the fuellest month

My universe turned very juicy indeed on April 1, 1999: on this day was brought forth the fresh, hardy, thrive-anywhere perennial who is my daughter Daisy. Nowadays, what with her ever-changingness, the launch of National Poetry Month, all this spring ("as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,/Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes"), the first day of April seems to fill up my tank and fuel fresh starts and forward thrust. Heaven knows I need that! (I also need packages that arrive unexpectedly filled with crazy faith and chocolate-peanut clusters, but that's a whole 'nother heart-tickling story...)

I had a few poems in mind for today's post but now I have a better idea, if you'll join me in some April Fuellishness: a poetry game. I'll start, and as your comment you'll add a line to the poem. It's MiniPoetryTag!

It might work best if you cut and paste previous lines into the comment box before adding your line. My job will be to come back this afternoon and wrap the whole thing up, wherever it may have taken us. Ready? (And don't forget to visit Amy at the Poem Farm for all the rest of Poetry Friday.) Here goes....

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

Fresh starts, forward thrust--

[to you!]

magnetic charm--and some depth

I have taught sizeable classes of 2nd graders, more than once, and I don't remember it being as challenging as parenting a single 2nd-grade boy. I have carefully avoided teaching a class of 6th graders, or any group of kids older than 11--once they grow underarm hair my sense of control erodes quickly--so I was not prepared for the joy of parenting a single 6th-grade girl.

We have on our fridge a set of children's poetry magnets which usually say things like "did we eat green and blue monkey dog cheese?" (The set does not include punctuation, so the question mark there is my addition.) That 6th-grade girl, who lives daily in her sense that things are changing, that childhood fleets away, left the following on the fridge this week. Up high.

ask mom
by dmmg, age 11

will she shine

are books alive

is this good

where is my home

do flowers sing in water

are sundowns too fast

Yes, daughter, they are...and poems speak your soul.

And now, by way of contrast: the 2nd-grader, my little early bird, has just come downstairs. Apropos of nothing immediate, but apropos of our recent 1960's live-action Batman viewing (the campy series featuring Bruce Wayne and his youthful ward Dick Grayson), he asks,

"Who names their child after a penis?!"

The poetry roundup this week is with Elaine at Wild Rose Reader...see you there, and don't forget to read my "extra" post this week featuring some really good news.

more, more, more (how do you like it?)

I made a fine discovery this week--my daughter's new reading teacher is a writer with a YA novel , Falling for Hamlet, coming out next year. I also found that in addition to her personal facebook page, Michelle Ray has a new "writer" page that she's using like a miniblog, if I'm reading it right.

This makes some sense to me, especially since purchase of a cell phone for said daughter has resulted in a new phone for me--a smartphone which is considerably smarter than I am at the moment--and which has downloaded all my facebook contact info.

So I find myself asking, in the interest of a more consistent online writer presence, what goal makes more sense: to double the number of posts to this blog to a whopping TWO per week, or to try and comment more briefly but more frequently on facebook? And (importantly): comment on what? My fervent desire to snatch Hermione's time-turner from around her neck as D2 and I enter Chapter 6 of The Prisoner of Azkaban? And what would be the reason to want a more consistent online writer presence?

All reflections welcome....

poemusic

I've been a fan of Natalie Merchant since near the beginning, and many of her songs with the band 10,000 Maniacs are in my top 50 of all time (however, do not ask me to list my Top 50 of All Time; I'm nowhere near ready to commit. But "These Are Days" is in the Top Ten). Today I'm finally getting around to enjoying a (March) birthday present from my mother: Natalie's new project, Leave Your Sleep.

Leave Your Sleep is a collection of 26 songs, all of them composed around poems by a wide variety of well- and lesser-known poets including Rachel Field, Jack Prelutsky (the only one still living), Ogden Nash and Eleanor Farjeon. The year-long project "represents parts of a long conversation I've had with daughter during the first six years of her life."

The two CDs come packaged in a fetching small book which includes short biography and a black-and-white portrait of each poet--a treasure trove for anyone who has wondered, like me, why more popular songs aren't set to poems.

Easily my favorite so far is "maggie and milly and molly and may"--lyrics by e. e. cummings, a poet also dear to my heart. Click here to listen to a snippet of this lovely piece that gives, as my own read-alouds often fail to do, a seemingly simple narrative poem all the glow and gravitas in the atmosphere as it has inside us.

maggie and milly and molly and may
~ e. e. cummings

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

late for poetry month

April 1 is a very important day for me and it has nothing to do with National Poetry Month--or it has everything to do with National Poetry Month! Back in 1999 I was faced with the fact that while I seemed to be very good at growing a baby, I was not going to be good at pushing a baby out. It was disappointing to think that I had been carrying around those child-bearing hips since age 12 for nothing; on the other hand, it was fun to choose my daughter's birthday, and if you can choose April Fool's Day, whyever would you pick March 31 or April 2?

Thus arrived our little April Fool, two weeks late and by appointment--and shortly thereafter, following a hiatus of 15 years, I felt the urge to write poems again. (More on this funny twist to my writing life in my interview later this month with Tricia Stohr-Hunt at The Miss Rumphius Effect). This year, on April 1, when I might have been posting for Poetry Friday, we were with our shiny new 11-year-old in Charlottesville, touring Monticello, eating outrageous desserts and swimming in the hotel pool.

Today I post the next two poems included in the public charter school application--the ones about reading and writing. Just see who authored the poem I chose to open the section on the place of writing in our school's curriculum...

The First Book

Open it.

Go ahead, it won't bite.
Well...maybe a little.

More a nip, like. A tingle.
It's pleasurable, really.

You see, it keeps on opening.
You may fall in.

Sure, it's hard to get started;
remember learning to use

knife and fork? Dig in;
you'll never reach the bottom.

It's not like it's the end of the world--
just the world as you think

you know it.

~Rita Dove (who, in a superb coincidence, is a professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville)


While Writing

Let the words come to you
Let the words escape you; flowing through your body to your pen
Let the words lead you through your whole life.

Let the words seize you
Let the words rip you from your world and take you to theirs
Let the words uncover your deepest thoughts

The words make feelings express themselves
The words make real life seem like fantasy
The words make us feel like nothing will ever be bad

And I love the words

~Daisy, age 10 (after Langston Hughes's "April Rain Song" )

animal spirituality

is at The Miss Rumphius Effect today.


A sleepover on Christmas Eve at the grandparents' in Baltimore is part of our holiday tradition, elegantly (if I say so myself) incorporated into our family's 12 Days of Yuletide. I got a lovely gift this year from my mother--two books of poetry, The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins and Voices by Lucille Clifton. Lucille (I stand in awe and yet presume a first-name basis) is one of my favorite Revered Adult Poets because of the brevity and simplicity of her writing, which enables her also to speak to the youngest children. If you don't know them, go find the Everett Anderson books soon. The variety in Voices is stunning, and I particularly liked this one and shared it with D the elder:

horse prayer

why was i born to balance
this two-leg
on my back to carry
across my snout
his stocking of oat and apple
why i pray to You
Father Of What Runs And Swims
in the name of the fenceless
field when he declares himself
master
does he not understand my
neigh

It reminded me of the following, which I once used as the basis for a writing project with Year 2 children in London:

The Prayer of the Little Ducks

Dear God,
give us a flood of water.
Let it rain tomorrow and always.
Give us plenty of the little slugs
and other luscious things to eat.
Protect all folk who quack
and everyone who knows how to swim.
Amen.

~Carmen Bernos de Gasztold
translated from the original French by Rumer Godden
from the collection Prayers from the Ark

Somehow I find the gods of animals more accessible than the gods of humans. : )

one of my many projects

Poetry Friday is not lamenting but crowing over at GottaBook with Gregory K.

At our house, Gregory's "fibs" got everyone excited, especially my mathematician of a daughter, and I found J. Patrick's "zeno" intriguing as well. Intermittently I get an idea for another "definition" poem, which is not a form exactly but an intention for a poem: in few words it attempts to capture the essence of a less common word. It started with this one, written after D1, then in third grade, asked "What does immaculate mean?" and then separately, assigned me to write a poem of at least 10 lines. So I synergized:

Definitions #1

not a
smudge of mud
not a
jot of rot

just
tulip leaves of clean green
just
tulip petals of pure red

mingling, singularly
immaculate

Here's a new one, first draft, from this week's engagement with D2's Level 16 nonfiction text entitled Squirrels.

Definitions # 12

reading about squirrels
your throat tightens
on seeing the limp body of the squirrel
under the cruel talons of the hawk

reading about hawks
your heart leaps
on seeing the skill of the hawk
as it drops onto the fleet squirrel

it's all a matter of
perspective

Now I wonder if I should formalize it after all...see how both have exactly 10 lines? and they want to fall into three stanzas of 3, 3 and 2 lines, with the last word being the word they define. Maybe it needs a name...the "definito"? Should the title also be the word in question? Anyone else want to play?

nanonature

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? : )

finally, a solution?

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.

the other way around

On the way from the bus stop, just the two of us, I announce the creation of my new blog to Daisy. "Why does everything have to be about Squeeze?" she asks in a tone of weary complaint.

"This blog isn't about Squeeze; it's about me and our family and whatever I think of writing about." I explain that the writing of the Squeeze book and its title poem wasn't just random, or even part of a cunning plan to invade her every classroom with Mommy's Patent Poetry Workshop.

I continue my speech. "The poem called "Squeeze" tells what I really believe about life. My universe is pretty small, but it's also pretty juicy, and I believe it's part of my job on earth to squeeze the juice out day by day."

I demonstrate by grabbing her behind and giving it a juicy goose. That gets a better reaction. Someday maybe she'll actually ask to see my boring blog.