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

"the gift of time"

Oh, glory! Thanks to a steady sifting of snow yesterday, the DC metro area is now just incapacitated enough to open schools on a 2-hour delay. This is in addition to last evening's gift of a glass of wine and a natter with neighbors, possible because of cancelled kidtivities. My contempt for a local culture that keeps children IN for recess because it's snowing is temporarily outweighed--selfishly--by gratitude for the gift of unexpected free time.








For the gingerbread fans, here are the promised photos: my mother's 1940 cookie cutter, the D's at work with the dough, and the finished adorables on the tree. (I could wish the photos were more skilled--but that's not my area, according to the division of labor in this family).

Poetry is my area, however. This week I've been at work on two projects: judging the work of some high school poets for the PTA's "Reflections" arts program, and working with the wonderfully versatile Laura Shovan on a grown-up poetry anthology that will be published by the Maryland Writers' Association. I'll have three poems in the collection and am also writing an introduction to one section, which has been a refreshing challenge.


At our house we're preparing for Yuletide and our "high holiday" Solstice Dinner. It's a tradition for me to give the guests (close family and neighbors) gifts of light on the shortest day of the year. There have been candles and candleholders and matches and flashlights of all descriptions over the years, but this year I'm going intangible, in this direction:






“If I stand”
from Light by Inger Christensen


If I stand
alone in the snow
it is clear
that I am a clock


how else would eternity
find its way around


Step into the pool of winter light that is Poetry Friday, hosted today by Amy at The Poem Farm!

tomcat apprentice

Just before Halloween we got our second cat, partly to keep Cat #1 "entertained" and partly to acknowledge the achievement of our sixth-grader, who soldiered through two nights away from home at Outdoor Ed with her new middle-school peers.

He was named Oak by the shelter and the kids decided to keep that name, although at the time I thought Acorn would be more appropriate. No more. At almost 5 months, he resembles our son, long-limbed and lean; when Oak stands on his hind legs to scratch at a fresh section of the parlor sofa his reach comes easily to my hip now. (But I'm short.)

How fortunate that right here in my new copy of Paul B. Janeczko's A Foot in the Mouth I have "A Tomcat Is" by J. Patrick Lewis, newly named winner of the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. Our Oak now has a model to strive towards, as do we poets--between midnight mouthfuls of marshmallow paws!

A Tomcat Is (excerpts)
J. Patrick Lewis

Night watchman of corners
Caretaker of naps
Leg-wrestler of pillows
Depresser of laps.

...

The bird-watching bandit
On needle-point claws
The chief of detectives
On marshmallow paws

A crafty yarn-spinner
A stringer high-strung
A buttermilk mustache
A sandpaper tongue

....

See the complete poem here and then buy the book! Scholastic resources here and here, if you like that sort of thing.

Today's tasty Poetry Friday round-up is at Jama Rattigan's Alphabet Soup, where I find that she's highlighting J. Pat too. Coincidence, or fate?!?

*********************************************************
Follow-up from last week's gingerbread man post (and thanks to all for the comments on Mrs. Oven's poem):

Here's the recipe I'll be using to make dough today;
baking and photos tomorrow!

Gingerbread Cookies
(6 dozen gingerbread men or 10 dozen stars )

Cream 1 ½ cups shortening with 1 ½ cups sugar.
Beat in 3 eggs, 1 ½ cups dark molasses, 3 T. apple cider or white vinegar.
Add 7 ½ cups flour, 2 ½ t. baking soda, ¾ t. salt, 1 ½ T. ginger,
1 ½ t. each cinnamon and cloves.

Mix thoroughly and form into dough disc. Chill at least 3 hours.
Roll out thin on floured surface with floured rolling pin.
Cut in shapes and bake on parchment-lined cookie sheet 5-6 minutes at 375*.

"you can't catch me"

"Run, run, as fast as you can! You can't catch me; I'm the Gingerbread Man!" It's still fun to chant, isn't it? I'm pondering why this little rhyme is so endlessly appealing to kids, beyond its obvious bounce. An informal trawl of internet sites for teachers suggests that at this time of year, 5- and 6-year-olds all over the country are immersed in The Gingerbread Man. He's handy because he has a festive holiday feel but is resolutely areligious. Certainly he holds a special place in my heart because it's a family tradition to thread red floss through holes in the heads of our simple, two-currant-eyes-and-a-knife-point-smile gingerbread men and hang them all over the tree. The children and I use a cutter that my mother used as a child, a transparent blue plastic piece her mother bought in the 1930's. I'll post some photos once our baking gets underway. (And gingerbread dough is a wonderfully versatile medium: as young adults my partner and I based a whole holiday party around gingerbread Patsys and Edinas from Absolutely Fabulous.) For me, gingerbread men are a symbol of cozy family comfort during a dark and dangerous time of year. I think of the The Gingerbread Man as an equivalent story to The Little Red Hen: patterned repetitive plots, rhythmic refrains, an important lesson to be learned. But wait--what is the lesson of The Gingerbread Man? It took me three seconds to realize what everyone else has perhaps always known, but if you hang out with 4 to 7-year-olds your whole life, you could miss it. What little children love is the naughtiness of the Gingerbread Man who gets up half-baked and runs away from home, and their favorite versions are the ones in which the Gingerbread Man actually LAUGHS AT those who are chasing him. I'm not sure, once they get over the shock of the SNIP-SNAP! at the end, that children go away thinking, "Oh! I'd better stick close to home, and if I do go out on my own, I'd better beware the sly fox who pretends to be my friend but really wants to eat me alive." And while I always make a big deal about the Value of Cooperation when reading The Little Red Hen, I have never, as a teacher, emphasized the Stranger Danger message of The Gingerbread Man. But I have considered the point of view of the oven. 

 

[poem]

thankful for big ideas

I have a new favorite book. I'm late to the party as usual, but through the 2009 Poetry Notables session at NCTE last weekend I heard about a slew of books new to me, and ordered several titles on the spot using my handy-dandy wireless device. It was an eminent body of work that arrived on my doorstep, but the most thrilling was The Tree That Time Built. I had not heard of it at all, nor read a single review, so I was taken by glorious surprise.

This weighty collection of about 125 poems is much more than a themed anthology. I find myself wishing that I were a 5th-grade science teacher so that I could use it as the basis for a whole year's study of what might ordinarily be called evolutionary biology. The cover says the poems were "selected by" Mary Ann Hoberman, 2008-2010 Children's Poet Laureate, and Linda Winston, a cultural anthropologist and teacher. However, the work they did in compiling this rich array of poems by everyone from William Blake to Emily Dickinson to Langston Hughes through to Douglas Florian, Alice Schertle and quite a handful by Hoberman herself goes way beyond "selection." (You might call it "supernatural selection.")

The title doesn't give it away, so I opened The Tree That Time Built expecting a "celebration of nature, science, and imagination." But this collection is really a tribute to the towering ideas of Charles Darwin, two anniversaries of whose were celebrated in 2009, and is an examination of the ways that the work of scientists (and particularly naturalists) and the work of poets resemble each other. "Science and art have often been cast as opposites," says the Introduction, " but the division is an artificial one. Scientists, like poets, depend on imagination for many of their core insights. And poets, like scientists, observe and explore connections within the natural world." Through their thoughtful selection and arrangement of the poems, Hoberman and Winston layer pockets of tiny detail, swathes of rock-solid description, and seeping realizations on a grand scale. Then, through their commentary on both the science and the poetry at work in each poem, they cut a cross-section through those layers to expose a whole new view of our natural history and the way we humans have expressed our understanding of it.

I've always been a fan of the idea of evolution and its grandeur, and the notion that it all happened without any hint of human agency save for naming it tickles my mind. Impossible to choose just one from this book, but here's a simple, elegant piece by Mark Van Doren.

 

If They Spoke

The animals will never know;

Could not find out; would scarcely care

That all their names are in our books,

And all their images drawn bare.

What names? They have not heard the sound,

Nor in their silence thought the thing.

They are not notified they live;

Nor ask who set them wandering.

Simply they are. And so with us;

And they would say it if they spoke;

And we might listen; and the world

Be uncreated at one stroke.

~ Mark Van Doren

The Tree That Time Built, 2009

Enjoy a Friday full of poetry with Ms. Mac at Check It Out today!

 

"poets and bloggers unite..."

...also known as Poetry Friday Live! Coming at you from sunny Orlando and the NCTE Convention, here are Elaine Magliaro, Sylvia Vardell, and Tricia Stohr-Hunt at their session this morning, preparing to highlight their offerings to the world through their poetry-focused blogs.

All were charmingly modest about the greatness they've achieved through their online advocacy for and delight in poetry for children, and all were thrilled to introduce poets Jame Richards, Marilyn Singer, Lee Bennett Hopkins and Pat Mora. Each poet spoke about some of the ways that they use (or don't use) new media in their work as writers, anthologists, and activists.
Then we were treated to readings by each poet, varying widely and tantalizingly.


That was today's first session, which also afforded me the bonus of meeting in person several online friends and fellow poets--Charles Waters, Amy Ludwig Van der Water, and Tricia herself. I also attended a roundup of 2009's Notable Poetry Books, and there will be more inspiring professional togetherness tonight at an event appreciating Donald Graves.

I love book people!

soscientry

Oh, how I love The Little Red Hen story! (Last night Duncan, now 8, and I retold it with a blue elephant obsessed with her jewelry collection, a purple flamingo with a thing about shoes, and a maroon monkey too busy with charter school business to help the Little Red Hen do any of the work towards a warm, crusty loaf of bread. Ahem.)


But before my first-graders delve next week into the many versions of LRH that I've collected over the years, I wanted to make sure we did some reading for information as well as some talking about why BREAD is part of social studies (which is, I always say, "learning about how people get along together."

This beauty of a book, like its predecessor by the same author and photographer, Pumpkin Circle, is pure soscientry...you know, that stimulating combination of "real true facts" about something socialstudies/ scientific (like how wheat becomes flour becomes bread for everyone) and language to describe it that plays like poetry. George Leventhal and Shmuel Thaler's book Bread Comes to Life: A Garden of Wheat and Loaf to Eat includes this passage alongside terrifically informative photos taken from an imaginative variety of angles:

"This baker makes his bread from scratch
by sowing wheat in his backyard patch.
Soon those seeds send down roots
and sprout into shoots
of bright green grass.

The days pass and that grass
grows into sturdy blades,
tall and straight, finely made
with budding heads and bristly hair
gently waving in the air."

While Becca didn't find out "How dos it tac bred log in the uven?", Stand and Ryan did get an answer to "What in gredints is bread mad uov?", and everybody enjoyed working with their air-bread (next week we'll make real playdough):

"Dump it. Thump it.
Dust it. Knead it.
Squash it. Stretch it.
Toss it! ...
Punch it down.
Give it some shape.
Let it rise again.
Put it in to bake."

I believe that this kind of soscientry is not as rare as it used to be in children's literature. If you've got a similar gem to share let us all know--I don't attend Non-fiction Monday very often so I'm sure I've missed out on some recent developments.

Join the canine(and other) poetry fun at Teaching Authors this week.

SPARKs fly

As I noted some weeks ago, I'm participating in SPARK 10, an online collaboration project between artists and writers. This painting is by Delores Ekberg of Piedmont, SD. Here's how she describes the work: "This is watercolor on rice paper...fun to do. You crumple rice paper, attach it to illustration board with acrylic matt medium, then brush color on the creases, or "rub" color on the creases...I used colored pencils...then use watercolor to make a picture of whatever you see coming out of the textures."

Here's my poem (probably not my final draft) inspired by the art. Ooh, I hope she likes it!

Willowriver


blossoms in autumn from
crumpled trunks
rootrippled river
from wrinkled tips of twigs

hangs lowswinging
among elderly leaves
dripping dry mineral hues

falls to ground
lies in brittle layers
sinking to siltsoil taking down
swallowed sunlight

sends up heat

is wisdom


Enjoy all the poetic richness of Poetry Friday this week with Toby at The Writers' Armchair.

P.S. Two notes to all my PF friends:
1) I apologize for receiving all your kind comments and regularly failing to return the favor. I shall try to do better now that my teaching life is settling down.
2) Will you be at NCTE? Let me know!

in case anyone has never

What is it about pumpkins? We went to choose pumpkins at a local "patch"--no time for a trip to an actual farm this week, and my kids know very well how pumpkins grow--but even just being in a large sunny yard strewn with pumpkins gave us all a rotund feel of earthy well-being.

At school today, following the kindergarteners' visit to a pumpkin farm yesterday, we'll celebrate our first Poetry Friday together by carving a pumpkin while simultaneously reading the following tour de force by the great Valerie Worth. To me this poem (with many of hers!) serves as a definition of "poetry" for kids: a piece of writing that distills experience into a handful of words that work musically together. (Want to watch me try to explain that to 5-year-olds?) In any case I think it will make a fine complement to our work with "Five Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate" next week.

Pumpkin

After its lid
Is cut, the slick
Seeds and stuck
Wet strings
Scooped out,
Walls scraped
Dry and white,
Face carved, candle
Fixed and lit,

Light creeps
Into the thick
Rind: giving
That dead orange
Vegetable skull
Warm skin, making
A live head
To hold its
Sharp gold grin.

~ Valerie Worth (1933-1994)

You can dig in to more at a wrung sponge with Andi this week.

autumn summer pumpkin butterfly

What's your favorite season? It's an important question; in my family we seem to review our preferences, with revisions, on a regular basis (just like we keep having to come back to the food question: "If you could have only one carbohydrate for the rest of your life, what would you choose? only one fruit? only one vegetable?").

I find it very easy indeed to pick summer, but this early fall time is a close second because of piquant overlaps like the one I tried to capture in the opening poem of last year's Pumpkin Butterfly (Boyds Mills/Wordsong). My school is full of painted lady and monarch butterflies because of the second-grade science curriculum, and the pumpkins are already on their way in, all under the mellow October sunshine. Don't forget to watch for ghosts.


Ghosts


we haul our wagon to a patch of hilly earth
weighed down with deep orange
with bigbellied, cumbersome pumpkins

“This is the one”
“And this one”
we say

we cut the tough vines and turn to load them up

behind our backs
a gust of butterflies rises and tumbles
on hot October air

yellowgreen tinged with orange
wings as weightless and angular
as the pumpkins are heavy and round:

the ghosts of our pumpkins untethered from earth

~ Heidi Mordhorst 2009

[uptoFIFTEENonline-listservs] in the picture

I find lists to be a powerful way of describing and defining. When I placed a personal ad in the Village Voice ohsomany years ago, it consisted of a list of items in my possession, among them "103 earrings, garlic press, Swiss Army knife, X tapes." That last got me plenty of suggestive letters from folks who misunderstood thoroughly.


I've realized that I'm now receiving daily digests from no fewer than 15 different listservs; taken together they describe and define me pretty thoroughly. The most recent addition is the Maryland Writers' Association, where I found an announcement about this project:



Welcome to SPARK!

Open to writers, musicians, and visual artists of all kinds,
SPARK is a participatory creativity event that takes place four times each year.

The project’s rules are simple: Writers send their partners a story or poem; artists send an image of their painting, photograph, or sculpture; and musicians and video artists send either a file or a link to their work on another website. Then, over the 10-day project period, each person uses their partner’s piece as a jumping off point for new work of their own.

This site is a work in progress, containing inspiration and response pieces from SPARK’s 2010 rounds. You can view those pieces by clicking “See the work,” above. You can also see work from SPARK’s first six rounds here.

SPARK Rounds take place in February, May, August, and October. If you’d like to join us, send us a note!

I've already registered to participate in SPARK 10 later this month, because I had so much fun doing something similar before. I've written some poems to go with paintings by my friend Elyse Harrison, a local artist who runs a studio/gallery, and participated in an event a few years ago where Elyse invited artists and writers to collaborate and then put up a show of their work. I wrote a poem to go with a provocative landscape photograph that I had intended to post here, but alas, I can't find it.

So instead I'll put up this week's "15 Words or (ahem) Fewer" poem, a weekly opportunity provided by the endlessly energetic and inspiring Laura Purdie Salas. This week she posted the above, and in response I posted the following.

gown

it's the elbows
that tell the story
of the next twenty-four years
of togetherness

Heidi Mordhorst
ARR MATEY 2010


While a list, like a column of tiny buttons, might describe and define, sometimes it's what is not quite in the picture that tells the real story.

Laura and Heidi at the ALA Poetry Blast 2010










Check out the list of Poetry Friday posts at Carol's Corner!