Butterfly Laughter and Nana's Lap

No. 1 Granddaughter

Teaching Authors continues to celebrate National Poetry Month! And especially National Poem in Your Pocket Day! 

I have so enjoyed the wisdom of my fellow TAs when it comes to poetry. April started with Steven Withrow’s “What Makes a Turbine Turn” from Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell's new anthology, The Poetry of Science: The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science for KIDS.

Mary Ann shared the moving and memorable “92” by e.e. cummings, and April returned with a Wednesday Writing Workout about rhyming patterns in poetry. Finally, JoAnn introduced us to her darling Rosy.

I am not so wise on poetry. I do not know how to write poetry. I am in awe of those that do. Mr. Poetry Himself, Lee Bennett Hopkins, defines the artform as an experience (Pass The Poetry Please, 3rd Ed., 1998)  that has been distilled to its emotional core. Life itself, he says, is embodied in poetry, and each poem reveals a bit of life. (12).

Recently I became a grandmother for the first time. I am a Nana. These words are profound to me. Too big for me to explain in simple sentences. I never knew my grandparents. And, because life happens, my daughter did not know her grandparents, at least not very well.  Her memories are  fuzzy images  that lack touch, sound and smell.

So the little poems in my pocket are my cheatsheets, teaching me what it means to be a Nana.

Butterfly Laughter by Katherine Mansfield

In the middle of our porridge plates
There was a blue butterfly painted
And each morning we tried who should reach the
butterfly first.
Then the Grandmother said: "Do not eat the poor
butterfly."
That made us laugh.
Always she said it and always it started us laughing.
It seemed such a sweet little joke.
I was certain that one fine morning
The butterfly would fly out of our plates,
Laughing the teeniest laugh in the world,
And perch on the Grandmother's lap.

photo by morguefile.com

 

Why We Tell Stories by Lisel Mueller

Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground

and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers

and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened

and learned to speak

2
We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us

and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees

3
Because the story of our life
becomes our life

Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently

and none of us tells it
the same way twice

Because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them

and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and

Bobbi Miller, Nana In Training

I Love This Little Poem Because

Happy National Poetry Month! To celebrate the month (and especially National Poem in Your Pocket Day), we Teaching Authors are sharing some of our favorite pocket-sized poems.

We have a new puppy, Rosy. The other day, I heard her barking and remembered a favorite old poem I’d saved long ago. The more I think about it, the more I appreciate its clever wordplay.

Motto For a Dog 

I love this little house because
It offers after dark,
A pause for rest, a rest for paws,
A place to moor my bark. 

Arthur Guiterman

The last line always grabs me. I didn’t realize the double meaning at first: a bark is a kind of boat; of course, a dog’s bark would be moored (tied up) somewhere cozy and safe. And the pause/paws homonyms add to the poem’s genius.

I looked up Arthur Guiterman and found a Wikipedia entry plus a 1915 (!) New York Times article (read a .pdf here) in which he gives advice on how to make a living as poet. Notice the article’s author: Joyce Kilmer! According to Kilmer’s Poetry Foundation bio, he was on staff at the New York Times around then. I love discovering tidbits like that.

I keep lots of Other People’s Poems on my computer in a file labeled “Inspiration.” I turned to that file last year when I visited an elementary school on National Poem in Your Pocket Day. I printed a stack of pocket-sized poems in case anyone needed one. Most students came prepared, but some of the parents at the evening assembly were empty-pocketed, so I was glad I had extras.

Do you have an “Inspiration” file? What’s in it?

Be sure to check out our other Teaching Authors posts in this series. April started with Steven Withrow’s “What Makes a Turbine Turn” from Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell's new anthology, The Poetry of Science: The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science for KIDS.

Mary Ann shared the moving and memorable “92” by e.e. cummings, and then April returned with a Wednesday Writing Workout about rhyming patterns in poetry.

Last year for National Poetry Month, I wrote a haiku a day. You can read all thirty poems on my web site. This year, school visits and deadlines made me decide to focus on reading more poetry. I’m happy to have so many options available! Laura Purdie Salas has this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup at Writing the World for Kids. Enjoy!

Check out Bruce Black’s interview with me at Wordswimmer.

And if you haven’t yet, please Like our Teaching Authors Facebook page!

JoAnn Early Macken

1 Way to Write Poetry: Rhyming Patterns-- A Wednesday Writing Workout!

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Howdy, Campers!

Before we begin, I wanted tell you happy news!  In my last post, we talked about poetry and science. Today, just before I pushed "publish" on this post, I got some terrific news! I just learned that my poem,"Can Our Eyes Fool Our Taste Buds?" from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science is on Science Friday's website! And Susan Blackaby's poem about Scientific Inquiry, from the same anthology, is also on the site. I'm thrilled for both of us!

Okay...now we can begin.

Welcome to another TeachingAuthors' WWW, aka:

Today we're going back to a post from 2010--revised, renewed and reborn for Poetry Month 2016:

Birthdays. Earth Day.  Poetry Month. Poetry Friday.  The world turns. Patterns rise to the surface.  We lean towards structure: forks, spoons, knives separated by dividers; children lined up by height; blouses arranged by color. 

Mom could count on me to put her pencils, rubber bands and paper clips in order.  My marbles grouped themselves into marble villages. Plastic dinosaurs, which my sister and I got from a junk shop (all for a dime!), quickly found families.

Something beautiful happens in my brain when a word goes “click,” fitting into a poetic pattern.

So, today, in honor of the patterns of our lives, let’s play with patterns.  I’ll take you on the behind-the-scenes tour on how I wrote the poem below...and then you'll have a chance to play with your own patterns.

I've been thinking back to 2009, and how I almost told my potential blogmates, “Thank you for inviting me to join your blog, but I’m waaaay too busy to take on another project.”

That's when the hands of five authors reached out to me, all the way on the West Coast, and how, for some reason, I reached back.  THANK GOODNESS!  I wanted to catch this “thank goodness” feeling in a poem.

I began goofing off, thinking of trees, of leaping across the country, across cyberspace.  A first line and then a second line came to me:

What does it mean to have made this leap?
To swing from tree to tree to you?

Suddenly I was in a jungle.  So I wrote (still playing, not sure where this was going):

To find, in the midst of the jungle a few
friends who are smart and kind and true?

I put them together: 

What does it mean to have made this leap?
To swing from tree to tree to you?
To find, in the midst of the jungle a few
Friends who are smart and kind and true?

I saw the beginning of a pattern. Can you see it, too?

The last three lines rhyme.  The first line doesn’t.  But it needed more.  So I decided to write a few four-line stanzas in which the first line of each stanza rhymes with the first line of the other stanzas, and in which the last three lines of each stanza rhyme with each other.

To put it another way, if each letter stands for a different end rhyme, my first stanza looked like is:
A
B
B
B

Or, to conserve space, A,B,B,B.  What would the next stanza be?  I decided it would be A,C,C,C.  And the next?  A,D,D,D. 

Then I began scouring my rhyming dictionary for earthy words that had enough relevant rhymes to support this pattern.

Here’s my list.  Sorry it's so long...but I did promise a back-stage tour:

Bird, heard, nerd, word, absurd, blackbird, songbird, hummingbird, overheard, blurred, purred, stirred,  
Blog, bog, slog, jog, dialogue, travelogue
Book, brook, look, took, shook, overlook,
Branch, blanch,
Creek, beak, peek, seek, week, critique, sneak, tweak, speak, tweet, cheek, meek, geek, weak, mystique, speak,
Deep, sweep, heap, cheep, sleep, reap, steep,
Dirt, alert, convert, divert, expert, insert, unhurt, blurt, assert, revert, introvert, extrovert,
Earth, birth, worth, unearth,
Fellow, hello, mellow,
Green, clean, keen, queen, scene, caffeine, sixteen, routine,
Grow, so, flow, glow, slow, so, ago, tiptoe, zero, volcano, studio, afterglow, bravissimo,
Leaf, …
Leap, deep, sleep, upkeep, reap, keep,
Learn, discern, earn, turn, concern, return,
Old, gold, enfold, bold, hold, retold, told, uphold, thousandfold,
Post, boast, west coast, most, almost, hitching post,
Readers, pleaders, feeder,
Sing, bing, wing, swing, anything, bring, spring, full swing, ring, thing,
Six, politics, mix,
Teacher, creature, preacher, feature,
Teaching, reaching, screeching, beseeching
Thrive, I’ve, hive, alive, arrive, survived, test-drive,
Tree, si, bee, free, gee, key, me, see, we, forsee, agree, esprit, community, disagree, history, courtesy, anthology,
Tweet, feet, seat, beat, sweet, athlete, bleat, complete, greet
Twig, big, sprig, gig, brillig, dig,
World, unfurled, twirled, pearl, girl,
Read, freed, lead, she’d, we’d, exceed, proceed, succeed, head, need, speed, bleed, plead, concede, misread, feed, greed, seed, weed, stampede,
Write, fright, might, night, quite, right, in spite, excite, goodnight, handwrite, polite, tonight, twilight, unite, parasite, oversight, watertight, 

I chose my words and began to play.  Here’s the result:

This is me, accepting the invitation to join TeachingAuthors
photo credit: morguefile.com

BLOG-I-VERSE-A-TREE
by April Halprin Wayland

How does it feel to cross over this creek,
to fly from tree to tree to you?
To find, in the midst of the jungle a few
readers discerning, kind and true?

How does it feel, week after week,
to water a seed, nearly seven years old?
To watch its young, green leaves unfold
as it gives me back a thousand fold?

I feel I’m Bird, just opening her beak,
at the top of a tree, on the first day of Spring,
easily found on Google or Bing,
joining five friends to Tweet, to sing!revised poem © 2016 April Halprin Wayland. All rights reserved

                                                   Here's your WRITING WORKOUT:

1) Brainstorm a topic.  (If you need help thinking of a topic, search our posts for the word brainstorming. For example: scroll down to the Writing Workout on Carmela’s post. )

2) Find a rhyming dictionary in the library or work with one online, such as RhymeZone.http://www.rhymezone.com/  List words which fit your dog, your garden, or whatever you’ve decided to write about.

3) Now play with stanzas in this pattern:
A,B,B,B. 
A,C,C,C.  
A,D,D,D.  

(Ha ha. ADDD indeed!)

If you can’t fit your ideas into that pattern, look for a poem you like, figure out its pattern and imitate it.  Or create your own pattern.  

5) Play!  Remember to breathe!  And write with joy.

drawings © 2010 April Halprin Wayland. All rights reserved

Posted with love by April Halprin Wayland and her faithful crew

Late to the Poetry Party

Note to readers: Carmela here. If you're reading this post online, it has my name in the byline, but the post that follows is from Mary Ann. She's unable to post today due to technical difficulties, so I'm doing it for her. Enjoy! 

In honor of National Poetry Month, I am to choose “a poem I would carry in my pocket.” I still have a knee-jerk reaction to the words, “National Poetry Month.” Poetry? Bleah! (Before you get too outraged and stop reading this post, I did get over my intense dislike of poetry. Read on.)

My elementary school teachers were “old school” when it came to poetry. We had so few opportunities for creative writing, that it seemed a shame to waste any of them on poetry. Poetry had to have rhyme and meter and just the right number of syllables per line. Oh yeah, it also had to make sense. And be short. I figured anything that was worth saying took more than eight or so lines. (Eight lines was the minimum for these poetry assignments.) Too many rules, too much structure.

Of course, no one was teaching Ferlinghetti or ee cummings to fourth graders in the sixties. What we wrote had to rhyme, and preferably be about a “pretty” subject like clouds or flowers or how much we admired our teacher.

In junior high, the poetry units seemed to consist entirely of the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish and my absolute, least favorite, Evangeline. Not only did we pore over every line and nuance, we were made to memorize long passages, that we regurgitated on tests. I usually did well, since memorizing is one of my “talents.” I hated every word of those poems, but I got my A. (Spoiler alert: I was particularly ticked that after seemingly hundreds of stanzas of the star-crossed lovers Evangeline and Gabriel just missing each other, over and over, they meet just in time for Gabriel to die in Evangeline’s arms. Some big emotional pay-off!)

By high school, the literature curriculum became “relevant” and suddenly the old marching line of World Lit, US Lit, British Lit were replaced with “literature electives” such as “American Theater,” “20th Century American Lit” (all the authors were male) and “Creative Writing.” There were some poetry courses on the list, but I skipped right past them. No more meter, no more rhymes. No more “thee’s” and “thou’s” and dying lovers. Yay!

Poetry did not re-enter my life until I began my MFA in Writing for Children at Vermont College. My classmates passionately discussed Mary Oliver and Donald Hall and Wendell Berry, poets I had never heard of. I would hole up in a corner of Bear Pond Books (MY “happiest place on earth”) and scan through piles of poetry books, finding poems that did NOT rhyme, and that spoke right to the heart of me. At long last, I had arrived at the poetry party.

At the time I was living in Bangkok and felt terribly isolated. As if I had drifted away from Earth and into another dimension. I lived on email, to the point that my friends no longer seemed human, only words on a computer screen.

It was then that I found E.E. Cummings’ “92”, the poem I would carry in my pocket, bring to a desert island and would recite to myself to remind me that on the other side of the world there were flesh-and-blood people who loved and cared about me.

                 "92"

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

---from E.E. Cummings Complete Poems 1904-1962
edited by George J. Firmage, Liveright, 1994

I am happy to announce that Chana S. is the winner of  our April’s latest picture book, More Than Enough: A Passover Story. Congratulations, Chana.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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 ~