blasted poets!

At the ALA in Washington Monday, on the way from Gianormo Convention Center Building #1 to Gianormo Convention Center Building #2, I asked directions to Room 144A, scene of this year's Poetry Blast, and then heard two stylish and colorful women behind me doing the same. As we crossed the street together, one commented on my own pink-with-orange ensemble. I did not realize, until we all reached the front row of chairs where the Blasting poets were gathering, that I had been complimented on my chromatocombo by Lois Ehlert herself!

I have participated in three what you might call "national" poetry readings now, and every time it is such a thrill to meet and hear in person writers who have existed for me only as names on a book jacket. And I was so relieved to hear famous* children's poets greeting other famous* children's poets saying, "I've heard your name but I'm not familiar with your work," since I often feel terribly ignorant of all the excellent work out there. I guess we all have a blanket of acquaintance with the work in our chosen field, and then, as someone put it, we have "deep shafts of knowledge" here and there.

I shall be digging some deep new shafts next week (once the blasted public charter school appeal is done) to know more about Debbie Levy (what range!), George Ella Lyon (what delightful diction!), Tony Medina (what humor!) and Carole Weatherford (what living history!).

Thanks to all at the Blast for another great show, especially Barbara Genco and Marilyn "Six Stars" Singer!

My lame but heartfelt reverso about the Poetry Blast...

You
had to be
there
to catch every nuance
but
it was worth the effort,
traveling!

Traveling:
it was worth the effort
but
to catch every nuance
there
had to be
You!

working for it can be fun

Today (behind the times as always) Kay Ryan is my hero. The poem below is what made me go looking for more; it's one of those included in Poetry Speaks to Children. When I included it in a collection for my first-graders--whom I thought would appreciate the bear-forest-wolf-stick fairy-tale flavor--they were generally baffled, and a couple even said they found it creepy. And it's true that when I went looking for another of Ryan's poems that might speak to younger children, I couldn't find what I was looking for.


Bear Song

If I were a bear
with a bear sort of belly

that made it hard
to get up after sitting

and if I had paws
with pads on the ends

and a kind of a tab
where a tail might begin

and a button eye
on each side of my nose

I’d button the flap
of the forest closed.

And when you came
with your wolf and your stick

to the place that once was
the place to get in

you’d simply be
at the edge of the town

and your wolf wouldn’t know
a bear was around.


But there's something about her style that we who write for children can learn from. Her poems are compact; they look tame and accessible on the page, written in complete sentences and in a conversational register. Read "The Fabric of Life," though, and see how dense and challenging it is, and how she encourages engagement with the big ideas by skillfully passing them through a prism of humor, and how that bent light opens our eyes.

The Fabric of Life

It is very stretchy.
We know that, even if
many details remain
sketchy. It is complexly
woven. That much too
has pretty well been
proven. We are loath
to continue our lessons
which consist of slaps
as sharp and dispersed
as bee stings from
a smashed nest
when any strand snaps—

hurts working far past
the locus of rupture,
attacking threads
far beyond anything
we would have said
connects.

From the biographical note at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/: "Ryan has said that her poems do not start with imagery or sound, but rather develop “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.” " They may not start with imagery or sound, but listen to this irregular gorgeous turtle music:

Turtle

Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing-case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.

I'm all inspired, not least to think that this Poet Laureate taught "remedial English" for 30 years. Can't you tell that she's a brilliant teacher? "I know great," Ryan said. "I do not know where great comes from." We could all use some of this remediation.

work song in the key of f

Well. Sooner than we expected, the school system reviewers and the Superintendent made their recommendation against approval to the Board of Education, and in a whirlwind of events our public charter school application was denied on Tuesday. There was no way to catch my breath in time for Poetry Friday--these are the last days of the school year, after all--so here I am today with a poem that reflects (not sure how, but it does) a little of the hollow feeling that lurks beneath a determination to try again.

Work Song
~ Joshua Mehigan

This fastening, unfastening, and heaving--
this is our life. Whose life is it improving?
It topples some. Some others it will toughen.
Work is the safest way to fail, and often
the simplest way to love a son or daughter.
We come. We carp. We're fired. We worry later.

That man is strange. His calipers are shiny.
His hands are black. For lunch he brings baloney,
and, offered coffee, answers, "Thank you, no."
That man, with nothing evil left to do
and two small skills to stir some interest up,
fits in the curtained corner of a shop.

The best part of our life is disappearing
into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring
at screaming non-stop mills, our eyes unfocused,
or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest.
Yet nothing you could do could break our silence.
We are a check. Do not expect a balance.

That is a wrathful man becoming older,
a nobody like us, turned mortgage holder.
We stay until the bell. That man will stay
ten minutes more, so no one can complain.
Each day, by then, he's done exactly ten.
Ten what, exactly, no one here can say.

"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>

penultimate episode

We have arrived at the last poem in the charter school application. I post it from a position of even greater optimism than usual, after a brief period of frustration and even--yes, even a little despair.

However, last week the Global Garden Founding Group got tremendous news: our separate application for $550,000 in federal charter school start-up funds was approved by the Maryland State Department of Education! The money only comes to us if the local school district approves our actual charter school application, but it's a good feeling to know that the experienced charter school reviewers at the state level have found us worthy of that kind of financial commitment. We're keeping our fingers crossed.

Now, back to the poem, which does a heart-spinningly, toe-tinglingly good job of voicing the universal even as it addresses one sole reader. Its mix of earth and sky and escalators and airplanes and night and light and reading and writing is just like--well, life. It closes the Academic Design section, as a wish for all the children who might attend Global Garden PCS.

Okay, Brown Girl, Okay
~James Berry

Josie, Josie, I am okay
being brown. I remember,
every day dusk and dawn get born
from the loving of night and light
who work together, like married.
And they would like to say to you:
Be at school on and on, brown Josie
like thousands and thousands and thousands
of children, who are brown and white
and black and pale-lemon color.
All the time, brown girl Josie is okay.

Josie, Josie, I am okay
being brown. I remember,
every minute sun in the sky
and ground of the earth work together
like married.
And they would like to say to you:
Ride on up a going escalator
like thousands and thousands and thousands
of people, who are brown and white
and black and pale-lemon color.
All the time, brown girl Josie is okay.

Josie, Josie, I am okay
being brown. I remember,
all the time bright-sky and brown-earth
work together, like married
making forests and food and flowers and rain.
And they would like to say to you:
Grow and grow brightly, brown girl.
Write and read and play and work.
Ride bus or train or boat or airplane
like thousands and thousands and thousands
of people, who are brown and white
and black and pale-lemon color.
All the time, brown girl Josie is okay.

Everybody should be this kind of okay, don't you think?

long time no blog

There are good reasons (mostly relating to overload) that I haven't posted since April 23. I don't think there's anyone out there faithfully expecting to hear from me every Friday, but still I feel sorry about not meeting that expectation.

Oh, wait--there IS someone faithfully expecting to hear from me!
This surprises and makes me glad:
of course it is my mom and dad!

Below is the poem that should have gone into the charter school application (right around Academic Design Section 12.b, "Provide details regarding the school's plan to build and maintain appropriate home-school partnerships"). I knew what the poem meant but not what it said, so I couldn't track it down until I opened up my box of books about families and found the Trumpet Club poster I've had since the 80's. My first-graders are doing some work about family traditions, personal history and autobiography, so I put up the poster and we started reading. Most of them memorized it in two days--and I think I have too, finally!

Andre

I had a dream last night. I dreamed
I had to pick a Mother out.
I had to choose a Father too.
At first I didn't know what to do.
There were so many there, it seemed:
Short and tall and thin and stout.

Then just before I sprang awake,
I knew what parents I would take.

And this surprised and made me glad:
They were the ones I'd always had!

~ Gwendolyn Brooks

The Friday Poetry Round-up is at Jama Rattigan's Alphabet Soup today.

poetry as a second language

First I must express right up top my gratitude to Kate Coombs at BookAunt, to Tricia Stohr-Hunt at The Miss Rumphius Effect and to Gregory K. at Gotta Book for their generous and careful attention to my work during this month of poetry festivities. Apart from anything else, I just love the feeling of being part of this community! Thanks to all who make it be.

My classroom is a little community in itself: surrounded by books (since it used to be the Reading Specialist's headquarters), I am one of four teachers who use it daily. I arrive as another, exemplary "Reading Initiative" teacher is finishing with her second-graders, and as I'm wrapping up my first-grade teaching session at 12:30, two ESOL teachers are preparing to conduct their small groups (often simultaneously!). We do pretty well at sharing our slice of real estate, and all this eavesdropping on other teachers is very educational. It's had other influences, too, and tomorrow morning I'll take the ESOL Praxis exam to become certified to teach ESOL as well as general education.

Meanwhile, as our public charter school Founding Group prepares for a Q&A session with the school district's review panel, I come to the section in our application on provision for students who are speakers of English as an additional language. Here's the poem by Gregory Djanikian that opens this section:

How I Learned English

It was in an empty lot
Ringed by elms and fir and honeysuckle.
Bill Corson was pitching in his buckskin jacket,
Chuck Keller, fat even as a boy, was on first,
His t-shirt riding up over his gut,
Ron O’Neill, Jim, Dennis, were talking it up
In the field, a blue sky above them
Tipped with cirrus.

And there I was,
Just off the plane and plopped in the middle
Of Williamsport, Pa. and a neighborhood game,
Unnatural and without any moves,
My notions of baseball and America
Growing fuzzier each time I whiffed.

So it was not impossible that I,
Banished to the outfield and daydreaming
Of water, or a hotel in the mountains,
Would suddenly find myself in the path
Of a ball stung by Joe Barone.
I watched it closing in
Clean and untouched, transfixed
By its easy arc before it hit
My forehead with a thud.

I fell back,
Dazed, clutching my brow,
Groaning, “Oh my shin, oh my shin,”
And everybody peeled away from me
And dropped from laughter, and there we were,
All of us writhing on the ground for one reason
Or another.

Someone said “shin” again,
There was a wild stamping of hands on the ground,
A kicking of feet, and the fit
Of laughter overtook me too,
And that was important, as important
As Joe Barone asking me how I was
Through his tears, picking me up
And dusting me off with hands like swatters,
And though my head felt heavy,
I played on till dusk
Missing flies and pop-ups and grounders
And calling out in desperation things like
“Yours” and “take it,” but doing all right,
Tugging at my cap in just the right way,
Crouching low, my feet set.
“Hum baby” sweetly on my lips.

~ Gregory Djanikian

Why is it so hard for big school systems to allow that Play Is Learning?

the first grade update

Poetry immersion continued this week with more children's choices: "Nightmare," a spider poem from Hey There, Stink Bug! by Leslie Bulion, chosen by Christopher; Sophia's selection "I Know Someone" by Michael Rosen collected in My Song Is Beautiful; and Kate's choice of "Violets, Daffodils" by Elizabeth Coatsworth from a lovely large-format collection that I'll get back to you on. Rafael chose "Schools Get Hungry Too" from Kalli Dakos's The Bug in Teacher's Coffee which I'll be going back to when we talk about voice, and yesterday Ella picked "Monday's child is fair of face" collected in The Barefoot Book of Rhymes Around the Year, which I've owned since my years teaching in London. We all enjoyed coming back to this one which popped up in our read-aloud Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, a classic English series by Catherine Storr which is not well-known here but very worth tracking down.

Meanwhile, there's some poetry action going on in my son's own first-grade classroom and as a result I enjoyed a peak moment this week: close to an hour snuggled in bed on a rainy evening with my two children as we all simultaneously wrote color poems following a form that Little D had used in class--he in a brand-new writing notebook, I in my umpteenth writing notebook, and Bigger D on her laptop (when did she learn to type so fast?). This is the one he brought home from school, specially copied out for Mommy the poet.

Black and Me

Black is the deep black night and Great Ape's
pound

Black is a great wolf's howl

black is a spider creeping

black looks like a slick fur coat

black sounds like an echo in a neverending
hole

black smells like smoky black coal

black feels like the threatening black spikes on a
steel gate

black tastes like the smoky taste of smoked
salmon

black makes me feel brave and swift

black is an old ghost in a tavern

~Duncan, age 7

Much later I realized I had missed Glee....like that mattered.

april summer snowflakes

I got so inspired by all the April festivities in the Kidlitosphere that I've imported "Thirty Poets, Thirty Days" into my first-grade classroom. Of course we've been enjoying poetry all year, but now we're riding the poetry wave! On April 1 we were on Spring Break, so I had to choose the first six poems to catch us up. I took them all from Poetry Speaks to Children and have put the CD that goes with that gorgeous book in the listening center. Now, however, the children are each taking a turn to choose the Poem of the Day--a power which they deeply dig! So far Katana has shared "Covers" from Nikki Giovanni's The Sun is So Quiet and Vivian has selected "ME I AM" by Jack Prelutsky, collected in My Song Is Beautiful by Mary Ann Hoberman. I'll keep you posted on what else goes up onto our Poetry Calendar in the hallway!

Here in the D.C. area the weather has been a little extreme. Not that many weeks ago we were buried under more than two feet of snow, "proving" in the minds of some folks that global warming is a myth. Now, for the past few days the temperature has been near 90 degrees, which sounds like climate change to me (although my brief research shows that in years with 90* April days, we do tend to get more snow...I wonder how that works?). Right now in my yard are blooming simultaneously forsythia, daffodils, periwinkle, tulips, hyacinths, weeping cherry, bleeding heart, dogwood and even some of the azaleas! Makes me want to sleep outside--except for "Marlon," the suburban raccoon who's hanging around and apparently aspires to becoming our pet. It's a little creepy.

In the spirit of unpredictable weather, I offer up this poem by David McCord, which was an ideal opening for the public charter school application's section on Special Education.

Snowflakes

Sometime this winter if you go
To walk in soft new-falling snow
When flakes are big and come down slow

To settle on your sleeve as bright
As stars that couldn't wait for night,
You won't know what you have in sight--

Another world--unless you bring
A magnifying glass. This thing
We call a snowflake is the king

Of crystals. Do you like surprise?
Examine him three times his size:
At first you won't believe your eyes.

Stars look alike, but flakes do not:
No two the same in all the lot
That you will get in any spot

You chance to be, for every one
Come spinning through the sky has none
But his own window-wings of sun:

Joints, points and crosses. What could make
Such lacework with no crack or break?
In billion billions, no mistake?

~ David McCord
(anthologized in Sing a Song of Popcorn)

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" )

a bank street girl at heart

"Explain how the curriculum is aligned with Maryland Content Standards and the voluntary state curriculum."

Hermanadad / Brotherhood

Soy hombre: duro poco
y es enorme la noche.
Pero miro hacia arriba:
las estrellas escriben.
Sin entender comprendo:
tambien soy escritura
y en este mismo instante
alguien me deletrea.

~Octavio Paz

I am a man; little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

~Octavio Paz / translated by Eliot Weinberger

"Most of what we learn--about ourselves, about the physical world and about our place in it--we learn through our relationships with or in the company of other people. At GGPCS social studies holds a special place in the curriculum, because its focus on people and their relationships with each other and the environment mirrors children's learning through their interaction with people in the environment...."

Today's Poetry Friday Roundup is at The Drift Record with Julie Larios.

all that we remember

Happy Poetry Friday: share the love at Some Novel Ideas, a middle-school focused blog that I'm happy to discover.

Since my last post I've participated to my great benefit in two poetry stretches and the public charter school application has passed the Technical Review--and of course, while the district was doing their checkthrough to see if anything was missing, so were we. I-yi-yi we found some glaring omissions! So yesterday I stood in the Asst. Superintendent's office with one of the stalwarts of the project and replaced or added to 20 binders eight pieces that had gone wrong somehow, and crossed out a really important "not" on every page 95.

More interesting for you all in the Poetry Friday audience is page 29. Here is where I included the following perfect poem by Countee Cullen, a move which many considered too risky for a charter school supplication (which may be a better word than application, since if approved we would be the first public charter school in our district ever).

Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

~Countee Cullen

This poem leads the section about how, in addition to "what children know and can do," our schools must address what children feel, value and demonstrate as attitudes towards each other and the planet. This, to me, is what reading is for (among a few other important things), and what poetry is particular is useful for crystallizing.

"But, the word "nigger"?!" some said.
I said, "That's precisely the point."