drawing in, reaching out

I didn't notice it last week under the coastal sky at Rehoboth Beach, DE, but now that we're back in leafy Bethesda, it's clear: each night it's darker a little earlier. Here's an apropoem by Eve Merriam, a great favorite of mine...

The New Moon

Hold on to me
We will slip carefully carefully
don't tip it over
into this canoe
pale as birch bark

and with the stars
over our shoulders
paddle
down the dark river
of the sky.

Do not delay.
By next week
the canoe will be bulging with cargo,
there will be no room
inside for us.

Tonight is the time.
Step carefully.
Hold on to me.

That poem just entered my Top Five of All Time (don't ask me what the other four are yet; I didn't know I had a Top Five Poems list).

In other news, aiming as advised for 15 promotional events for Pumpkin Butterfly in October (15 events in two weeks is beyond a girl with a day job, don't you think?), I have strong leads on our local district Back-to-School Fair, a Pumpkin Festival at a farm (three days' worth!), several school book fairs, a workshop at my local branch library and the local B&N. I'm working on an all-ages poetry reading at my church, another something at a local church that goes pumpkin patch in October, and our local Whole Foods. And I'm going to the NCTE conference in Philadelphia in November. Must get postcards printed, must get postcards printed, must get postcards printed...

pumpkins on my mind

Oh dear. I can't decide if I'm delighted or dejected to finally find my way to the wealth of promoformation at the bubblestampede blog of Laura Salas and Fiona Bayrock. So many provocative ideas, so many approaches, so obvious that I should have started long before beginning of June! Despite my 'tenacity,' I have been rebuffed by the farm where the pumpkin butterfly poem, "Ghosts," happened; they can't fit my fabulous book launch event into their packed pumpkin-harvest October schedule...so now I'm trawling for another pumpkin farm that has more respect for poetry and racking my brain for another clever launch venue...

back-to-school thoughts, just for a moment

I have an exciting new teaching job starting in a month (yesterday I had my first official meeting with the Reading Specialist), and in my role as charter school founder I've been having some deep "academic design" thoughts. So this wicked poem that I rediscovered in a book called Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (ed. Gary Mex Glazner, 2000) has been wandering the halls of my inner school...

Backwards Day

Sometimes at school we have a special day

We call it backwards day

Everyone wears their clothes backwards

Or wears colors that clash

I have a modest proposal

Forget your silly backwards hats and tee shirts

Forget this stripes and checks together puppypoop

Let's get serious

Let's really shake school up

In math class, for homework

Describe the associative, distributive, and

commutative properties

In dance

Choregraph it, dance it, show your work

Points off for clumsiness

In Social Studies, for homework

Prepare two Civil War marching songs, one North one South

Sing in four part harmony, show your emotion

Points off for flat notes

In English, for homework

Carve a sculpture that expresses Hester Prynne's solitary courage

The cowardice of her lover

The beauty and strangeness of her child

In Science, for homework,

Bring in a broken toaster, doorknob, or wind-up toy

Fix it

You get extra credit for using the leftover parts to make something new

Points off for reading the directions

On the S.A.T.

Every one of the questions

Will be in haiku

You get two scores

One in whistling, and one in Legos

No calculators

Let's take a stroll down the hall

Let's see who is in the learning disabilities classroom now

Will you look at all those guys with pocket protectors

Sweating, slouching, and acting out

Hey, no care that you can divide fractions backwards in

your head buddy

You will stay right here and practice interpretive dance steps till

you get it right

Will you look at all those perfect spellers with bad attitutdes

Look at those grammar wizards with rhythm deficit disorder

What good is spelling gonna do you

If you can't carry a tune

Toss a lariat

Or juggle?

You are going to stay right here and do the things that you can't

Over and over, and again, and again

Until you get them right,

Or until you give up

Quit school

And get a job

As a spell checker

At the A&P

~Daniel Ferri

P.S. Does anyone know how to make blogger obey my WYSIWYG commands? Grrrrrr.

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.

a piranha religion

I may be the last poet to discover the Favorite Poem Project, but just in case not, here's a sample of the glory of this idea of Robert Pinsky's that the medium of a poem is not the words, but the breath, voice and body of each person as he or she reads that poem, especially a favorite one, out loud.

Nick and the Candlestick

by Sylvia Plath

chosen and read by Seph Rodney, photographer

I am a miner. The light burns blue.

Waxy stalactites

Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.

Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,

Cold homicides.

They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium

Icicles, old echoer.

Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.

And the fish, the fish--

Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,

A piranha

Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.

The candle

Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.

O love, how did you get here?

O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,

Your crossed position.

The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.

The pain

You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,

I have hung our cave with roses.

With soft rugs--

The last of Victoriana.

Let the stars

Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric

Atoms that cripple drip

Into the terrible well,

You are the one

Solid the spaces lean on, envious.

You are the baby in the barn.

live from chautauqua!

I'm here for the first time in beautiful downtown Chautauqua, New York--one week late for the Highlights Foundation Writers' Workshop, I know, but compromise with the grandparents was necessary--and trying to get the hang of how to do it without overdoing it. On the first day already I went to a poetry&prose reading and then read from Pumpkin Butterfly for the first time to a small but enthusiastic group of adults. In between doses of this week's theme, "The Ethics of Capitalism," I'm reading White Girl, a memoir by Clara Silverstein, the only other girl from Richmond, VA who attended Wesleyan at the same time as I did. Robert Pinsky will be here later this week discussing, among other things, the Favorite Poem Project and the third collection of Americans' favorite poems entitled Invitation to Poetry.

So I'm thinking about my favorite poems, and remembering how in high school two stanzas by an outwardly prim Victorian priest whomped me upside the head (despite all the God talk) with the sheer wildness of the words, some of which I couldn't even attach to actual things, as concrete as they all are in Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Pied Beauty":

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.

(And wondering: does anyone know how to preserve a poem's formatting in a blogger post? All the indents just disappeared...)

Poetry Friday, early or late?: the best ultrasound ever

You know how when you're pregnant you go to the sonographer who shows you what the baby looks like at, say, 7 months? Here's what my new baby looks like. He's not due until October 1, but it's great to know that he's looking so hale, hearty and hardbacked! Thanks to the folks at Wordsong/Boyds Mills for another beautiful book. Here's one of the poems, feeling right for these long, glowing baseball days...

Cherry Very

Be sneaky, be cheeky
Pinch from the kitchen
The reddest, the roundest there are

A bowl full of cherries
A bowl of the very
Most cherriest bombs by far

Backbone straight
Step up to the plate
Puff up your chest and lungs

Swallow the fruit
Ready to shoot
Put the pit in the groove of your tongue

One more tip:
Round your lips
To launch it without a hitch

Don't get tense
Aim for the fence
Wind up like you're fixing to pitch

Now blast it hard
Across the yard
Kissing that missile goodbye

It's over the fence!
It's out of the park!
It's a letloose cherryjuice
noschool slobberdrool
spitwhistle summerfun home run!

The Hug, by Thom Gunn

Heart-snagging.

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

...and now it's sprung

is hosted today by Maya Ganesan at allegro.

I spent two mornings this week playing poetry with kindergarteners in a Title I school in Arlington, VA. Here's what one class had to say, with a little orchestration from me, about the view out of their window right now:

dogwood

grow green, soft sprout
(drop splash puddle)
four white-pink petals
on juicy-sour stems reaching out
exquisite puddle of petals

Can you guess which word was the teacher's contribution?

insisting on spring

Today I'm joining Poetry Friday for the first time, and by way of introducing myself to the PF community, I'm posting a poem of my own for the first time. It's a small celebration of the fact that I received a PDF yesterday of the Boyds Mills Fall 2009 catalog, in which the forthcoming Pumpkin Butterfly is listed (I love saying "the forthcoming Pumpkin Butterfly"; it will be almost sad when it has finally come forth).

In the meantime, I'm keeping my eye on the buds and insisting on spring...

Petaling

People come crowding to these chilly streets
to see the twisted old cherry trees
crowded with new pink blossoms.

I come walking one week later.
Now the blossoms are breaking,
blowing, blizzarding petal by petal.

The wind lifts them, waves of petals the size of
my thumbnail, sends them rolling,
riding, racing on their ragged edges.

They’re not like tiny, petal-soft wheels—
they really are tiny wheels of softest petal,
pedaling these streets toward summer.

as civilization unravels

it's soothing to chant something like the following, in which everything set backwards and upside down leads to a sense of floating rather than sinking....

I Am the Song

I am the song that sings the bird.
I am the leaf that grows the land.
I am the tide that moves the moon.
I am the stream that halts the sand.
I am the cloud that drives the storm.
I am the earth that lights the sun.
I am the fire that strikes the stone.
I am the clay that shapes the hand.
I am the word that speaks the man.


~Charles Causley
from The Puffin Book of Utterly Brilliant Poetry, ed. Brian Patten

'and she was' to 'je vais vite': the quantification of music part 1

Becoming a math teacher has begun to take its effect on my real life. I find I have begun increasingly to think of the world in mathematical terms as well as in poetic turns, and I’m seeing patterns and trends everywhere (except in my personal finances, which I leave entirely in the capable hands of another). Let's do some numbers: In 1986 I was walking down East 84th Street towards the 1–bedroom apartment I shared with Lisa, crossing 3rd Avenue and listening for the x-hundredth time to 'Little Creatures' on my Walk-It. It was Friday afternoon and my book bag must have been light because I was swinging along; 'And She Was' came on and for the 1st time I noticed how the beat matched my stride exactly…and there I experienced simultaneously a moment of A-HA + DUH. (I believe mathematicians call this a Duh-Ha Moment.)

A-HA + DUH = A person who dislikes “working out” but who does like dancing could put together a mix of favorite songs and turn all that city walking into exercise! This meant laboriously trawling through all my cassettes and vinyl records and copying songs with the Magic Number, which was not Three but 29 beats per 15 seconds (which, as my 2nd graders cannot yet figure out, equals 116 beats per minute, but who sits counting beats for a whole minute?)

The first walking tape I made was pedestrianly titled Walkabout Mix, and it took 2 years and moving in with a man who owned better stereo equipment than I to get it done. It included 'And She Was', songs by Midnight Oil (hence the Aborigine-flavored name), New Order and Enya ('Orinoco Flow' turned out to be too slow at 28bp15s), and the song that took my listening experiences into a whole new spiritual, philosophical plane. 'Ackee 123', by the Beat (the English Beat to you folks who didn’t spend an extremely formative month in Evesham, England during 1981) led to the next tape, entitled Music for Instant Attitude Adjustment. You can hear it on this playlist, which includes "important" songs from each of the ensuing walking tapes.

http://rhaplinks.real.com/rhaplink?rhapid=5656330&type=playlist&title=Playlist&from=real

Another perk, among many, of moving in with (and then getting married to) Brad with the better stereo equipment was the health club on the roof of our 46-story building in Battery Park City (BPC, not be confused with bps). There I discovered the treadmill, handy for those days when it was cold and wet and a girl really needed a dose of Instant Attitude Adjustment. There I discovered how to check my heart rate, which led in turn to discovering that while walking to all my carefully selected songs, my heart rate matched my stride matched the beat at 29bp15s. Surely the coordination of inner and outer rhythm was why this particular form of exercise felt so darn good. Keep this factoid in mind, as we will return to it later....

Those first 2 compilations lasted very well, supplemented by the likes of Deee-lite and Madonna's 'Immaculate Collection'--right through the move to London in 1991. There were other mix tapes along the way: Dancing and Kissing (What More Is There?) and Lovergirl Mixxx are the musical evidence of my split with Brad, and all of them could be filed under Mixed Feelings. By 1994, using Fiona's new Andersen-Consulting-funded stereo system, I had created walking tapes number 3 and 4, Pavement Pounder and then Pacemaker, which accompanied me on complicated London Tube commutes from West Hampstead to Camden to Haringey.

Meanwhile I was rediscovering the glories of a genre I had scorned during my long-ago "Heidi is/a punk-rocker" past (a pose which fooled no one): I bought a GBP5 cassette called "Divas of Disco" and had soon combined 'Ring My Bell' and 'Shake Your Groove Thing' with London club hits to make a new tape (45 minutes per side, approximately 22 tracks in total) called Sidewalk Groove. By the end of the London era, walking-instead-of-dancing had been joined by Actual Dancing as I took part in the Great London Gay-and-Lesbian-Ballroom&Latin-Movement. I salsaed, I rhumbaed, I East- and West-Coast-swinged, and I cha-chaed to the likes of 'Walking on Broken Glass' by Annie Lennox. Life was one permanently-adjusted attitude.

Please join us next week for Part 2 of The Quantification of Music, when we consider the short-term heart-health effects of life inside the beltway....