resume

Thoughtful commentary will resume after I update my resume and prepare to find a new job. I am now officially an "involuntary transfer."
*sigh* In the meantime, slam bam thank you Mr. Mali...



Definitely beautiful.

Discuss what YOU make this Poetry Friday at A Year of Reading with Mary Lee....She makes me laugh.

life in me like grass on fire

This week I'm celebrating my first foray into publishing poetry for adults. I'm delighted to say that I have three poems in Life in Me Like Grass on Fire, an anthology on the theme of love treated in its broadest, richest sense by 50 members of the Maryland Writers' Association.

Laura Shovan, a fellow Maryland poet (whom I first met at a SCBWI conference), alerted me to the opportunity and has served as a tireless, intuitive editor. She even asked me to write an introduction to the section called "Love Floods the Senses," in which two of my poems are placed--a request that was both terribly flattering and terribly daunting, probably the hardest piece of writing I've done in the last few months.

Our official launch is at the annual conference of the MWA on April 2nd, but you can support "local poetry" by pre-ordering this collection here and now at 20% off. To whet your appetite, here's one of my contributions to the collection, from the section entitled "Friends and Family." (As usual, I'm unable to preserve the formatting of the poem in blogger--can anyone help me solve that problem?)

Ears

DANGER MAD ELEPHANT
read the signs on the boxcar

and my daughter on the verge of three
sits sobbing, hands over her ears
as Mrs. Jumbo rocks her Dumbo
cradling him in the curl of her trunk
the only part of her hugeness
he can reach through the bars
this is the scary part

Baby mine, don’t you cry
she wails, “Mama I need you”

yes, you need me
to tell you why I’m full of tears
why I’m the one who needs a nap
why the clowns are bad guys
and why your days are “full of troubling”
when they used to be one long bubbling bath
of peek-a-boo
I see you

Rest your head close to my heart
to hear what I can’t tell you yet:
the flutter of faraway stork wings

~ Heidi Mordhorst
in Life in Me Like Grass on Fire, MWA Books 2011

Today's Poetry Friday Roundup is with Andromeda at a wrung sponge, where she uses a very interesting volume of poetry to connect all of us to our Japanese earthmates. May stork wings fly eastward bearing renewal.

effective

Wednesday I spent 6 hours in a hearing of the House Ways & Means Committee of Maryland's General Assembly, waiting to testify on a bill regarding, predictably, our public charter school law. While there I heard testimony on a bill that would add teacher "ineffectiveness" to the list of causes for dismissal, along with things like poor attendance and moral turpitude (I don't think that term is used any more but I love the sound of the word turpitude a lot).

This would seem to make sense--as in other professions, if you're not doing a good job you should be, as they say in my partner's consulting firm, "counseled out." The problem is that, despite recent focused research and writing about what great teachers actually do on a moment-by-moment basis, no one is still very sure exactly what constitutes teacher effectiveness--or how to measure it.

Personally, I consider good teaching to be an art, much like poetry. So often the sum of a great poem is greater than its parts; while connoisseurs may appreciate the dazzle of discrete elements of a poem, there is an alchemical mystery to the overall effect, as in this one by Howard Nemerov. It is often this way in the classroom, too.

To David, About His Education
~ Howard Nemerov

The world is full of mostly invisible things,
And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,
Or its nose, in a book,to find them out,
Things like the square root of Everest
Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,
Or whether the law of the excluded middle
Applies west of the Rockies. .......
........ such things are said to be
Good for you, and you will have to learn them
In order to become one of the grown-ups
Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,
But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world
Under his hat, which is where it belongs,
And teaches small children to do this in their turn.


Read the complete poem here, and catch the mysterious sums over at The Small Nouns with Ben on this Poetry Friday. He's leading with an homage to Lucille Clifton, also one of my favorite poets during all months of the year.

"I am ewnec"

The poetry version of last week's first-grade effort to grasp character traits...

On the outside, you can see my physical traits:
"I have tanish-pinkish sgin."
"I have krly eyelashs."
"my body is tall"
"my hair is shtrayt"
My words and actions show my character traits on the inside:
"I am a little shiy."
"I am prsistent."
"I take care of my frands"
"I have lost of ideas"
"I am ewnec. there is only one me in the wrld."

And an open letter to colleagues:

As we survey our reading asessment results and think about how best to meet the needs of children in our classes, I want to raise a few points that I think sometimes get insufficient attention in our “data-driven instructional model."

The students we work with are 5, 6 and 7 years old. They are all, to a greater or lesser degree, egocentric, and they live in the here and now of their daily experience. They come to us as children first, and no matter what their academic ability they share the fundamental needs we all have: the need for security and comfort, the need to be known (and yes, loved). That’s partly why we have chosen this job, because we’re good at making little children feel at home in our classrooms--their home away from home.

Our students come to us second as individual learners. Each one has his or her strengths and weaknesses, and part of being a good learner is growing into a sense of where you have the power to help others along and where you might need to ask for help. We create heterogeneous classes because that’s what the world is like, and part of a good education is learning to be an effective participant in a diverse community. (In fact, I believe that’s the whole point of public education in a democracy, which is why, even as a reading teacher, I tend to start my planning with the social studies curriculum in mind).

Third on the list, our students come to us as readers--and now they all have a nice fresh label attached. In my first grade class, for example, I have two boys who are alike in many ways—mischievous, not as intrinsically motivated to “do school” as we might wish, and within 6 months of each other in age (which is quite a lot, really, when you’re only 72 months old). They have both moved from Level 5 to Level 8 since the beginning of the year, but I will not be putting them in the same guided reading group, because they are very different learners.

One is wired to decode pretty well, but he has a hard time focusing on the ideas behind the words, and in general his problem-solving skills are not strong. He needs a lot of support in reading for meaning, and a slower pace will also be a benefit as he struggles with some unfortunate family circumstances. I’ll put him with the Level 5/6/7’s because there he can have a chance to shine a little and the comprehension demands will be manageable.

The other boy is much more attentive to life generally, more observant, has shown himself ready and willing to rise to a challenge as long as it wasn’t actual reading. However, he’s been very conscious of his struggles in comparison with classmates, and now that he’s making some noticeable progress, this is the moment to put him with a snappier group of thinkers, to capitalize on his competitive tendency and to maximize his growing investment in becoming a reader. I’ll be putting him with the 10/11/12’s--for now.

And then there are the books. We know that all Level 8 books are not equal, and just because both boys read the Level 8 fiction selection successfully doesn’t mean they’ll do as well with every other book labeled 8. So it’s part of my job to choose books that will be “just right” for each of these boys labeled Level 8, and those “just right” books may be Level 6’s or Level 10’s or not leveled at all. They may be books that speak to each boy where he is right now, like Goggles! by Ezra Jack Keats, which they both love because of the way Peter and Archie put one over on the big boys. This book is challenging for each boy in different ways, but they are both persevering in reading it because it’s meaningful and because it has become part of our classroom culture.

By now you may have guessed what point I'm getting at. Because our students are children first, who need to feel at home in the culture of a classroom (a culture that we work hard to build), individual learners second, and labeled, leveled readers last, I want to advocate against moving Kindergarten and 1st grade children around at this point in the year.

I feel strongly that any instructional gains we may earn by moving a child into a group with other Level X’s are likely to be cancelled out by the emotional upheaval of moving that child out of one classroom culture (that culture that we so carefully build in community with our students) and into another.

Of course, there are always reasons to make considered exceptions, but I think we mistakenly give up some of our professional power if we allow the handheld assessment device to determine a child’s daily experience of school. I believe in the usefulness of data, and I believe that teachers and children are more than interchangeable pegs in a big pegboard. Grouping by reading level tends to turn us all into pegs.

With respect for all you do in the classroom,
Heidi

bookable

There has been a lot of discussion recently about, to put it dramatically, the death of the poetry anthology and the difficulty of getting our themed and "random" collections of poetry published and recognized. As I read to my kids this week in school--more Ezra Jack Keats for 1st graders (full of poetic moments) and Rosemary Wells for the kindergarteners--it occurs to me that we may be neglecting another approach to getting our best work into the hands of young readers--the "picture poem book."

Wells's Noisy Nora is a grand example of a rhymed picture book text that could easily stand alone, even without her characteristic, finely detailed illustrations, as one poem in a collection like Sing a Song of Popcorn. If we begin to imagine all the picture book texts that could "cross over" into the realm of anthologized poems, it becomes easier to imagine the poems that might cross over in the other direction, into the realm of stand-alone picture books.

There are plenty of out there--one of my favorites is e.e. cummings "little tree" rendered beautifully book-length by Deborah Kogan Ray (and adapted into an actual story, possibly unnecessarily, by Chris Raschka). Several have mentioned the Delmore Schwartz-Barbara Cooney work pictured here, I Am Cherry Alive--enjoy Kate Coombs's reflections on it here. And a kind Booklist reviewer of my own Squeeze suggested that "The best poem, “How to Run Away,” could be a picture book in itself." What a compliment!

Of course, not all good or even excellent poems will stand up to a picture poem book treatment--and if we have exerted ourselves to percolate ideas and write poems from a "collection" point of view, it's likely that most of the poems written from that stance huddle too close to their flockmates to be comfortable out on their own.

I'm going to spend some time reflecting on what qualities make a poem picture-bookable and try to articulate them. I'm also going to be thinking which of my poems offer enough possibility for an illustrator, enough richness to warrant whole books to themselves. And then I'll start thinking again about the agent who might shop them for me!

Which of your poems are "bookable?"

the mystery of zingerline

Recently on NPR's Science Friday there was a piece on how our many online social media opportunities raise a question about the multiple identities we all inhabit and how we present ourselves to the world. I think I'm what you might call a "casual user" of this technology, but even I am splintered across this blog and my static website, two accounts on facebook, LinkedIn and twitter (as yet unused), three email addresses (personal,"writer" and teacher), about a dozen listservs (three different usernames) and a charter school identity. And who knows how many sites (Evite, Groupon, amazon.com to name a few) think they know who I am and what kind of cookies I like?

But long ago--ten whole years and then some--before any of this, when most of us were pretty cutting-edge in having any email address at all, I considered redefining my poet self by writing under a pen name instead of under the same old scary-looking, mispronounceable Mordhorst (which, by the way, is spelled just the way it sounds and pronounced just the way it's spelled, so please don't say MordhUrst). I came back to poetry almost the minute my daughter was born (talk about identity crisis: "You are now Mommy"), and while taking workshops at the wonderful Writers' Center here in Bethesda, I started signing my drafts "Heidi Zingerline."

The new surname choice was totally legit and even served a historical purpose, I thought. My mother's maiden name is Zingerline and with only one set of cousins on her side of the family, both girls, the name is in danger of disappearing from use. Plus, how perfect is that for a poet--zinger-line? Get it?

Then I realized that there was no way to communicate all that information in a byline, and that anyone who didn't know that Zingerline was a real name, mine to use by rights, might see it as a cheesy joke. I briefly considered "Heidi Zingerline Mordhorst," but it's not like "Heidi Mordhorst" needs any further distinguishing feature--maybe, if I had been Lisa Smith my whole life, Lisa Zingerline Smith might have made some sense.

But what really changed my mind was a poem written by a fellow workshopper and instant friend from the Writers' Center. He arrived at a critique group meeting one week in 2000 with this to share, and now the only vestige of my flirtation with Zingerline is in my writer email address, zingerline@gmail.com. Thank you, Lawrence, for your faith in Mordhorst.

Nom de plume
For "Heidi Zingerline," newly named

Mordhorst.
A commanding sound -- so majestic!
It could be a painting
by Vermeer: View of
Mordhorst.

Or a short
story, no? One of Edgar Allan Poe's
more fearsome inventions --
"The Fall of the House of
Mordhorst."

Or a series
for Masterpiece Theatre -- imagine
Alastair Cooke: "Welcome
to tonight's episode of
Mordhorst

Revisited."
I'm sorry I misspelled your name. Please
don't take another just because
my fingers can't type
"Mordhorst."

Ignorant
digits. They pay no attention, and
sometimes the eyes don't either.
But the ears delight in
"Mordhorst."

~Lawrence Biemiller
October, 2000 ~ all rights reserved

The round-up today is with my new acquaintance Carol Rasco, the CEO of RIF. Does my awe at the fact that the CEO of anything big would hang out at Poetry Friday reveal a streak of cynicism, or have I just suffered bad timing?

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.

a certain kind of poetry

"CONCLUSION [OF THE MARYLAND STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION]:

...because we find that the local board has failed to provide any rationale for its decision, we reverse and remand [the appeal case of Global Garden Public Charter School ] so that the local board may reconsider its decision in light of the rulings we have made in this case. We expect that such reconsideration shall occur within 90 days of the date of this decision."

found out

Last week I mentioned Frank O'Hara and linked to a really interesting piece on him by yet another poet I didn't know, Elaine Equi. She's quite famous, and pretty soon agents of the Academy of American Poets are going to show up on my so-called poet's doorstep and relieve me of my laminated Poets Club ID card based on my dire ignorance of modern American poetry.

I'll plead with them, explaining that after all it was I who, as a work-study student at Wesleyan University Press in 1982, discovered Yusuf Komunyakaa's Copacetic in the slush pile and sent it breathlessly off to the Editorial Board, but they'll say, "That's no excuse for admitting in public that you had never heard of Elaine Equi until 2011. Just look at the kind of works she's been producing since 1978, long before you found yourself typing first-reader's reports in Middletown, CT on a manual typewriter using carbon sets."

They'll thrust a page into my hands. "Just look at this poem from The Cloud of Knowable Things! And you call yourself a poet!" Then they'll turn on their heels as I cry from my kidscribbled, catscratched teacher's doorway, "Please--I just need more time!"

[echo of "more time! more time! more time!" receding into the distance]

excerpt from

The Objects in Fairy Tales

are always
the most important
characters.
Then as now,
the power to transform
is theirs —
the story
a way of talking through
(and to) us.
Shoes of Fortune,
Magic Beans,
are unlike objects
in magazines
for they awaken
us against our will
from the spell of abject
longing for more.
Only then do we live
happily ever after.


2.

They speak
but not
to everyone,

just those
ready to hear
and endure

what they have to say —

impossible tasks,

shine wrapped around
the seedvoice.

Golden apples
in the grasp of time.

"I'll climb up."

~ Elaine Equi

I wonder: what kind of well-read do you have to be, to write well?

Explore this question and others at A Teaching Life with Tara Smith, host of Poetry Friday this week.

I promise a return to the Kidlitosphere next week...

"what buds?"

My son is 8 and although he knows a lot about the world, I'm sometimes surprised at what I assume he knows and doesn't. We had another 2" of snow overnight on Tuesday and therefore (somewhat absurdly) a 2-hour delay on Wednesday, so we had time to gear up and head out to the bus stop half-an-hour early. It wasn't great snowball snow--fine and flaky and extra-sparkly in the sun--so we found other ways to amuse ourselves, like shaking snow off branches (and is there anything more beautiful than dark branches frosted in sparkling snow against a blue, blue sky?) .

"Look at all the buds," I said. "They know spring will come again even though it doesn't feel like it now." I bothered to say it out loud because this knowledge added to my hopeful, sunny, fresh-air feeling. Duncan looked up and said, "What buds?" You know, like he'd never heard of buds. I pointed out the little textured teardrops at the end of each twig on the--actually I don't even know what kind of tree we were standing under. "Each of those is a tiny beginning of a leaf, just waiting for the weather to warm up." "Really? Cool," he replied, and went to jump daringly into the snow from a wall which is rumored to contain a snakehole.

There was time when I eschewed exclamation marks as a sign of weak writing in need of bolstering by flashy punctuation. Frank O'Hara changed my mind about that (and has inspired many others), and see how WCW uses one surprisingly! in this otherwise softspoken poem. I think it renders perfectly the feeling we have when we can cross something big off our to-do list, relax and store up wisdom. Hm. I miss that feeling...

Winter Trees
by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

Enjoy Poetry Friday today with Laura Purdie Salas at Writing the World for Kids--and congratulations indeed to Joyce Sidman for her Newbery Honor medal--it'll look great on the cover of Dark Emperor. Go Poetry!

winter eyes

Every day on the morning announcements at my school, there's a "Did you know...?" Yesterday's was, "Did you know it might SNOW tomorrow?"

Personally I could live without most of winter, but around these parts real snow comes seldom enough that it brings real magic when it does. On the other hand (and I'm convinced this is due directly to climate change), the 5- to 7-year-olds that I teach have grown up in a mid-Atlantic region with considerably more snowfall than I ever enjoyed as a kid, where we tended to get one snowfall of 10-12" a year sometime in January--never in time for Christmas!

So the kindergartners do know what it's like to cross a landscape something like that in Jan Brett's The Mitten, and the first-graders know something about venturing out into hills and expanses of snow like Peter in The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. Today is Poetry Friday in my classes and Douglas Florian has something for both groups! His 1999 Winter Eyes (Greenwillow) is so full of goodies--and really no two the same, kinda like snowflakes--that it's hard to choose.

To the kindergarteners, who are as a whole a snappy group, I could offer "Winter Tracks," about the same meadow mouse that figures in The Mitten, or "Winter Burrows," which would echo yesterday's discussion about how Jan Brett eschews the boring popcorn words "go" and "went" to make the animals "burrow," "wriggle" and "nose" their way into the mitten. But because of Nicki's white mittens on white snow, I'm going to give them "Winter Wear."

Winter Wear
Douglas Florian

The weasel wears a coat of white.
He always keeps it zippered tight.
It helps him weasel out of sight.

The snowshoe hare from head to toe
Wears white wherever she may go
To help her hide against the snow.

The snowy owl perched in a tree
On snowy days is hard to see.
I don't see him but he sees me.

In our white coats we come to peek.
On winter wildlife we sneak.
We play a game of hide and seek.

How simple, how pleasing! To the first-graders, who as a group benefit from taking things more slowly, I'll offer "Sled," a concrete poem that climbs the left side of a two-page spread just like Peter climbs "up a great big tall heaping mountain of snow," and then speeds down the right side just like Peter sli-i-i-des all the way down.
Here's the text:

Sled
Douglas Florian

First
you
budge
then
slowly
trudge
your
sled
to
the
top
and
then (here's where the poem meets the gutter of the book)
you
s p e e d
you
s a i l
you
w h i z
you
w a i l
and
start
all
over
again.

I don't usually show children the book or illustration with the poem I'm sharing at the first reading, but this is one where I'll be holding up both Winter Eyes and The Snowy Day so that the children can make the visual connection. I love Poetry Friday!

Join in today at Live. Love. Explore! with Irene.

precurso

It was fairly easy, at the dinner table on our Yuletide Day of Intellect, to answer Daisy's question,"Who is Garrison Keillor?" What was harder was to explain "Why is Garrison Keillor?", a much bigger question about cultural phenomena that I'll look forward to coming back to someday.

In the meantime, it's enough to say that I"m enjoying the gift of Keillor's Good Poems immensely for its range and for the familiar voices interspersed with the poets whose work is new-to-me. One of those is Howard Moss, who was poetry editor at New Yorker magazine for 40 years and is probably well known to everyone but me. There are three of his poems in Good Poems, including one that made me think, as I read it for the first time, "Wait, wait--don't tell me--something extra's going on here!"

It will be a long time before there is enough said about the genius of Marilyn Singer's reverso poetry form, so cleverly deployed to shift point of view in Mirror, Mirror. (If you don't know the reverso, go here and here for some descriptions and "the rules.") Today I want to suggest that Howard Moss at least, at least one time, used the reverso form in a slightly different way to equally brilliant effect. Here is the "precurso" in question, from Moss's New Selected Poems published in 1985.

The Persistence of Song

Although it is not yet evening
The secretaries have changed their frocks
As if it were time for dancing,
And locked up in the scholars' books
There is a kind of rejoicing,
There is a kind of singing
That even the dark stone canyon makes
As though all fountains were going
At once, and the color flowed from bricks
In one wild, lit upsurging.

What is the weather doing?
And who arrived on a scallop shell
With the smell of the sea this morning?
--Creating a small upheaval
High above the scaffolding
By saying, "All will be well.
There is a kind of rejoicing."

Is there a kind of rejoicing
In saying, "All will be well?"
High above the scaffolding,
Creating a small upheaval,
The smell of the sea this morning
Arrived on a scallop shell.
What was the weather doing
In one wild, lit upsurging?
At once, the color flowed from bricks
As though all fountains were going,
And even the dark stone canyon makes
Here a kind of singing,
And there a kind of rejoicing,
And locked up in the scholars' books
There is a time for dancing
When the secretaries have changed their frocks,
And though it is not yet evening,

There is the persistence of song.

~ Howard Moss
collected in Good Poems
selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor, 2002


Today's Poetry Friday round-up is at Carol's Corner today. May your year begin in song; may the singing persist the whole year long!

An InLinkz Link-up