30d30w: word 17

birthday  

secret whistles,
fiery code…

              nothing.
happy wrapping
hides the empty

         cage. 

something whispers…

furry coat,

              thumping

Hee hee...nothing/something/thumping! Thanks, Buffy.

It COULD still be a dog, but since one of my earliest relationships with a character was with Thumper, I don't know.  I really tried hard to go with Diane's excellent grinning, but it doesn't seem time yet for the Liver of the Poem (see Irene Latham's advice) to pull himself out of his empty birthday doldrums and start putting 2 and 2 together.  He--and I'm realizing that I've been picturing a boy since about Word 5--needs more clues.  Of course, someone or something else could do the grinning as well (although I don't believe that rabbits grin).  But neighbors and siblings do....

I hope everybody's still having fun here--I sure am.  And don't forget to go see the progress of the Progressive Poem over at  No Water River today--fun by the line instead of by the word!

30d30w: word 16

birthday  

secret whistles,
fiery code…

              nothing.
happy wrapping
hides the empty
         cage. 

something whispers—

furry coat,

As I do in my own composition (for better or worse), I've now settled the stanza length and pattern, and although this is free verse, I'm compelled to stick with it until the end.  Then, ordinarily, I'd do an immediate redraft allowing changes to the form which has developed organically.  In this case, I won't have the authority to revise like that, so it's all the more important to get it "right" the first time.  I thank you all for your suggestions, especially Savvy Wit and Verse visitors, and Matt and Daisy for nose and catch, which both had special merits, but I've gone with Tabatha's coat because of my matchy-match compulsion.  (Yes, it also drives my home decor and fashion choices, even though I'm aware that matchy-match is out.)

So we have a 6-line stanza with 11 words, times two is 22, leaving 8 words for some kind of concluding stanza?  Or we could alternate 6 lines/4 lines.  Hmmmmm....

30d30w: word 15 / mjlu visits Savvy Verse and Wit

Back in March, Serena from Savvy Verse and Wit called on fellow bloggers to participate in her month-long blog tour by profiling a poet or poem. I don't know Serena well, but the variety of folks and their posts who signed up is very interesting. Welcome, SVandW followers!

Here at my juicy little universe, we're playing a National Poetry Month game for busy people--
the 30days30words cumulative, collaborative poem!  I posted a single word on Monday, April 1, and each day have invited all comers to suggest the next word in the poem. We'll continue like this throughout April, one word at a time, until I've selected 30 words in total and we have a finished poem of some surprising form and function. I hope many of you will stop back again to offer suggestions and see how the poem builds!  Here it is today, with its new 15th word.

birthday  

secret whistles,
fiery code…

              nothing.
happy wrapping
hides the empty

        cage. 

something whispers

furry

Today's word comes from Petrina, who seems to have been inspired by the development of "birthday" and posted on facebook that her family is now home to Chippy the hamster and Finny the fish.  What choice did I have, after "fiery" in Stanza 1, Line 2, if not furry?  (Okay, I was tempted by fairy, but the fairy can come in later as the something whispering.)  I think I know what the next word should be, and she or he who suggests it gets special mention for reading my mind--but you have surprised me before and may well do again, so I'm ready to switch gears.

Thanks once again for joining in, everyone!

the Progressive Poem visits mjlu!

It's my turn to catch the Progressive Poem today, juggle it a little, and toss it on to the next player!  Organized by Irene Latham of Live Your Poem, this piece has grown itself  a six-line stanza of longish lines and a good strong rhythm (though a variable meter).  It's a poem about writing, about the movement and sound of words as they dance across the page, sometimes in a "solitary samba," then whispering as they come together in a "jitterbug and jive." 

This image of words in motion was expanded yesterday by Catherine's new twist--she took Linda's swing and sent it to the circus!  This turns up the volume (and makes me a little hungry for popcorn and cotton candy)...and I'm keen to maintain the internal rhyme, too.  Here goes...

When you listen to your footsteps
the words become music and
the rhythm that you’re rapping gets your fingers tapping, too.
Your pen starts dancing across the page
a private pirouette, a solitary samba until
smiling, you’re beguiling as your love comes shining through.

Pause a moment in your dreaming, hear the whispers
of the words, one dancer to another, saying
Listen, that’s our cue! Mind your meter. Find your rhyme.
Ignore the trepidation while you jitterbug and jive.
Arm in arm, toe to toe, words begin to wiggle and flow
as your heart starts singing let your mind keep swinging

From life’s trapeze, like a clown on the breeze.

Swinging upside down, throw and catch new sounds--

 

*****************
Over to you, Mary Lee, and thanks to Irene and the authors of lines 1-13 for all the possibilities! To watch what feats the poem performs next, follow the schedule below. Also, don't forget to keep reading below for today's 30days30words one-word-a-day poem--things are getting interesting!

April Progressive Poets, Day by Day
1  Amy Ludwig VanDerwater
2  Joy Acey
3  Matt Forrest Esenwine
4  Jone MacCulloch
5  Doraine Bennett
6  Gayle Krause
7  Janet Fagal
8  Julie Larios
9  Carrie Finison
10  Linda Baie
11  Margaret Simon
12  Linda Kulp
13  Catherine Johnson
14  Heidi Mordhorst
15  Mary Lee Hahn
16  Liz Steinglass
17  Renee LaTulippe
18  Penny Klostermann
19  Irene Latham
20  Buffy Silverman
21  Tabatha Yeatts
22  Laura Shovan
23  Joanna Marple
24  Katya Czaja
25  Diane Mayr
26  Robyn Hood Black
27  Ruth Hersey
28  Laura Purdie Salas
29  Denise Mortensen
30  April Halprin Wayland

 

30d30w: word 14 and another bonus poem!

birthday  

secret whistles,
fiery code…

              nothing.
happy wrapping
hides the empty

         cage. 

something whispers

Nice!  Both Liz and Matt suggested whispers, so both the popular vote and the demands of pattern made it easy to choose.  See how line 2 of the second stanza now matches line 1 of the first stanza?
But is it the something from the empty cage doing the whispering, or is the lead coming from somewhere else, somewhere within?

And now, our second bonus poem.  I tried a new twist on an old technique in my classroom. First we chose a letter--P for Poetry or F for Friday? F won the vote (narrowly) and thus was conceived the Mighty Minnows' F-Word Poem. Each child suggested a word beginning with f, I wrote each child's word on an index card, and one by one we made our choices and taped them on chart paper.  In the composition process it became a dramatic (and quite fanciful) story poem, and we discovered we needed some repeated and extra words for it to make any kind of syntactic sense. 

Fly, flamingo fairy!
Fan fast!
Fly four, five, five hundred feet
from the fat fire!
Fluffy-feathered flower-fish
finishes flip-flop force field.
Flamingo fairy is fine on Friday.



Not sure the "new twist" worked, exactly...However, I will say that the Minnows did a pretty great job supplying juicy, powerful and interesting words.  I think spending last week with Piggy in the Puddle helped. ; )

30d30w: word 13

birthday

 secret whistles,
fiery code…

              nothing.
happy wrapping
hides the empty
         cage.

something

This is so interesting!  I was pretty sure that the inhabitant of the cage had passed on to the spirit plane, but your suggestions--and what a lot of good ones--tell me otherwise.  You don't want death; you want escape, intrigue, search and surprise!  (Do we shy away from death when writing for young people, or lately in this world must we dwell on it too much?)

Okay, we'll go there, but despite all the fuller words you suggested, I'm going with Dori's something. It tenses against the big "nothing" of the first stanza and waits open and ready for clues, allowing a sense of anticipation and hope to build.

The icon above is to remind us all that Irene's Progressive Poem stops here tomorrow--a double dose of collaboration! 

30d30w: word twelve! mystery revealed! but just a little...

Flickr Creative Commons photo by Mykl Roventine

 

birthday

secret whistles,
fiery code…

              nothing.
happy wrapping
hides the empty
        cage.

Okay, boys and girls--we have reached that turning point that some of you have been longing for!  I would have had fewer choices than any day yet for Word Twelve (NPMF Syndrome developing, perhaps?  Surely you've heard of National Poetry Month Fatigue Syndrome?), BUT both Laura S. and Buffy spewed forth a slew of choices along with the prank snakes, and now Buffy has focused the birthday sadness for me with her word cage.   Yes, a cage sits under that happy wrapping paper, and now we know that those secret whistles and fiery coded wishes achieve nothing for a good but grave reason.

Curiously, that one single word both focuses the first stanza of the poem (somehow I already know that we've completed the first stanza) AND presses us to move on to the second act.  During the stanza break there will be heartfelt sighing and crying, but we don't need to say that out loud.  The image of the empty cage hanging there in white space conveys that powerfully. Instead, the first word of the second stanza will spin us out of sadness to face us in a new direction.  Bring it on, people--the lucky 13th word!  (Have I mentioned how much fun this is?)

Diane has the Poetry Friday round-up today at Random Noodling.  Do come back later when I hope to have posted the next Mighty Minnows poem from my kindergarten collaborators!

30d30w: word eleven

birthday

 

secret whistles,
fiery code…

              nothing.
happy wrapping
hides the empty

In a rush today, but I'll take one minute to calculate some PoeMetrics a la Ed DeCaria:  our poem is now more than 33% complete!  (That's as much math as you'll get out of me today.)  Thanks to all the enthusiastic participants who keep coming by to play by offering words, and especially to Ruth for today's word, empty.  I had (not for the first time) the urge to select a clump of three words and empty red confetti all over this poor sad birthday, so do feel free to REsuggest red and confetti (or indeed pistachios) again tomorrow!

30d30w: word ten and bonus poem!

birthday

      secret whistles,
fiery code…

                   nothing.   
happy wrapping
            hides the

My apologies to Mary Lee, who has suggested ever so many juicy, powerful words for this poem and generally in life--and now I'm choosing her the!  You can see that I'm trying out a revised format, and if I thought this was a tricky exercise early on because of the indistinctness of the baby poem, it's MUCH trickier now that it's a bit more grown up and I begin to have my own aspirations for its future.  So perhaps choosing the is a stalling maneuver while I (we?) gather our thoughts and reflect...or while I remind myself not to think too hard!  At the very least, it sounds good...

And now here's the bonus poem.  Monday is Outdoor Education for me and my Mighty Minnows, and with giddy warm weather finally arrived we went out yesterday to enjoy bare arms and spring and to make our own word-by-word collaborative poem.  We rehearsed inside a bit--"What juicy, powerful words would fit into a poem about spring?"--but when we got outside it was purely spontaneous.  "Who's got the first word?" I asked.  With confidence Katja suggested flowers and we were off!  Of course there was coaching along the way ("What are the summer leaves DOING right now?") but each child really selected his or her word and they all own the completed poem, which they decorated all around with chalk when it was finished.  Crazy poetry fun!

30d30w: word nine

Flickr Creative Commons photo by Mykl Roventine

 

birthday  
 

secret whistles
fiery code

nothing happy

wrapping hides

 

I'm backing off the punctuation, etc. for today--yesterday's v.1 and v.2 got about equal votes--and focusing on the word instead.  I've chosen Linda's hides because there are still quite a few days and words to go and it doesn't seem time yet to reveal any surprises.  I also like the way "hides" fits into a rhythm that just reading the two-word lines creates, and the h of "hides" together with the h of "happy."

 

I did wish there was a word that combined the senses of crinkling and hiding--I think the poem could benefit now from some more "sensory details," as we say in the classroom.



30w30d: word eight

birthday

secret whistles,
fiery code--

nothing happy.

wrapping

 

-or-

birthday

secret whistles,
fiery code--

               --nothing.

happy wrapping

Well, check this out.  I feel pretty sure about choosing Margaret's excellent word, wrapping (SO many possibilities there!), but much less sure about what to do with it.  Along with your word today you can say whether you prefer v.1 or v.2.  It would seem that either way, "birthday" has become the title.  I don't think there's any going back from that...or is there???

 

And thanks, faithful players!  Did you notice that for the first time two of you suggested the same Word Eight, except?  Interesting, right?  Is it that you don't want nothing to be happy?  Well, life is like that sometimes.  But the wrapping can be happy, if you like v. 2!

30d30w: word seven

Flickr Creative Commons photo by Mykl Roventine

birthday

secret whistles
fiery code

nothing happy

Today's word is suggested by my "walking friend" Petrina and her son Super M, age approximately 5.  While I'm blogging at a fairly sophisticated adult level, I'd like the poem to point definitively towards Super M and his fellow early readers, and for that audience no word fits birthday better than happy.  And yet, to challenge them, so far there's "nothing happy."  Why not?  What's going wrong with the secret whistles and fiery code?  Or do we just have to wait a bit, be more patient, to understand the whispers of the birthday universe?

You'll notice that I've now attributed the delicious photo that has become the logo of the 30days30words project.  Mary Lee of A Year of Reading put her internet media savvy to work and writes this:

"I found your image, Heidi, and here's how I did it: Like you, Google searches got me nowhere. I have the Google search app on my phone, but have never tried Google Goggles, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. Basically, through Google Goggles you take a photo of something and Mr. Google searches his (Ms. Google searches HER?) visual memory of things that look like that and gives you possible links to check. Bingo! I found the page (in Italian) and followed that person's link to the image back to Flickr. Lucky you -- this picture has a Creative Commons license." 

Mary Lee explains that I can provide attribution by adding a caption that says something like "Flickr Creative Commons photo by..." and link back to the source page.   Mary Lee also recommends the politeness that our mothers taught us:  "I always like to leave a "thanks for making this Creative Commons" note in the comments of CC photos I use from Flickr with a link back to my post and a little explanation of how I used the image. I've gotten a few of those notes on my Flickr account and it's nice to know how your images are being used!"

When I right-clicked Mykl's photo, up came a label saying "This photo has some rights reserved," and when I clicked some rights reserved I got a very nice summary of how this work may be used by others.  Also, I think I made a new friend.  Mykl's sets and series of photos are just right up my alley.