breath

When I first thought of trying to get a poetry book published, I began "studying the market" and found a striking and glorious book on the shelf in my local library.  It was Janet Wong's Night Garden: Poems from the World of Dreams, illustrated by Julie Paschkis, newly out in 2000.  This seemed to me the perfect marriage of words and art, but more importantly, it was the perfect use of poetry:

to faithfully
          unpredictably capture
the unreasonable
               undisciplined
       musings
of the mind.


I have since come to better understand the many "uses" of poetry, especially in the classroom, which go far beyond pure intrigue and enjoyment.  And, in the way of anyone who has practiced a craft for many years, I understand better now how much faith and flexibility, reason and discipline can go into the making of a poem that seems like a spontaneous flow or burst of the subconscious.

Unpredictable segue to Room 203, fall 2018: second-graders arrive from the tumult of recess followed by the Seventh Circle of Hell (aka lunch in the cafeteria).  We settle into our circle on the carpet and the Afternoon Leader selects a Mindful Breathing Exercise.  They are simple and brief, 3-5 breaths, and have names like Up and Down, Balloon Pop and Breathing Buddies.  But they serve to regather and recenter us to the purposes of the classroom.

But now it is late winter, and the Great Second-Grade Shift has begun: we're bigger in our bodies and MUCH bigger in our brains; we no longer care so much what the teacher thinks and are MUCH more interested in what our peers are saying, doing, judging, inventing, choosing. We are able to comprehend and appreciate the two points of view in a genius poem called "In the Hood" by Marilyn Singer, but often the Big Bad Wolf gets carried away...

It's time for some bigger breathing called YOGA.  Our simple Mountain Pose and Warrior Pose breathing exercises become part of a longer yoga routine like this one led by Leslie Fightmaster.
And I get out a book called Twist: Yoga Poems, also by Janet S. Wong and Julie Paschkis, and we begin with


Breath | Janet Wong

Breath is a broom
sweeping your insides.

Smooth and slow:
You pull scattered bits of dream fluff
and heart dust into neat piles.

Short and quick:
You coax shards of broken thoughts
out of forgotten corners.

Breath is a broom
sweeping you fresh.


****************************************

Burst or flow of subconscious, crafted into a language object of gorgeous usefulness.  Thank you, Janet--and Julie, will you illustrate my next book, please?  It'll be a while; full-time teaching is ever so distracting.

But in the meantime I get a poem or two out into the world by other means...I'm thrilled to announce that two forthcoming anthologies carry my poems--as different in feel as you can imagine.  The books are The Poetry of US, another National Geographic anthology edited by J. Patrick Lewis, and Imperfect: Poems About Mistakes, edited by Tabatha Yeatts.

The round-up today is with Michelle at Today's Little Ditty--can't wait to see what's breathing over there!

OIK Tuesday: overheard in the car

Every year at our congregation there's a holiday party between the two services, which offers kids the chance to make cards for sick kids, donate mittens to the mitten tree, roll up little goodies in crepe paper streamers that become Joy Balls intended for parents' stockings.  But you know what they head for first, don't you?  It's the graham cracker "gingerbread" house station, which gets its own whole room.

Both kids took quite a bit of time and effort over theirs this year (Duncan's being thatched with red licorice whips and then further shingled with brown M&Ms. There has been a lot of damaging weather this year and you just can't be too careful in a time of climate change), and on the way home in the car ("MOM!  Would you mind driving a little more carefully!") they commented on the less designed, less elegant approach of some fellow architects. 

"Most of them end up looking like sheds more than houses!"

***************************

Gingerbread Shed 

Four walls, flat roof

to make a lid—

built a bunker’s

all you did.

Shape is lost in

gobs of frosting.

Your hands, and arms,

and neck

need washing.

That’s no house—

it’s a gingerbread shed

to store the tools

of a sugarhead:

hersheykisseslicoricelace--

is that a froot loop on your face?

gumdropsskittlescandycanes--
your eyes say “Rush me to Insane.”

That’s no house—

it’s a gingerbread shed.

Now give me that

and go to bed.

Heidi Mordhorst 2012
DRAFT


Postscript:  Duncan pronounces this "the best thing you've written in a long time.  It rhymes and it tells the ideas in a way I can comprehend!"  I guess my campaign in defense of sensitive free verse for children is not over.

recomposition

I come to you today from Cabin 21 in Boyds Mills, PA, where I’m attending a Highlights Foundation workshop with David Harrison and enjoying a much-needed creative retreat.

There are times to be grateful for the hovering between asleep and awake that comes during the wee hours. Last week I wrote about visiting my son’s 2nd grade class with a poetry exercise—a new exercise that came to me during one of those thinking-but-not-too-hard moments. No doubt this technique has been obvious to other poetry teachers out there, but I was chuffed when I saw how well it worked to focus children’s attention on the structural aspect of poetry. I asked the children “recompose” one of my poems by cutting the words from an unstructured block and pasting them to create line and stanza breaks.

I picked a short poem from Pumpkin Butterfly, another seasonally appropriate one inspired by my son’s preschool utterances. First I “activated prior knowledge” and checked to see what the kids knew about botany (not much, although they easily identified the sunflower) and the instruments and style of jazz music (quite a bit).

Botanical Jazz

Quiet down, flower—
not so loud!

All this stretching your neck
and spreading your arms
bellowing your brassy yellow sass—

you’re breaking our eyedrums
trumpeting all that color and sun
blowing that blazing yellow jazz. . . .

Belt it out, flower—
we’ll join in!

~Heidi Mordhorst, 2009


I read the poem through twice, very slightly emphasizing the line breaks. (This raises a question that I’d enjoy seeing addressed in the comments: are you a poetry reader of the school that faithfully indicates line breaks in every style of poem, or are you a reader of the school that reads through line breaks in support of the natural phrasing of ideas?) I deliberately didn’t show the page.

Then I handed out a sheet with blank lines—three-quarters the width of the page—at the top and the words of the poem across four fully justified lines on the bottom.

The directions were to think about how to arrange the words to make the poem Sound Good to Your Ears and Feel Good in Your Mouth. Several children were unsure at first whether they had to use all the words—they thought I was asking them to reWRITE the poem—so guidance was needed : “Keep all the words of my poem in the same order, but you decide how many words to put on a line; you decide how many stanzas to make.” I made a big deal of it when I noticed Alexandra quietly reading her arrangement out loud to test the sound of it—“that’s exactly what poets do!”

Here are just three of the varying arrangements that the kids came up with.

Quiet down, flower—
not so loud!
All this stretching your neck
and spreading your arms bellowing your brassy yellow sass—
you’re breaking our eyedrums
trumpeting all that color and sun
blowing that blazing yellow jazz. . . .
Belt it out, flower—
we’ll join in!

H.T.


There were several kids who strung the gerund phrases into long lines like this. This one was very deliberately centered and shaped, which I can't easily reproduce here.


Quiet down, flower—not so loud!

All this stretching your neck and spreading
your arms bellowing your brassy yellow sass—

you’re breaking our eyedrums trumpeting
all that color and sun

blowing that blazing yellow jazz

...Belt it out, flower—we’ll join in!

C.I-C.

That's one of a few where stanza breaks were employed, and the new enjambments are quite effective…

Quiet down, flower—
not so loud! All this stretching
your neck and spreading your arms bellowing
your brassy yellow
sass—you’re breaking our eyedrums
trumpeting all that color and sun blowing
that blazing yellow
jazz…Belt
it out,
flower—we’ll
join in!

J.S.

And that's one where, without realizing she was doing it, the student’s arrangement resembled the head of the sunflower on a five-line stem!

These new imaginings absolutely have me questioning whether the published arrangement of “Botanical Jazz” is the ideal one…

But the very best surprise came from Jack O., who was concentrating so hard on his cut-and-paste task that he was halfway through rewriting a new poem before I caught up with him. It was too late to go back, so I encouraged him to finish, and boy, did he make this set of words his own! He even cut out individual letters to spell new words he needed. How confident! How clever! (Please note that Jack has experience of tae kwon do—we used to see him there every Thursday. Did this influence his recomposition?)


Jack’s Botanical Jazz

Quiet down, flower—your so loud!

you’re breaking our neck your

yellow jazz and yellow color e d

Belt i s blowing u s a w a y


Wow, right?


Today’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Toby the Terrific at The Writer's Armchair. See you there!