA Recommends)

If you were Janet and Sylvia, wouldn't you swoon when you read that review?

Poems in this book are grouped into 24 themes such as “Push and Pull,” “Ecosystems,” “Lab Safety,” “Computers,” and “The Math of Science.”

Use this link to get your paperback copy, and this link to get it as an ebook. I am in love with this anthology. It's so much fun to read. And apparently I'm not the only one...

Janet and Sylvia write:

Ben Franklin loved the poem about him—thank you for your poem “Discovery," X.J. Kennedy! In fact, he loved the whole book and got very excited when we gave him a copy—so excited that he handed his phone to a security guard, asking him to take a photo with his phone, too.  

When I flipped through to find a poem I wanted to share I ended up with a list numbering a million gazillion favorite poems. I finally threw my hands up in the air, closed my eyes and threw a dart into my list.

The dart hit Steven Withrow's marvelous poem. 

Steven, will you please introduce your poem?

Sure! Science, I've learned from working for many years with scientists and medical researchers as a journalist and editor, is a kind of poetry. To communicate science is to use the language of metaphor and symbol, as well as persuasive sound and rhetoric, and it's no surprise that many scientists also write poems.

When talking with children about poetry, I often bring in concepts and images from science. A metaphor is not an equivalence, but a suggestion of likeness, of linkage. As Robert Frost wrote in an essay for The Atlantic Monthly in 1946, “There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority.”

"What Makes a Turbine Turn" was inspired by the massive wind turbines being constructed close to my house in New England. I hope my turbine poem captures a hint of this pleasurable otherness.

from Morguefile.com

What Makes a Turbine Turn
by Steven Withrow

The formless force
that waggles a flag
and shapes a ghost
from a plastic bag

and levitates
a dragon kite
and wrestles with
the trees at night

is named the same
as that airy motion
which blusters over
field and ocean

and charges up
electric motors
with each revolving
round of rotors.

When next you see
a three-armed beast
who might be facing
north-northeast

don’t worry if
you feel thin-skinned.
“It’s just my pinwheel,”
says the wind.

Copyright © 2016 Steven Withrow. From the book The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science. Pomelo Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Wow. The thing that strikes me about this poem is that I see how wind moves...and I am moved, too. Thank you, Steven!

Campers, if you were to write a children's poem about something in science, what topic would you choose? And don't forget: if your work is in this anthology, let us know!

Thank you, dear Amy at The Poem Farm, for hosting PF today!

posted poetically by April Halprin Wayland...with help from Eli, Snot, and Sheldon ~

"Just the Facts, M'am"--fiction vs non-fiction on Poetry Friday

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Howdy, Campers, and Happy Poetry Friday! (the link to this week's PF host is below.)

First: welcome, welcome to our newest TeachingAuthor, Carla!  I am in awe of your writer's journey, Carla, because when I learned that we would be discussing non-fiction, my legs trembled and my palms grew cold and damp.  Unlike you and Mary Ann, in her wonderful first salvo on this topic, I am not, by nature, a researcher.  I am NOT a "Just the facts, M'am."

Jack Webb as Joe Friday in Dragnet, from Wikipedia

But... is this really true?

Well...I DO tell my students that real details bring fiction to life, and have them listen to the following short audioclip from StoryCorps.  Talk about bringing a subject to life! The details Laura Greenberg shares with her daughter are priceless--not to mention hilarious.

Still, I struggled to write poems for The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science (Pomelo Books).  By "struggled" I mean I read science articles and wrote tons of stinky poems about rocks, astronauts, materials science, the expiration dates on seed packages,electricity, science experiments...and on and on and on.

But...I dread gettting facts wrong--my worst nightmare. (Confession: writing these blog posts scares the bejeebers out of me.)

In fiction, I can fly my fairy-self to Planet Bodiddley and make up all the materials science by myself.  But if I have to convey facts?  And then somehow bake them into a tasty poetry pie?  I get tied up in knots.  My writing becomes stiff as a board.  I'm afraid of...

But finally I stumbled on this fascinating fact, in a review of The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman:"The water coming out of your kitchen tap is four billion years old and might well have been sipped by a Tyrannosaurus rex."

Wow. Think of the water you drink.  Think of the water you take a BATH in!!!! Ten versions of "Space Bathtub" later (with considerable coaching from the ever-patient anthologists, Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell) this fact became a poem for kindergartners:

OLD WATER
by April Halprin Wayland

I am having a soak in the tub.
Mom is giving my neck a strong scrub.

Water sloshes against the sides.
H2O's seeping into my eyes.

The wet stuff running down my face?
She says it came from outer space!

The water washing between my toes
was born a billion years ago.

from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science
(c) 2014 April Halprin Wayland, all rights reserved

If you're a K-5th grade teacher, this science/poetry anthology is so immediately useful, you'll cry with relief when you open it. Trust me. For details, and to watch under-two minute videos of poets (Bobbi Katz, Kristy Dempsey, Mary Lee Hahn, Susan Blackaby, Buffy Silverman, Linda Sue Park and me) reciting our science poems from this anthology, go to Renee LaTulippe's No Water River.  Again, trust me. (A little foreshadowing: Pomelo Books' newest anthology, Celebrations! comes just in time for Poetry Month this year--stay tuned!)

Here's a terrific vimeo of "Old Water" produced by Christopher Alello:

And thank you, Linda Baie, fabulous friend of TeachingAuthors, for hosting Poetry Friday today!

posted safely and scientifically by April Halprin Wayland wearing safety goggles