poem of a dress

Greetings, Poetry People, and welcome to this aggressively-arriving December! I don't celebrate Advent in the traditional sense, but I'm very aware of it all the same. When the first Sunday of Advent is also the first DAY of December a person can feel a little rushed, and when the first week of December brings freeze and snow (unusual for these parts) a person could feel a little chilly, too. Not to mention the similarly aggressive DARKNESS.

Luckily we have poetry to keep things warm and bright, and this month I offered the Inklings a simple challenge: "Address an item of your clothing."

Once upon a time in 2019 I was at NCTE, striding the halls of the Baltimore Convention Center, and a woman passed before me wearing an item of clothing that I literally had to reach out and grab. (I hope it was more of a reach-out-and-unaggressively-tap-her-shoulder, but I was very excited so I can't be sure.)

In my hurry I skipped the civil preambles of "Excuse me" and went straight to "Where did you get that DRESS?" She overlooked my abruptness because she was also a teacher in a hurry; she told me where (and this post is sponsored in spirit by woman-owned internet merchant Svaha); I arrived at my NCTE session and immediately ordered it using my phone.

And so began a lengthy love story. I wore this dress for the umpteenth time just yesterday while teaching an ekphrastic poetry workshop to 150 6th graders, and I was wearing it in November when I wrote poems of address, advice and apology with 5th graders...which of course made we want to write a Poem of A Dress. THIS dress!--although my version is a slightly different style.

Hee hee. Incidentally, this poem owes some of its vocabulary and figures to the 5th graders of Mrs. Twigg's Class, who helped me workshop it when Mrs. Twigg and I critiqued each other's poems by way of demonstrating a response protocol for sharing poems with a partner. (Mrs. Twigg's poem was also great fun, full of hand-and-heartwarming "Brewed Wisdom" for the barista in all of us.)

As you can see, though, this dress is not well-suited for warmer, more colorful months, in my opinion, so in March I ordered a second writerly Svaha dress, with a design called "Botanical Library." I wore it for the first time on April 22 to a protest at the Supreme Courth about opting out of LGBTQ+ books in my district's classrooms--the perfect symbolic combination for Earth Day and Representation in Books!

I wonder what items of clothing our other Inkling friends will address? Check them out below, and thanks to our distinctly UNaggressive host Irene at Live Your Poem for rounding us up  today!                

Catherine @Reading to the Core
Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Mary Lee @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche