my juicy little universe

the same leaves over and over again!

2009-11-06T06:13:00.012-05:00

Poetry Friday is at Wild Rose Reader today.

There must be as many leaf poems as there are leaves in our yard, but just as you can always find a leaf that seems like a miracle of colors, I keep finding another leaf poem to roll around in.

In my first grade class we talked about how this poem is the perfect combination of science fact and mystery. We talked about how poems are so often made of Noticing and Wondering and how Robert Frost must have been doing both when he wrote this. And I taught them how leather is made, and one little one asked, "Does the animal have to be dead?"

In Hardwood Groves

The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.

Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed.

They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.

~ Robert Frost

octover

2009-11-04T05:55:00.007-05:00

October may be the 10th month nowadays

but I counted it octopodally:

I was an eight-armed creature walking on water, juggling

many odd balls, some of them flaming

with excitement, even as

I battled an eight-armed creature equipped

with powerful suckers that threatened to drag me

too deep in an ocean of constant motion

clouded with turquoise ink, bad weather and

many more than one grain of sand.

In October my long arms finally reached

the rubbery endtips of my ability to Do Things.

Surfacing, now I can breathe the word

Octover.

party poopers

2009-10-15T23:46:00.004-04:00

No bright uploaded image here; it's wet and chilly in Montgomery County, MD and I'm in a glowersome mood.

I was looking forward on Tuesday evening to participating in the PTA-sponsored "Read-Along Pajama Party" event at my school--the perfect opportunity to introduce myself (new this year) and Pumpkin Butterfly to the community. I asked about selling copies and donating some of the proceeds to the school, and my supportive and savvy principal called to inquire what the rules might be about such a proposal.

The answer from The Office was something like, "Not only can your teacher not sell copies of her book, she shouldn't be reading it on school property. That constitutes a conflict of interest." So I went to the pajama party and read work by Calef Brown and Valerie Worth, by Marilyn Singer and Constance Levy, by Ralph Fletcher and Brian Patten--a lot of fun! And yet...

The part about selling books makes sense to me; fair enough. But the part about not reading, not teaching my own published poems to my class (or any other in the system, perhaps including those of my own children as a parent volunteer), doesn't make sense. Our curriculum emphasizes the writing process and the development of the author identity in our students, and writers and poets are invited in all the time to bring that process to life--isn't having a live, in-house model a good thing?

I think it means something that after sharing one single poem from Squeeze (which is approved for inclusion in the county's school and public libraries), half of my first-graders are working on poetry collections for our Publishing Party at the end of the month. That's the interest we want to protect and promote, surely?

pushing out pumpkins

2009-10-09T06:02:00.013-04:00

This isn't the first time I've likened the publication of a new book to the birth of a baby, but the effort this past 10 days has gone beyond metaphoric labor to literal heavy lifting. Last Friday, when I should have been blogging about how excited my class got when I announced that they would be publishing their own books just like Kevin Henkes and...well, ME, instead I was loading the car with all manner of promotional accoutrements: a 10x10 Swiss Army canopy, three folding tables, boxes of books, rolls of plastic tablecloth, bags of candy corn and plates of Trader Joe's pumpkin bread, laminated book pages cut from the f&g's Boyds Mills sent me at the last minute, a big fishbowl (for the raffle tickets), and of course, three giant pumpkins. I should have had the epidural.

My first event was held on the front lawn of a Lutheran Church who agreed at the last minute to let me squat there in the middle of a local restaurant event called "Taste of Bethesda" when I couldn't find anywhere else. It didn't rain (hallelujah) and I had a steady trickle of customers: a good combination of people who had received my email announcements of book events and families just passing by. There was no opportunity for a reading, exactly, but I sold 16 copies of both books nonetheless--plenty to make all the bearing down worth it (and now the car is loaded for all the other events this month). Here's a "Taste of Pumpkin Butterfly," the first poem of the new book.

Ghosts

we haul our empty wagon to a patch of hilly earth
weighed down with heavy orange
burdened with cumbersome pumpkins

"This is the one"
"And this one"
we say

we cut the tough vines and turn to load them up

behind our backs
a gust of butterflies rises and tumbles
on hot October air

yellow-green tinged with orange
wings as weightless and angular
as the pumpkins are heavy and round:

the ghosts of our pumpkins untethered from earth

if you find a rock

2009-09-25T05:59:00.008-04:00

Today Poetry Friday is hosted by Susan Taylor Brown--thanks!

In our county, first graders spend the fall on a science unit about Rocks, Soil and Worms, and in my class the initial reading assessment requirements are nearly fulfilled so I'm looking forward to Rocktober.

You know how some books reach in and grab you by the heart? If You Find a Rock by Peggy Christian is one of those for me. It's not marketed as a volume of poetry, but it works that way, and the "colortoned" photos by Barbara Hirsch Lember picture, in a slightly surreal way, real children doing real things with real rocks. They fill the simple, measured text with even more gravity. The message is that playing with rocks is serious business. Here's a sample.

If you find a rock--
a big rock--
by the edge of the water,
then you have found
a splashing rock.
When it hits the surface,
the water jumps
out of the way,
raining back down
on your outstretched hands.
The bigger the rock,
the wetter you get.

The other thing I love about this book is its element of magical realism--there's science content here, physics and biology and paleontology, but it's all mixed in with aesthetics and emotion and even the possibility of wishes granted. Just like real life.

And now, to spoil the mood, I must just announce again that THURSDAY IS THE DAY! Pumpkin Butterfly: Poems from the Other Side of Nature has its official release this week! Become PB's fan on facebook!

"this curriculum sponsored in part by Tom Chapin"

2009-09-18T08:40:00.005-04:00

Today's poem is really part of a song from Tom Chapin's album "Billy the Squid." In case you don't know him, Tom Chapin is a musician famous for being Harry Chapin's younger brother--but I'd risk asserting that his music for kids is known by far more people because of his downright usefulness in the classroom.

The first day of school I sent my first-graders out delightedly singing verse one of "Great Big Words"--because there's great pleasure in being able to announce to grown-ups that you're an "eager bibliophile." And here I give a loud shout-out to John Forster, a frequent lyricist for Tom Chapin. I can't confirm that he wrote the lyrics for this one, but his wordsmithing is behind most of the other cleverly composed, perfectly appropriate yet never syrupy songs I've taught children over the years. All join in!

La, la, la la la la la, la, la, la!
When I was a little kid (a diminutive juvenile),
I liked my folks to read to me--I was an eager bibliophile.
Now I like words for how they sound and how they communicate...
I guess I should explain myself--that is, elucidate.
Great big words, I love big words!
Letter by letter, the bigger the better--
Great big words!

Now maybe you're adept at sports or excellent at school,
Or maybe you're vainglorious (which means you think you're cool).
But give me a massive ideogram (a big word) to make my point--
When you can verbalize your thoughts, you can really rock the joint!
Great big words, I love big words!
I get a thrill out of every syllable--
Great big words!

Big words are prodigious terms; now don't they sound delicious?
They impress your teachers, confuse your folks, and make your friends suspicious.
But that's okay; we'll start a trend that soon will sweep the nation:
The Hyperlinguistic Polysyllabic Speech Association!
Great big words, I love big words!
Letter by letter, the bigger the better--
Great big words!

La, la, la la la la la, la, la, la!

a big little beginning

2009-09-04T06:18:00.006-04:00

Poetry Friday is hosted today at Crossover by Kelly Herold.

Today will be my fourth day with a rather phenomenal group of 1st graders. They've all arrived in my RLA classroom reading like 3rd-graders, and on the first day, when we began by reading Chrysanthemum (need I add 'by Kevin Henkes'?) and talking about names, they could all count the vowels, consonants and syllables in their own names. They could fill in a blank to describe their names as short, long, cute, Spanish, "un-comen" and "pawrfl" words.

But in general they write like kindergarteners, and they are only 6, and therein lies my delicious challenge: to lead them into rich, juicy literacy projects that call on their established skills (and not inconsiderable smarts) while respecting their 6-year-old hearts. Where better to start than with Ruth Krauss?

Beginning on Paper

on paper
I write it
on rain

I write it
on stones
on my boots

on trees
I write it
on the air

on the city
how pretty
I write my name

~Ruth Krauss, from the anthology Sing a Song of Popcorn

We started on Tuesday; by Wednesday they'd done their first choral reading, exchanging the "on" lines and the "I" lines, and yesterday we turned our backs on the chart and said it by heart. C'est parti, mes amis! (which is a prettier way to say, "And they're off!)

nanonature

2009-08-21T06:58:00.015-04:00

Poetry Friday is hosted today by The Boy Reader. Nice to meet you, Kyle--a fellow teacher who will be helping me reflect on my new job as Lead Reader.

So fond of alliteration am I that both our children start with D, which is slightly troublesome in that they must appear in the family diary as TWO space-consuming initials. Here I'd prefer just to call them by their carefully chosen names, but I feel a responsibility to protect their identities in cyberspace (is it warranted?), so here they shall be known as D1 (a girl halfway to 11) and D2 (a boy 6 and 11/12). But they are not both daughters. Though they are both darling.

D1 the mathematician likes to deny that she has any poet in her at all and says things like, "Mom, why do you have to make everything about poetry?" Then the other day at the pool during adult swim I saw her mouthing words and counting fingers, and then she asked to be reminded of the syllable count for a haiku. Gazing into the grass she said,

the clover is not
strong enough to hold the bee
that pollinates it

Is it nature or is it nurture? : )

drawing in, reaching out

2009-08-14T13:46:00.004-04:00

I didn't notice it last week under the coastal sky at Rehoboth Beach, DE, but now that we're back in leafy Bethesda, it's clear: each night it's darker a little earlier. Here's an apropoem by Eve Merriam, a great favorite of mine...

The New Moon

Hold on to me
We will slip carefully carefully
don't tip it over
into this canoe
pale as birch bark

and with the stars
over our shoulders
paddle
down the dark river
of the sky.

Do not delay.
By next week
the canoe will be bulging with cargo,
there will be no room
inside for us.

Tonight is the time.
Step carefully.
Hold on to me.

That poem just entered my Top Five of All Time (don't ask me what the other four are yet; I didn't know I had a Top Five Poems list).

In other news, aiming as advised for 15 promotional events for Pumpkin Butterfly in October (15 events in two weeks is beyond a girl with a day job, don't you think?), I have strong leads on our local district Back-to-School Fair, a Pumpkin Festival at a farm (three days' worth!), several school book fairs, a workshop at my local branch library and the local B&N. I'm working on an all-ages poetry reading at my church, another something at a local church that goes pumpkin patch in October, and our local Whole Foods. And I'm going to the NCTE conference in Philadelphia in November. Must get postcards printed, must get postcards printed, must get postcards printed...

pumpkins on my mind

2009-08-12T23:17:00.005-04:00

Oh dear. I can't decide if I'm delighted or dejected to finally find my way to the wealth of promoformation at the bubblestampede blog of Laura Salas and Fiona Bayrock. So many provocative ideas, so many approaches, so obvious that I should have started long before beginning of June! Despite my 'tenacity,' I have been rebuffed by the farm where the pumpkin butterfly poem, "Ghosts," happened; they can't fit my fabulous book launch event into their packed pumpkin-harvest October schedule...so now I'm trawling for another pumpkin farm that has more respect for poetry and racking my brain for another clever launch venue...

back-to-school thoughts, just for a moment

2009-07-31T07:25:00.007-04:00

I have an exciting new teaching job starting in a month (yesterday I had my first official meeting with the Reading Specialist), and in my role as charter school founder I've been having some deep "academic design" thoughts. So this wicked poem that I rediscovered in a book called Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (ed. Gary Mex Glazner, 2000) has been wandering the halls of my inner school...

Backwards Day

Sometimes at school we have a special day

We call it backwards day

Everyone wears their clothes backwards

Or wears colors that clash

I have a modest proposal

Forget your silly backwards hats and tee shirts

Forget this stripes and checks together puppypoop

Let's get serious

Let's really shake school up

In math class, for homework

Describe the associative, distributive, and

commutative properties

In dance

Choregraph it, dance it, show your work

Points off for clumsiness

In Social Studies, for homework

Prepare two Civil War marching songs, one North one South

Sing in four part harmony, show your emotion

Points off for flat notes

In English, for homework

Carve a sculpture that expresses Hester Prynne's solitary courage

The cowardice of her lover

The beauty and strangeness of her child

In Science, for homework,

Bring in a broken toaster, doorknob, or wind-up toy

Fix it

You get extra credit for using the leftover parts to make something new

Points off for reading the directions

On the S.A.T.

Every one of the questions

Will be in haiku

You get two scores

One in whistling, and one in Legos

No calculators

Let's take a stroll down the hall

Let's see who is in the learning disabilities classroom now

Will you look at all those guys with pocket protectors

Sweating, slouching, and acting out

Hey, no care that you can divide fractions backwards in

your head buddy

You will stay right here and practice interpretive dance steps till

you get it right

Will you look at all those perfect spellers with bad attitutdes

Look at those grammar wizards with rhythm deficit disorder

What good is spelling gonna do you

If you can't carry a tune

Toss a lariat

Or juggle?

You are going to stay right here and do the things that you can't

Over and over, and again, and again

Until you get them right,

Or until you give up

Quit school

And get a job

As a spell checker

At the A&P

~Daniel Ferri

P.S. Does anyone know how to make blogger obey my WYSIWYG commands? Grrrrrr.

finally, a solution?

2009-07-27T07:09:00.004-04:00

Somewhere towards the beginning of 2nd grade, the silent reading speed of my sharp little D1 (F, now heading for 5th grade) surpassed my own read-aloud speed. As a result, I have despaired of ever being able to read aloud to her again. At bedtime-story time, rather than attending to a skillful but tediously dramatic performance by her mother, she prefers to lie companionably beside me while racing through novel after novel and the occasional nonfiction selection while I get on with my own bedtime reading.

But poetry is my bedtime reading (brevity is beautiful: I can usually get in at least one whole poem before my eyes close and the book lands on my belly), and I have discovered that D1 WILL allow me to read her a poem or two. After all, in poetry there's often a little something extra that my read-aloud can reveal. Last night it was Billy Collins. I was looking for "The Lanyard," to go with the several that D1 started at the Chautauqua Boys' and Girls' Club last week, but I didn't find it, so we went for "I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'" and then "Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles." In both cases, she enjoyed the journey but wasn't quite equal, first time around, to the destination.

We'll save "The Lanyard" for another moment in the future, in which her green, white and black lanyard is less special, and realizing that I may have found a way to preserve the cozy bedtime reading habit, I'll work on being as intentional in my choice of poems as I am in offering picture- and chapter-book choices to her brother.

a piranha religion

2009-07-24T09:17:00.004-04:00

I may be the last poet to discover the Favorite Poem Project, but just in case not, here's a sample of the glory of this idea of Robert Pinsky's that the medium of a poem is not the words, but the breath, voice and body of each person as he or she reads that poem, especially a favorite one, out loud.

Nick and the Candlestick

by Sylvia Plath

chosen and read by Seph Rodney, photographer

I am a miner. The light burns blue.

Waxy stalactites

Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.

Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,

Cold homicides.

They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium

Icicles, old echoer.

Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.

And the fish, the fish--

Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,

A piranha

Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.

The candle

Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.

O love, how did you get here?

O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,

Your crossed position.

The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.

The pain

You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,

I have hung our cave with roses.

With soft rugs--

The last of Victoriana.

Let the stars

Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric

Atoms that cripple drip

Into the terrible well,

You are the one

Solid the spaces lean on, envious.

You are the baby in the barn.

live from chautauqua!

2009-07-20T20:35:00.006-04:00

I'm here for the first time in beautiful downtown Chautauqua, New York--one week late for the Highlights Foundation Writers' Workshop, I know, but compromise with the grandparents was necessary--and trying to get the hang of how to do it without overdoing it. On the first day already I went to a poetry&prose reading and then read from Pumpkin Butterfly for the first time to a small but enthusiastic group of adults. In between doses of this week's theme, "The Ethics of Capitalism," I'm reading White Girl, a memoir by Clara Silverstein, the only other girl from Richmond, VA who attended Wesleyan at the same time as I did. Robert Pinsky will be here later this week discussing, among other things, the Favorite Poem Project and the third collection of Americans' favorite poems entitled Invitation to Poetry.

So I'm thinking about my favorite poems, and remembering how in high school two stanzas by an outwardly prim Victorian priest whomped me upside the head (despite all the God talk) with the sheer wildness of the words, some of which I couldn't even attach to actual things, as concrete as they all are in Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Pied Beauty":

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.

(And wondering: does anyone know how to preserve a poem's formatting in a blogger post? All the indents just disappeared...)

Poetry Friday, early or late?: the best ultrasound ever

2009-07-14T15:15:00.019-04:00

You know how when you're pregnant you go to the sonographer who shows you what the baby looks like at, say, 7 months? Here's what my new baby looks like. He's not due until October 1, but it's great to know that he's looking so hale, hearty and hardbacked! Thanks to the folks at Wordsong/Boyds Mills for another beautiful book. Here's one of the poems, feeling right for these long, glowing baseball days...

Cherry Very

Be sneaky, be cheeky
Pinch from the kitchen
The reddest, the roundest there are

A bowl full of cherries
A bowl of the very
Most cherriest bombs by far

Backbone straight
Step up to the plate
Puff up your chest and lungs

Swallow the fruit
Ready to shoot
Put the pit in the groove of your tongue

One more tip:
Round your lips
To launch it without a hitch

Don't get tense
Aim for the fence
Wind up like you're fixing to pitch

Now blast it hard
Across the yard
Kissing that missile goodbye

It's over the fence!
It's out of the park!
It's a letloose cherryjuice
noschool slobberdrool
spitwhistle summerfun home run!

The Hug, by Thom Gunn

2009-05-14T09:10:00.004-04:00

Heart-snagging.

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

...and now it's sprung

2009-05-01T10:15:00.011-04:00

is hosted today by Maya Ganesan at allegro.

I spent two mornings this week playing poetry with kindergarteners in a Title I school in Arlington, VA. Here's what one class had to say, with a little orchestration from me, about the view out of their window right now:

dogwood

grow green, soft sprout
(drop splash puddle)
four white-pink petals
on juicy-sour stems reaching out
exquisite puddle of petals

Can you guess which word was the teacher's contribution?

insisting on spring

2009-03-27T06:34:00.005-04:00

Today I'm joining Poetry Friday for the first time, and by way of introducing myself to the PF community, I'm posting a poem of my own for the first time. It's a small celebration of the fact that I received a PDF yesterday of the Boyds Mills Fall 2009 catalog, in which the forthcoming Pumpkin Butterfly is listed (I love saying "the forthcoming Pumpkin Butterfly"; it will be almost sad when it has finally come forth).

In the meantime, I'm keeping my eye on the buds and insisting on spring...

Petaling

People come crowding to these chilly streets
to see the twisted old cherry trees
crowded with new pink blossoms.

I come walking one week later.
Now the blossoms are breaking,
blowing, blizzarding petal by petal.

The wind lifts them, waves of petals the size of
my thumbnail, sends them rolling,
riding, racing on their ragged edges.

They’re not like tiny, petal-soft wheels—
they really are tiny wheels of softest petal,
pedaling these streets toward summer.

as civilization unravels

2009-02-11T11:39:00.003-05:00

it's soothing to chant something like the following, in which everything set backwards and upside down leads to a sense of floating rather than sinking....

I Am the Song

I am the song that sings the bird.
I am the leaf that grows the land.
I am the tide that moves the moon.
I am the stream that halts the sand.
I am the cloud that drives the storm.
I am the earth that lights the sun.
I am the fire that strikes the stone.
I am the clay that shapes the hand.
I am the word that speaks the man.

~Charles Causley
from The Puffin Book of Utterly Brilliant Poetry, ed. Brian Patten

'and she was' to 'je vais vite': the quantification of music part 1

2009-02-04T09:44:00.007-05:00

Becoming a math teacher has begun to take its effect on my real life. I find I have begun increasingly to think of the world in mathematical terms as well as in poetic turns, and I’m seeing patterns and trends everywhere (except in my personal finances, which I leave entirely in the capable hands of another). Let's do some numbers: In 1986 I was walking down East 84th Street towards the 1–bedroom apartment I shared with Lisa, crossing 3rd Avenue and listening for the x-hundredth time to 'Little Creatures' on my Walk-It. It was Friday afternoon and my book bag must have been light because I was swinging along; 'And She Was' came on and for the 1st time I noticed how the beat matched my stride exactly…and there I experienced simultaneously a moment of A-HA + DUH. (I believe mathematicians call this a Duh-Ha Moment.)

A-HA + DUH = A person who dislikes “working out” but who does like dancing could put together a mix of favorite songs and turn all that city walking into exercise! This meant laboriously trawling through all my cassettes and vinyl records and copying songs with the Magic Number, which was not Three but 29 beats per 15 seconds (which, as my 2nd graders cannot yet figure out, equals 116 beats per minute, but who sits counting beats for a whole minute?)

The first walking tape I made was pedestrianly titled Walkabout Mix, and it took 2 years and moving in with a man who owned better stereo equipment than I to get it done. It included 'And She Was', songs by Midnight Oil (hence the Aborigine-flavored name), New Order and Enya ('Orinoco Flow' turned out to be too slow at 28bp15s), and the song that took my listening experiences into a whole new spiritual, philosophical plane. 'Ackee 123', by the Beat (the English Beat to you folks who didn’t spend an extremely formative month in Evesham, England during 1981) led to the next tape, entitled Music for Instant Attitude Adjustment. You can hear it on this playlist, which includes "important" songs from each of the ensuing walking tapes.

http://rhaplinks.real.com/rhaplink?rhapid=5656330&type=playlist&title=Playlist&from=real

Another perk, among many, of moving in with (and then getting married to) Brad with the better stereo equipment was the health club on the roof of our 46-story building in Battery Park City (BPC, not be confused with bps). There I discovered the treadmill, handy for those days when it was cold and wet and a girl really needed a dose of Instant Attitude Adjustment. There I discovered how to check my heart rate, which led in turn to discovering that while walking to all my carefully selected songs, my heart rate matched my stride matched the beat at 29bp15s. Surely the coordination of inner and outer rhythm was why this particular form of exercise felt so darn good. Keep this factoid in mind, as we will return to it later....

Those first 2 compilations lasted very well, supplemented by the likes of Deee-lite and Madonna's 'Immaculate Collection'--right through the move to London in 1991. There were other mix tapes along the way: Dancing and Kissing (What More Is There?) and Lovergirl Mixxx are the musical evidence of my split with Brad, and all of them could be filed under Mixed Feelings. By 1994, using Fiona's new Andersen-Consulting-funded stereo system, I had created walking tapes number 3 and 4, Pavement Pounder and then Pacemaker, which accompanied me on complicated London Tube commutes from West Hampstead to Camden to Haringey.

Meanwhile I was rediscovering the glories of a genre I had scorned during my long-ago "Heidi is/a punk-rocker" past (a pose which fooled no one): I bought a GBP5 cassette called "Divas of Disco" and had soon combined 'Ring My Bell' and 'Shake Your Groove Thing' with London club hits to make a new tape (45 minutes per side, approximately 22 tracks in total) called Sidewalk Groove. By the end of the London era, walking-instead-of-dancing had been joined by Actual Dancing as I took part in the Great London Gay-and-Lesbian-Ballroom&Latin-Movement. I salsaed, I rhumbaed, I East- and West-Coast-swinged, and I cha-chaed to the likes of 'Walking on Broken Glass' by Annie Lennox. Life was one permanently-adjusted attitude.

Please join us next week for Part 2 of The Quantification of Music, when we consider the short-term heart-health effects of life inside the beltway....

pluck a daisy, dunk a donut...

2009-01-28T15:20:00.004-05:00

I love snow days;
I love them not.
I love snow days;
I love them not.
I love snow days;

check in with me tomorrow.

heigh-ho heigh-ho it's off to work we go

2009-01-21T11:06:00.005-05:00

I'm not at my best this morning, but both of us were smokin' last night at the Out for Equality Inaugural Ball. Everybody was already feeling fabulous, even after some frustrating "but I have tickets!" experiences, and music by Dave Koz, Katie Curtis, Thelma Houston and that ever-bubbling fount of exuberance Cyndi Lauper boosted us all way up over the top. (Rufus Wainwright performed too, remarking insightfully that he's not really a party dude, being "rather morose, but I look good, so it all works out.") The evening ended with Melissa Etheridge growling earnestly away; a friend and I agreed that we're fans of her existence if not her music.

One of the unscheduled visitors (Sir Ian McKellen said a word and Jamie Lee Curtis and Carrie Fisher were both sighted) was Bishop Gene Robinson, who spoke the opening words at Monday's We Are One concert (nearly attended by Fiona but not quite) but whose contribution was inexplicably not broadcast. Here is his prayer; to get the full effect compare it side by side with Rev. Rick Warren's. Whether you're Christian or not, religious or not, Robinson's prayer shows a future of faith that I for one can live alongside.

A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama
By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire
Opening Inaugural Event, Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC January 18, 2009

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God's blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will...
Bless us with tears - for a world in which over a billion people existon less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.
Bless us with anger - at discrimination, at home and abroad, againstrefugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Bless us with discomfort - at the easy, simplistic "answers" we've preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.
Bless us with patience - and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be "fixed" anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.
Bless us with humility - open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world. Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance - replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding thatin our diversity, we are stronger.
Bless us with compassion and generosity - remembering that every religion's God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable inthe human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States. Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln's reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy's ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King's dream of a nation for ALL the people.
Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.
Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.
Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.
Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.
Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters' childhoods.
And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we're asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand - that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.
AMEN.

an animated solution

2008-12-03T10:51:00.005-05:00

Duncan went to his first after-school basketball session yesterday and Daisy will have hers on Friday. Watching the coach at work, I remembered that I returned from France with a mission and that I must contact Michelle Rhee and Barack Obama at once about the following:

In France there exists a legitimate job entitled “Animateur” or “Animatrice.” These are the people, usually young, very often male, who hold diplomas (either nonvocational or professional) in sports, leisure activities and animations and who staff the before- and aftercare centers housed at every school. They design and provide the ateliers (workshops) in sports, pottery, drama or cooking that are offered by every school system, who play with the kids at countless “vacation villages” while their parents pursue adult recreations, and who—because this is also standard in France—staff the Centres de Loisirs that take the place of school during the numerous and lengthy school breaks. In Vincennes there was a cadre of young people—GUYS—of many cultural backgrounds employed by the Ville de Vincennes during the summer to work the trampolines set up for free in the town square, and to work the ice rink set up in the winter. They ran the Festival du Sport in the spring and were, with very few exceptions, cool, kind, skilled and attentive to even the youngest kids.

I’m researching the official process for licensing animateurs and animatrices, but in the meantime, this is my big idea. We—I mean Americans—should start thinking laterally about the benefits of a national service requirement for young people, about the need for quality childcare and the need, particularly in inner-city communities, for more opportunities and more positive role models for boys. I bet every one of us knows a teenager whose big talents are in the area of PLAYING, and while very few will get to do that in a major league sport (and I think I'm right in saying there IS no major league Playstation, Warcraft or Wii), what if there was a 1-year diploma to be earned in the subject of, let’s call it, Playcare?

What if there were a legitimate professional path in this country for people, male and female, who enjoy kids and like to play but don’t want the demands of full-time teaching? This might be because they’re taking a year out before college, or because they’re deciding whether to go to law school, or because they are artists or performers with other work to do, or it might just be because they don’t have grandiose mainstream professional plans and because PLAYING is their true best thing.

I don’t have all the facts and figures, of course, but I do have this gut feeling that many of the social challenges we face, both downtown and in the ‘burbs, could be at least partly addressed by making creative, active childcare a real career. There are teachers, I bet, who will tell me that first on our agenda ought to be achieving true professional status for teachers and the salaries that go along with that. But when I think of all the kids aged 16-24 who don’t necessarily excel academically, who may be hanging around the streets waiting to be trained and employed, who could be recognized as contributing members of society and earn a living organizing after-school games for their own younger siblings, those concerns fade.

I’ll be getting back to you on how I’m doing with my mission. In the meantime, I’m grateful for Brian the babysitter, who can always be relied upon to goof off responsibly with my kids when I don’t have time, and for Monsieur Iba, the senior animateur at Duncan’s school in Vincennes, who played clowning and drumming and all kinds of fun, and for this guy, Cyrrr63, who takes his animations very seriously and is blogging about them in France.

the beauty of the blog

2008-11-20T11:42:00.006-05:00

This morning on NPR (and let's face it, if I don't hear it on Morning Edition between 5 and 7am, it's not news) I heard how Maxine Hong Kingston, winner of a special award at the National Book Awards ceremonies last night, had tried to get her essay on the election of Barack Obama, a fellow Hawaiian, published in a number of newspapers and magazines and failed. Her response, of course, was to turn to the Internet, and with the click of a "Publish" button, her essay went live.

Also this morning I heard from a friend, the one who moved to the gigantic mansion in Texas; we always knew she was the Erma Bombeck of this decade, and now her blog, Marge Ponders, proves that she has been a blogger-in-waiting since before we knew what a blog was. She writes today that her daughter will turn 10 on Friday and become a "zero-teen." Now here is a concept I had not encountered, nor did I realize that the only gifts for a girl of this age are pricey electronics or pricey American Girl dolls.

This is ever so pertinent, since I informed Daisy just a week ago that there will be no tweenage in our household--you are a child until you are a teen, I said, (just like I said in 2000 that we would never eat in the car, in 2002 that no one would play computer games until they learned to read, and as recently as 2007 that our family would simply never have a video game system, and guess who now has a Wii?)--and then I let her buy the American Girl body book. (Thank the stars she has no interests in the sissy I mean historical dolls or their clothes, and in my defense, I made her buy the book with her own extensive stash of tweenage allowance money.) Anyway, now that Marge is blogging, I can keep up with her family, have a laugh, and get some advice on the state of the economic bailout at the same time--a beautiful efficiency.

Another friend is using her blog to make sure that people like me, whose only news source is early morning NPR, have easy access to the alternative media. At A Nice Gal's Guide to Online News and Politics, she makes it simple for me to keep up not only with her battles against chronic sinus infection, but with the new discourse of the Internet. She and I probably don't agree on everything, but we agree on enough about the world that I can trust her to point me in the right direction--an invaluable public service from my least public friend.

And then there's Sylvia Vardell, more of an acquaintance than a friend, who keeps me up to date on events in the world of shadowy world of children's poetry. I read, I write, I publish (very intermittently), but I do all this in a kind of vacuum, not having time to read all the children's book journals etc etc, so I'm grateful that there's somewhere to go for digestible tidbits of news and more than occasionally a poem to enjoy.

Finally, as a recent convert to Facebook, I appreciate the blog-spirited Status Updates from people I see regularly and those I haven't seen since high school, and let's face it, some of those updates are more worthy of the literature label. It all contributes to the possibility of contracting TMI disease, but this is more of the beauty of the blog--I go get it when I want it and not otherwise.

But le plus beau here is this: I'm sure I don't have anything as meaningful to say as Maxine, and I don't have the financial nouse of Marge or the political savvy of A Nice Gal, nor the connections that Sylvia profits from--and yet I too can set myself a purpose, set up a blog, and click "Publish." If nothing else (and if no one reads but me), it's a way to think, to write, to craft, and to have my say. Without bending too many live ears.

birth pangs

2008-11-12T09:29:00.011-05:00

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

~Sylvia Plath

I’m aching in couple of unusual places right now--I just raked and dragged 13 loads of leaves from my front yard using a rake with no handle (it had already lost half its handle in an unknown incident, and then I reversed over it in the driveway and completed the amputation). Working away in unaccustomed positions may be what got me thinking about birth pangs, or maybe I was already primed to recall the anguish of childbirth by the arrival on Monday, in PDF form, of my fourth child I mean second book.

Now, I have not experienced any of the shock or grief of parents whose baby arrives premature or sick or disabled. Compared to that, my own surprise at discovering, after all those years of living with my Child-Bearing Hips, that I wasn’t going to be able to push a baby out, and then my distress at finding that, according to the cosultant at the hospital my bosom practically screams “inadequate lactation”—I’m certain that these count as minor traumas.

So I don’t know if the feelings I’m having at the first glimpse of my newborn book fall into the category of major trauma, but it feels that way at the moment. This book had an unsteady start in that I didn’t understand for a couple of agonizing months that the publisher had already informally accepted it for publication—which is the opposite of eagerly peeing on a stick and seeing the thrilling or crushing response within 3 minutes. (I first announced the happy news of Daisy’s existence to a friend in the middle of a crosswalk at 15th and Q Streets—why wait until your actual partner gets home?) The gestation period of this book has been elephantine and then some; it has been 25 months since the process began and the book will not actually appear until Fall 2009.

Along the way there have been long periods of no movement at all, leading me to panic in the same way that every pregnant woman worries now and then that the baby may be—it’s hard even to write it—dead. And recently, even with a relative flurry of correspondence regarding a possible illustrator, a change of title, a possible cover sketch, copyeditor’s queries and a request for flap copy (author bio and front flap blurb, the writing of which is like preparing a birth announce- ment with a personality description instead of the simple facts of date, length and weight)—even with all this afoot, I was not ready for my bundle of joy to arrive in my inbox all at once with a note from the editor informing me that this was my last chance for text changes and that it would ship to printer ON THURSDAY.

Even so, this should be exciting news, right? The poems are as good as I can make them, the illustrations are lovely, things are really happening now—except that the illustrations don't always match my vision for the book. “Oh, woe is me!” I wailed yesterday to a friend who casually asked how I was at the bus stop. “After all this working and waiting, this book is like a fourth child, and I want it to be beautiful!” And then I realized that to an outside eye my book probably IS beautiful, and also that I don’t care exactly that it’s beautiful—but I do want my baby to look like me. That is, I was hoping that the illustrations would match the ideas in my poems and then go on to develop the ideas in my poems, make more of my words, rather in the way that anonymous genes have created unexpected richness in my two actual children—and (with no offense to the artist), I’m afraid that hasn’t happened here.

It's almost always true that love is the best response, but what kind of love works in this delivery room?