dayenu = joy

 I'm posting from near Manchester, England ("England, across the Atlantic Sea; and I'm a genius, genius, 'cos I believe in" Poetry Friday).  We spent a few days in London and are heading to Lake Coniston today for a week-long family celebration of my mother-in-law's upcoming notable birthday.  (Side note:  My mother-in-love, previously honored here for her contributions to my poetry bookshelf, is now truly and technically my mother-in-LAW, thanks to that legal wedding certificate.  Nice bonus effect!)

Our London experience this time around was deeply colored by Daisy's twin passions:  Harry Potter and Shakespeare. We have spent large chunks of our trip visiting Harry Potter book and film locations in Wiltshire and in London, helped by a poorly-written but comprehensive book on the subject acquired in a National Trust bookshop at Lacock Abbey.  The two passions came together nicely on the terrace at the Globe Theatre.  There, among the many flagstones commemorating the supporters of American Sam Wanamaker's 45-year quest to rebuild the Globe, is one bearing the name of Sam's daughter Zoe, and any diehard Harry Potter fan knows that in the movies Zoe Wanamaker plays Madame Hooch, the flying instructor and Quidditch referee at Hogwarts.  I won't go into how many other Harry Potter actors are also noted Shakespeareans.

But I digress (even before approaching my true subject):  why can Shakespeare even begin to touch Harry Potter in Daisy's world of what rates?  Credit for early initiation goes to Mrs. Kleinman and Mrs. Alexander, the 4th grade teachers who had their classes performing Romeo and Juliet, in which Daisy played the Prince of Verona (and The Pirates of Penzance, a not unrelated British institution, in which Daisy played the modern Major General).  But credit for her lasting, maturing passion goes to Michelle Ray, a fellow Montgomery County Public Schools teacher and author of the recently published Falling for Hamlet.  My respect for teacher-authors gets a big boost once again.

Passion (or lack thereof) in the classroom is contagious, and this is why teaching is such a powerful and dangerous profession.  Ms. Ray, Daisy's 6th grade reading teacher, made Shakespeare current and true and important to Daisy. Here I find that Ms. Ray has also written a few words of wisdom on the topic of gratitude for what is sufficient in life.  "Being published has been one of the best things in my life, yet it’s been fraught with emotional challenges....So my mission:  focus on the joy."
.
I for one can always use the reminder that what we have, each of our blessings, our small contributions and celebrations, even each of our little adversities, is enough.

"Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

William Shakespeare
As You Like It, 2.1.13

Poetry Friday today is hosted by Karen at The Blog with the Shockingly Clever Title.

p*tag you're it

After the rounds of poetry tag played at my Honesdale Highlights workshop, I didn't think a tag game would ever be quite so exciting again.  But I was wrong:  I have been invited to participate in the second poetry tag project coordinated by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong, champions for the dissemination of poetry for young people.  Titled p*tag (you can play along here), it's the "first electronic-only anthology for teens" and will be illustrated with photos taken by Sylvia herself. 

Even as I write I'm in the midst of the challenge:  I have just been tagged by Stephanie Hemphill, an accomplished verse novelist.  My mission is to a) immerse myself in a photo I selected from Sylvia's intriguing gallery, b) select three words from Stephanie's fine poem, and c) compose my own poem inspired by the photo using Stephanie's three words and an as-yet-undetermined number of my own.  I have 24 hours in which to do this, and to write a piece that describes my process and how the resulting poem is linked to the photo and to Stephanie's.  

Then I get to tag another of the 31 poets who are participating (with respect for who's on vacation this weekend and who's working!).  The project will all be complete and available for download at an irresistible price by October. How cool IS this?  I just hope I can pull off something worthy of the concept and of the first Poetry Tag Time volume, which was e-published in April.

So, back to Stephanie Hemphill.  Her latest book is Wicked Girls, which I confess I thought might be another girls-telling-lies-and-being-mean-to-each-other-book despite its subtitle: A Novel of the Salem Witch Trials.  I took up HarperTeen's offer to "browse inside" and found myself reading way past my bedtime with fascination and admiration.  Here's a selection called "Caught."

Caught
Margaret Walcott, 17

Past the crooked evergreen
and the brook what lost its water,
on my way home from playing
games on who'll make me husband,
I cross Ipswich Road.
I rub my eyes.  His two blue ones
be looking straight on me.

My pulse starts to gallop
like a steed.  But today I trip not.
I track on up to him and say,
"Be you following me?"

His arms be thick enough
to lift the axe of three men.
Isaac's laughter shakes
through him so fierce
it scatters the snow off his boots.
"Yea, Margaret Walcott,
betwixt tending the stables,
staking out the fields
and bringing wares to town,
I be scouting all the time after you."
He raises one brow.
"But where hast thou been?"

The color splashes over me,
drenching me red.  I hold up my buckets.
"Fetching water," I say.

"Thou are far from any stream
I know of," Isaac says,
and shakes his head.
His eyes catch on me
like he be holding lightly
my face with his hand.

"I must then be lost," I say,
and I pick up my bucket
and my skirts and trot off.
And do so quite a bit like a lady.

~ Stephanie Hemphill
from Wicked Girls, Harper 2011


Apart from the draw of the story itself, of the girl accusers of Salem's alleged witches, I am completely fascinated by the sound of American English at this early, early stage of our history--the syntax, the grammar, and not least the voices of these girls who find themselves, unlike most girls of the era, known in history rather than anonymous.

Check out what other worlds folks are dreaming today at A Year of Literacy Coaching with Libby.  Happy Poetry Friday, and look out for p*tag!

the big day

Update, August 12:  here we are, having done the deed!

Those zebras are going to have to wait yet another week, because suddenly, after 20 years and two children together, my beloved and I decided to tie the knot----you know, officially and publicly, with a license---because who knows how long same-sex marriage will stay legal in DC., and who knows how long until it's legal in Maryland?  So the big day will take place down in the big city and the ceremony has been hastily cobbled together this week around the theme of  "unconventional"--best expressed by our 8-year-old son's decision to wear a black tuxedo, accessorized with a sombrero.  Really.

Here are words I find appropriate on such a momentous little occasion.  I just read that e. e. cummings was criticized for his failure to grow as a poet, and one reviewer called him "a case of arrested development."  But I'm with Edward Estlin: I say that keeping that beginner's wonder at "the root of the root and the bud of the bud" through decades is what grows the tree called life [called love] so sky high.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
....................................i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

~ e.e. cummings


Visit Kate for more poetry love at Book Aunt, and think of me and Fiona, the Spice Girls (spouse girl + spouse girl = Spice Girls) on Saturday morning!

we interrupt this poetry blog

...to remark on how thrilling it was for our whole family to attend a midnight showing of You-Know-What 7 Part II last night.  Recently at The Miss Rumphius Effect Tricia had a Poetry Stretch in which she mused about the "small moments" our children may remember (check out Steven's clever, frozen-moment spincentric response, among others).  While this moment together at the Avalon Theatre in DC was not small--and I know that my daughter's entire childhood has been colored by Harry & Co (though I'm proud to say that her favorite character has always been the distasteful, complicated, ambiguous Snape)--the yawning, flaky day we're having today and even the cheat for my younger son, who has now seen three movies without reading the books first, is totally worth it.  Too bad I have no commemorative poem to share.

So here's something else to amuse (and I'll get back to those zebras another week when my EfficientOrganizedBrain has returned from vacation). One of the things I like best in the series is parsing the linguistic and connotative meanings of all the spells and incantations:  flash poems, you might call them, and try "Wingardium leviosa" with that thought in mind.

One of my personal favorite moments of the film was when Professor McGonagall begins to protect Hogwarts Castle with the spell "Piertotum locomotor," which brings to life the statues and suits of armor of Hogwarts' walls and halls to "Man the boundaries, protect us, do your duty to our school!" [spoiler alert] Then she turns to Molly Weasley and says with a kind of dizzy, desperate pleasure, "I have always wanted to use that spell." (This line is not in the book, I find.)

As the animated warriors pound towards the boundaries, all I could think of was the scene from "Bedknobs and Broomsticks,"  the 1971 Disney film in which the fledgling witch Miss Price brings a similar army to life against the Nazis using Substitutiary Locomotion and a very different incantation:  "Treguna mekoides tracorum satis dee." 

It's a scene with a much more humorous tone from that of the Deathly Hallows battle, but shows equally the magical power of the right words.  As you embark on your weekend, "protego!"

Find more powerful incantations over at  A Year of Reading with Mary Lee.

what I like helps you figure out what you like

I've been thinking a lot about the essay I found earlier this week, "In Praise of Promiscuous Thinking," on Charles Bernstein’s Attack of the Difficult Poems and David Orr’s Beautiful and Pointless.  Both are books that, as essayist Joel Brouwer says, "have things to say about how to read poems in general, as opposed to this or that specific poem." Both are also books that I would never read, although of course I'm intensely interested in how good poems do what they do, in what makes a poem "good."

Why wouldn't I read them? Because I know what I like and what I don't, what combinations of words tingle the tips of my synapses (flowing all around into every sensory cell not to mention my spiritual human heart) and what combinations leave me flat, bored or even exasperated at the waste of perfectly good words. In other words, I don't need any help to figure out what is a good poem; it's a fairly black-and-white situation. (I think most kids who have any opinion would say the same thing.)

But wait! Didn't I read Brouwer's essay with the same tingling delight as a really great new poem? Why? What did I get out of it that made me want to share it? What has kept me thinking all week about it?

Oh. Heh. Brouwer writes illuminatingly about why he likes poems but doesn't like Poetry, and about his experiences of reading poetry criticism as well as poems, and about his reactions to these two books.  Because his whole point is that there is no point in telling people what to like or why, in reading his critique of poetry criticism, I'm free to decide how I agree, or disagree, or agree with reservations, or agree resoundingly, as with:

"By a lovable criticism, I mean a criticism that allows space for its readers’ imaginations without compromising its own convictions; which ventures its ideas rather than asserting them; which would rather start a conversation than end one; which not only speaks but also listens; which admits and embraces uncertainties. A lovable criticism is a criticism willing to make itself vulnerable, willing even to embarrass itself." *

In reading about another person's inexplicable personal preferences, exquisitely explained, I come to a renewed and refined understanding of my own inexplicable preferences, which leads me to want to try explaining them as exquisitely, in case what I like helps you figure out what you like.  It is a strange and ambiguous process--not very black-and-white but certainly not grey--which leads directly to my first rule of poetry teaching: "Share Only Poems That You Love," and its corollary: "Don't Expect Every Child To Love Them Like You Do."

With a new appreciation for the purpose of criticism, later this week I'm going to compare two zebra poems previously referenced here thanks to Andromeda:  one that I love and think is good, and one that I think is a waste of perfectly good words.  It'll be a good challenge for me, and maybe it will help someone else better understand what they like when it comes to poems.

The sweet and searing round-up is with Elaine at Wild Rose Reader today.

*This passage is enlightening as it is, but try substituting any number of  items in place of  "lovable criticism"--poem, teacher, spouse!

because it's lovable

I have carefully resisted invitations to "StumbleUpon" or "digg" all the gloriously random but gripping content of the internet for the same reason that I never make marshmallow treats at home:  because I love them too much.  That makes accidentally Stumbling Upon something I really digg even sweeter and stickier.

Consider this, from a review of two new books on the why of poetry by poet Joel Brouwer:

"So for both Bernstein and Orr, poems have “inner lives” and are capable of “coming to life” as we read them, and there are reasons to love them. All this would suggest that poems are, as a class, inherently meaningful and appealing. But Bernstein is committed to the idea that any effort to understand those meanings is not only doomed but misguided, and Orr arrives at the underwhelming conclusion that if poems happen to appeal to you for some reason, then they will appeal to you for that reason.

Both authors appear to be practicing criticism as tautology. The meaning of a poem is that we ask ourselves what it means. If the poem is valuable, it’s because it is. Orr approvingly quotes Italo Calvino’s conclusion to his essay “Why Read the Classics?”: “The only reason one can possibly adduce is that to read the classics is better than not to read the classics.” Such an argument seems easily defended, but also irritatingly easy, and I can foresee it eliciting one of two perfectly reasonable reactions from readers. The first would be to get peeved and demand that the critic stop pussyfooting around already and tell us what he thinks we should think, so that we can agree or disagree with him and get on with it."

And then:

"You may be thinking all this sounds like a lot of ivory-tower horse****. That may be, but beneath it lies a simple and straightforward concern. I worry that contemporary readers and writers of poetry and poetry criticism, a constituency you’d think would be capable of being in uncertainties and eager to dwell in possibility and all that, are too often too quick to judge one another’s ideas right or wrong. I don’t want to oversimplify Bernstein as having nothing more to say than “difficulty and experimentation are good; accessibility and received forms are bad,” and Orr as having nothing more to say than “if you gave poetry a chance, you might like it!” I propose that we greet simplistic and reductive rhetoric not with more of the same but with lenity and mischief. I propose that the next time someone tells you that blogs, Twitter, critical theory, Garrison Keillor, the AAP, the AWP, the MLA, the MFA, Billy Collins, publishing conglomerates, obscurity, accessibility, John Ashbery, hip-hop, online publishing, Charles Bernstein, David Orr, or anything or anyone else is “killing poetry,” you proffer your responding deposition in the form of a spear of summer grass. I propose we desert our posts in the poetry wars and wander off in search of more creative and intimate ways of interacting with criticism.

I don’t need Bernstein’s or Orr’s critical positions to be correct or incorrect—I don’t need them at all—but I want them to be . . . oh, let’s say “lovable.” (I choose the term in part because it’s embarrassing, vague, and dorky; criticism marked by cool, clear confidence is exactly what I’m trying to discredit.) By a lovable criticism, I mean a criticism that allows space for its readers’ imaginations without compromising its own convictions; which ventures its ideas rather than asserting them; which would rather start a conversation than end one; which not only speaks but also listens; which admits and embraces uncertainties. A lovable criticism is a criticism willing to make itself vulnerable, willing even to embarrass itself."

Do go and read the rest of this incisive (in the way that marshamallows and Rice Krispies are incisive) and entertaining consideration of how poetry matters.

old salts and sea froth

Despite the unseasonable winter's morn and stormy day, this learish nonsense goes well with a beach vacation. Go on, stand up and declaim it out loud!


The Jumblies (excerpt)
by Edward Lear

They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, 'You'll all be drowned!'
They called aloud, 'Our Sieve ain't big,
But we don't care a button! we don't care a fig!
In a Sieve we'll go to sea!'
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

You can enjoy all six stanzas and a lot of other Lear here. For more Poetry Friday froth go to Carol's Corner.

one, two, three juicy grasshoppers

Some coincidences cannot be ignored. A coupla weeks ago I enjoyed a gripping performance of the poem below by Joy Acey, a fellow participant in that Highlights Foundation workshop I keep mentioning. It's one of the poems Joy uses in her workshops with children. Despite my fondness for Mary Oliver's work, it was new to me, and striking.

Then I found the same celebration of ordinary miracles (go here for the start of this thread) posted on Mary Lee Hahn's Year of Reading blog, with a whole different 84th birthday spin on it.

Today I notice that the actual title of this poem is not "The Grasshopper," or "A Prayer," or even "At last, and too soon." Instead it is "The Summer Day"--not "A Summer Day," but "THE Summer Day," and here it comes. Tomorrow our family will host our 10th Annual Summer Solstice Picnic, a loose affair involving a Ritual Unveiling of Foil and Plastic, watermelon, lightning bugs, mosquitoes, public consumption of alcohol, and quite often a thunderstorm.

Maybe this year, as we drag the picnic tables up the hill to the gazebo, there will be a grasshopper. I'll take sugar just in case.

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day....

Read the rest at http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/133.html

P.S. More juice: my son is right now telling me that "this pineapple has two kinds of energy, even though it's not moving: heat energy, and citrus energy: the burning acid parts....It's true."

today's menu

As for many of us who teach, my last day of school has come and gone and all that's left is the cleaning up. I have more cleaning up than most, since circumstances require me to box up all my classroom possessions--but it's a great relief that I finally know what to write on the labels! I'll be moving schools and teaching kindergarten full-time next year.

So, goodbye to a sweet & sour year, to a warm and wonderful school community that I really didn't want to leave, and hello to a whole new proposition...

On the Menu for School Today

Label planets
in our sky.
Learn how numbers
multiply.
Count coins.
String beads.
Shake bells.
Plant seeds.
Map constellations
dot
to
dot....
Decorate
a flowerpot.
Say a poem.
Spell b-u-t-t-e-r-f-l-y.
Shout hello.
Wave good-bye.

~Rebecca Kai Dotlich
from Falling Down the Page, ed. Georgia Heard, 2009

My summer goals are to work on a refreshed concept for an old group of poems (thanks to the inspirations and suggestions of my fellow conferees at David Harrison's workshop in Boyds Mills) and to post here at least three times a week. And also to really follow the folks I "follow"--I always get so much out of your posts.
"Thak you for bing mi tethr! <3 <3 <3"

Poetry Friday at Check It Out with Jone today, who has her own goodbye to say. Let evening come.

speaking of walt

I've just come across this article http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/12/us-usa-civilwar-whitman-idUSTRE73B7QU20110412, which explains better to me why a nearby high school is called Walt Whitman and why the following lines adorn an entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro station:

Thus in silence in dreams' projections,

Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;

The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,

I sit by the restless all dark night - some are so young;

Some suffer so much - I recall the experience sweet and sad...


Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, 1876


Somehow I'd missed the deep USGOV connection...3000 documents!

inward *beam*

This is what I mean by "my juicy little universe."
Go Walt.






Miracles
by Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of
the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer
forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so
quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle...

Read the rest at http://www.daypoems.net/poems/2084.html

hello, tootsie

One last installment of 2nd-grade work today... I'm conserving the rest of my energy to do a better job of visiting other Poetry Friday postings (and anyway the poems speak for themselves). Both are by a mysterious figure known only as DWG.


H ello
E ach day you say it at
L east one time
L et go of your troubles and
O pen your mind


Tootsie Rolls

Twist the wrapper. Take it out. Pop
it in your mouth. Suck on it a bit.
Then bite down on it. The sweetness
spreads through your whole
mouth. Enjoy the moment. Savor it.
Think about how sweet it is.
Then when it's gone. Think about
how lucky you are.

*beam*

Hey diddle diddle! Savor the flavor of Poetry Friday with Anastasia at Picture Book of the Day.