sunday swaggers question themselves

It's the first Friday of the month and so the members of our critique group once again have a challenge before them:  to write a question poem.  That is all the guidance our friend Margaret Simon has given us!

Now I like a prescribed form as much as the next poet, for its opportunity to stretch my skills within defined boundaries, but as I note in this piece (which I wrote back in 2011 and have just rediscovered!) free verse is my jam.  So Margaret's challenge is a nice one for me, since I may pose my question/s in whatever form the poem itself seems to demand.  To me a poem is not a poem unless it can show off its shapeliness, unless it operates by some detectable pattern or principle that becomes constraining even if it then breaks free by the end.

I wonder if this poem, written for Laura Shovan's February Poetry Project on February 14th, meets that criterion.  I myself posted the photo and the prompt, which was "MELT IT."

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Meanwhile, I have begun a poetry collaboration with a 5th grader, NZ, whom I taught in 2nd grade.  Poetry just oozes out of him wherever he goes, so I suggested a shared Google Doc and we've been poeting back and forth.  Here's our current exchange...

Some Questions

HM What is it like to be an only child?

NZ Don’t know, I never was. I imagine freedom, 

more love than anything in the world. 

HM No, I never was. What is freedom?

NZ Freedom is the wind blowing on my face,

while my dad hugs me on the boardwalk

next to the great big ocean.

HM The loose wind of the world, the tight hold of a hug.

Is freedom made of push and pull?

NZ Something like that. Freedom can be

being set free, or it could be the opposite,

something holding you back.

How do you see the world?

A meaningless piece of rock,

a speck of dust in the ever growing universe?

Or something more?

HM Something more, something more.  

The rock makes meaning as it breaks from the soil,

as it is built and falls from the human wall,

as it crumbles into dust carried by the wind.

NZ That wind, what does it feel like

as it carries the dust into the great big galaxy?

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And finally, I was wondering last night:

We poets, are we not the posers

of answers rather than questions?

You come to us for our philosophies

of blades of grass and breaking glass,

of blaring joy and ominous birds,

and surely our job is to answer, like

oracles dropping flowers on the water

from our coracles woven of words.

We poets are paddlers, leaving you,

leading you to the answers, not

leaking a trail of questions like

bread crumbs along the path only

to be eaten, to take up rain, to sink 

slowly toward the bottom, nibbled

by fishes along the way.  

Is it not so, that we poets are here to

tidily bundle up the salty grains of truth?

©Heidi Mordhorst 2020

InstadraftTM

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Don't forget to visit the rest of the Swaggers to see what "question poem" means to each of them, and thanks to Rebecca for hosting at Sloth Reads this week!

-Catherine at Reading to the Core
-Linda at A Word Edgewise -Margaret at Reflections on the Teche -Molly at Nix the Comfort Zone

npm pmmu #11: fanfare for *The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary*!

Tomorrow is a very special day for my dear friend Laura Shovan...it's the birthday of her debut book The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary!  Laura has worked long and hard to get to this moment with many other poetic accomplishments along the way, but I think she might say that this book--conceived, developed, written, revised, agented, acquired, edited, marketed, listed and heralded everywhere already--is a Very Big Deal.

For the Poetry-Music Match-Up series I asked busy Laura to send me one poem from this novel-in-verse that would inspire a musical match-up.  Laura made an obvious choice!  It's in the voice of fifth-grader Ben Kidwell.

PERCUSSION POEM || Laura Shovan

Ben Kidwell

Every time

I try to write a poem,

the pencil goes

scritch a scratch.

My pencils

tick a tack

drumbeats

on my desk.

My feet boom

badoom the floor

like a heartbeat

always moving.

My words

take up a rhythm

like the wind

blowing outside.

Scritch a scratch

Tick a tack

Boom badoom

Outside outside

How can I write

when everything around

makes an interesting

sound?

It's not the first time this one poem has been matched to music, I recall.  Back in February, when she was making match-ups, Tabatha Yeatts got hold of "Percussion Poem" too.  Her music choice was an orchestral piece played by a Venezuelan youth orchestra, and mine--the more obvious choice for a poet grown in the medium of Top 40 radio--has a Latin American flavor too, despite being a thoroughly American disco hit before Gloria Estefan Miamified it.

Here's Vicki Sue Robinson with her 1976 hit "Turn the Beat Around."  Pretty sure Ben Kidwell would "love to hear percussion" too!  Did this earworm creep into Laura's head when Ben was trying to write a poem in class Scritch a scratch/Tick a tack/Boom badoom?

 posted to YouTube by Sirius80s

written by Gerald Jackson and Peter Jackson

 Hope that got your day going!  Come back tomorrow to stretch your musical boundaries with something completely different.

overheard in Sunday School

This year at my Unitarian Universalist congregation we're using a new (to us) approach to religious education known as the WRM or Workshop Rotation Model.  Rather than sending same-grade groups of kids to the same class with the same teachers each Sunday, the kids are divided into several multiage groups and each month a handful of different types of lessons are taught around a theme.  The groups rotate through each lesson over the course of the month, with new volunteers teaching each month. 

In February, when our theme was Truth, I offered a poetry workshop.  I worked with three groups of  3rd-5th graders, and our RE Director worked with our one group of K-2nd graders.  As I had hoped, UU kids were especially receptive to poetry and dove in, producing some really first-rate work in our one hour together.  (Someday I'll write a post about what I mean about UU's and poetry.)

I used a poem from my collection Squeeze about a special rock to introduce the idea of an "outside truth" (the sensory, scientific facts about a thing) and an "inside truth"--the personal experiences and imaginations about a thing that are equally meaningful and true.  We provided some interesting nature objects as inspiration, and challenged the children to be aware, as they wrote, about whether they were expressing the outside truth or the inside truth about their subject.  Even the adult guides for each group wrote, and one of them, Danie Smallwood, a photographer, took really striking photos of the objects for an illustrated anthology of the poems, which we'll copy for the congregation to enjoy.

Here are the first two poems in the series, each of them first and only drafts.  Enjoy!













Starfish 

With five points sticking out

Pops of white bursting out

Light brown spots

Hard to see

Like the bottom with a honey-colored line that seems to be

Pouring out

Woven under

With small holes

That to me look as if they are going to break open

Unlike the ocean

Harsh, never stopping, never having an opening

 

~Katie, 5th grade

 Light Wing

Light wing, bumpy wing,

Light wing, colorful, and bumpy.

Yellow dots, black dots,

Light wing in my hands.  

 

~ Zachary, 2nd grade

 

The roundup for this week's Poetry Friday is over at GottaBook with Greg. Go gear up for National Poetry Month!

 

"paying no heed to the biting cold wind"

The biting cold wind of middle age has swept in, and there is no doubt that my middle-aged brain can't do what it used to. I used to walk into a classroom each year and learn 25 names in 30 seconds; now I need nametags and at least 30 minutes, and the names I do know tend to hover tantalizingly just above my tongue at the moment I need them most. However, I've been noticing a different memory phenomenon that puzzles me a little. 

I spent time this week in my daughter's fifth grade classroom talking about poetry as memoir. To mirror the young writers' process, I wrote a fresh new memoir poem for their critique. (I'm sharing below the draft I took in yesterday before their questions, comments and suggestions showed me many ways to improve it.) Once I got going on this poem, I had no trouble at all accessing strong physical and emotional memories of the way my friend and I played. I have deep wells of detailed memory from the years between 5 and 14--not comprehensive by any means, and only sort of chronological--which have fed my writing over the last ten years. 

But I just allowed my 25th college reunion to pass without me, partly because of a kind of embarrassment about what I don't remember (and what classmates I know seem to remember quite clearly and easily). Is there really a difference between the way I experienced things at 10 and at 20 and then again at 30? Some difference in intensity, some difference in the quality or mode of recording memories at different ages? Or does it have something to do with writing itself? 

At 10 I was a writer, but by 15, even, I was recording my life in journals and poems and term papers and letters, and by 25 practically everything in my life went on paper somehow: lesson plans, travel packing lists, favorite songs, budgets.... Maybe it has always been, since 15, the way it is now: I write it down so that I don't have to actively remember it. I decided long ago that, after the kids themselves, our family diaries are what I'd take if the house were burning down. It's a good trick, but it makes me sad to think that in committing these experiences to paper I am perhaps erasing them from my mind. 

 <poem redacted>