Category: Poetry

Poetry Friday: Call for Roundup Hosts

It’s that time again. Six months have passed since last we queued up to host the Poetry Friday roundups.

What is the Poetry Friday roundup? A gathering of links to posts featuring original or shared poems, or reviews of poetry books. A carnival of poetry posts. Here is an explanation that Rene LaTulippe shared on her blog, No Water River, and here is an article Susan Thomsen wrote for the Poetry Foundation.

Who can do the Poetry Friday roundup? Anyone who is willing to gather the links in some way, shape, or form (Mr. Linky, “old school” in the comments, or ???) on the Friday of your choice. If you are new to the Poetry Friday community, jump right in, but perhaps choose a date later on so that we can spend some time getting to know each other.

How do you do a Poetry Friday roundup? If you’re not sure, stick around for a couple of weeks and watch…and learn! One thing we’re finding out is that folks who schedule their posts, or who live in a different time zone than you, appreciate it when the roundup post goes live sometime on Thursday.

How do I get the code for the PF Roundup Schedule for the sidebar of my blog? You can grab the list from the sidebar here at A(nother) Year of Reading, or I’d be happy to send it to you if you leave me your email address. 

Why would I do a Poetry Friday Roundup? Community, community, community. It’s like hosting a poetry party on your blog!

Put your request in the comments (blog URL is appreciated) and I’ll update the calendar frequently. Feel free to share this post on all the various socials.

And now for the where and when:

July
7
14
21
28

August
4
11
18
25

September
1
8
15
22
29

October
6 Matt at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme
13
20
27

November
3
10
17
24

December
1
8
15 Janice at Salt City Verse
22 Jone at Jone Rush MacCulloch
29

Poetry Friday: No Vacancy

No Vacancy (A Sudoku Poem)

Molly’s challenge/invitation for the Inklings this month was to channel the “dazzle of color that arrives in spring after months and months of blues and whites and grays.” She gave us a couple of mentor poems, but when I saw this Sudoku poem in the Rattle newsletter, I knew I had to try one.

Sudoku are logic puzzles. “The objective is to fill a 9 × 9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3 × 3 subgrids that compose the grid (also called “boxes”, “blocks”, or “regions”) contain all of the digits from 1 to 9.” (thank you, Wikipedia for this concise explanation!) In my Sudoku poem, every row and every column reads as a sort of haiku.

I’m not entirely new to this kind of writing. Once upon a long time ago, I made some mini-canvas mix-and-match haiku sets to give away as gifts. (Could I find any pictures? No, I could not.)

This 5X5 poem started with my Metaphor Dice and the phrase down the left-most column. It grew from there, with color added where I could. If only I had done a time lapse video of the writing and revision I would be able to tell you the exact (hah!) steps for creating a Sudoku Poem. You’ll have to try it for yourself and see what happens!

Here’s what the other Inklings came up with this month:

Linda @A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche

Tricia has this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup at The Miss Rumphius Effect. Watch for the signup for July-December roundup hosts next week!

Poetry Friday: Ghazal for the Lake

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The Poetry Sisters challenge for this month was to write a ghazal. Challenge is the right word! I had a bit of a head start because the Inklings wrote ghazals back in 2021 and I had both the experience of juggling all the rules of ghazals AND an abandoned draft to work with. Good thing, because all the other drafts I started in the past week or so came to absolutely nothing…for now! Maybe the next time I tackle ghazals, one of those drafts will be just what I need!

In June, we will be writing in response to a quote. Pick your favorite and join us!

Here’s what the rest of the Poetry Sisters came up with this month:
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas

Patricia has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Reverie.

Poetry Friday: How to Write a Poem

In the past two weeks, this book has done good work in the world. (Okay, in all fairness…has helped ME do good work in the world!)

I’m a once-a-week Reading Specialist at each of the three sites of our community resource center’s after school program. The first week of May, we had a whole-group read aloud and then in small groups, folded zines that would be the container for our own poems, which we would write the following week.

My young friends and I have a ritual for reading picture books. We examine the dust jacket, opening the book wide to see if the cover illustration spans the entire cover (our favorite), or if there’s an important nugget from the book on the back cover. In the case of How to Read a Poem, there is this nugget that we watched for as we read:

“The words have been waiting to slide down your pencil.”

Next, I lift the dust jacket so we can see if the cover illustration is the same. (Our favorites have a different cover illustration!) Then, we examine the end papers, which, for How to Read a Poem, show the alphabet, and which were the source of a lively discussion:

Me: Melissa Sweet chose the alphabet for the endpapers. These letters are everything you need to make the words for your poems!

Child 1: There’s no A!

Me: I noticed that. I wonder why she…

Child 2: There’s the A! It’s really big!

And then, just like the best optical illusions, the A showed itself to all of us. Now I can’t unsee it!

Before I began reading at one site, one of my youngest friends asked, “But what IS poetry?” After praising him for his insightful question, I quoted Kwame’s back matter. He quotes a third grader’s response to this very question:

“Poetry is an egg with a horse inside it.”

This led to a discussion about what makes poetry poetry: it gets to break rules, it doesn’t have to make the kind of sense we expect, it’s short, and yes it sometimes rhymes and has a form like haiku or acrostic or limerick, but mostly it gets to be whatever it wants to be.

Kwame’s book reinforces these ideas (and Melissa Sweet’s illustrations are just as much a poem as his words). His poem-text hits the notes of wonder, listening to the world, using imagination, playing with words (“…a cotton candy cavalcade of sounds”), accessing both joy and sorrow, and becoming “a voice with spunk.” The book ends with the invitation, “Now show us what you’ve found.”

Here is some of what we found this week:

“Inspiration is everywhere
you just need to look.”

“Lonch youere self to the
MOON with your jet pack
of ceativeaty.”

“Star bright
in the air
let my dreams
fall down
to my hands.”

“There is magic falling
all around us growing tall
roped into our life
like how forks
are roped to food
open your door
and let in the wind
let it go in and out”

“alligators eat
the sun”

“flower birds
sing rain”

“the pizza
is made of
teeth”

So. Much. Fun.

Here’s wishing you joyful poetry writing!

Robyn has the Mother’s Day edition of Poetry Friday at Life on the Deckle Edge. Happy Mother’s Day to all the men and women and non-binaries who nurture small humans, fur babies, gardens, and the world.

Poetry Friday: Factotum

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Thank you, fellow Inkling, Linda Mitchell, for this month’s prompt which gave me permission to write an almost-definito for a word I’d been saving since mid-March:

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You can see what the other Inklings came up with here:

Linda @A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche

Linda B. has this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup at TeacherDance.

Poetry Friday: In the Style of Neruda

Write a poem in the style of Neruda.

The urge to skip this month’s Poetry Sisters challenge was strong. I went to last Sunday’s zoom meeting with an idea for a way to come to this challenge through the back door. I was also hoping for a Cliffs Notes version of The Style of Neruda that could help me on my way, or, at the very least, provide content for my cheat. I got both.

Tricia shared this recent children’s book:

And others reminded me that Neruda is known for his odes. (Also sonnets, but only Tanita had the bandwidth to go that direction. Yay, Tanita!)

Here’s my cheat: a golden shovel with the striking line running through the middle of the poem, inspired by Neruda’s BOOK OF QUESTIONS and my garden.

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We are still inside National Poetry Month, so I was determined, also, to get a cherita out of this challenge. I leaned in the direction of Neruda’s odes for this one.

Here’s what the rest of the Poetry Sisters came up with this month:
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas

Ruth has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at There is no such thing as a God-forsaken town and the Progressive poem is at Still in Awe with Karin Fisher-Golton.

Happy Almost the End of National Poetry Month! All of my cheritas can be found at Poetrepository. So that I can catch up reading YOUR projects, I declare May to be Read What Everyone Else Did for NPM Month!

Poetry Friday: Open

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All of my cheritas for the month can be found here.

If you missed it, one of Jone’s students made a powerful work of art and social commentary with my poem from last year’s NPM project, “Dandelions.” Go watch her video. Have a tissue ready.

Jone has the Poetry Friday roundup today, featuring Classic Found Poems. I’m late to the party, but I found a cherita inside A WRINKLE IN TIME, p.191.

comparing our lives to a sonnet:

a strict form
but freedom within it

you’re given the form
but you have to write the sonnet yourself–
what you say is completely up to you

Jone also has the next line in the Progressive Poem tomorrow. Sounds like my life at the beginning of the month! Such fun times in April!

Poetry Friday: Dictionary Hopscotch

Back when I issued my challenge to the Inklings, I thought my Poetry Month project would be Dictionary Hopscotch — I would randomly choose 4 words from different spots in the dictionary and then use at least 3 of them in a poem.

So I challenged my fellow Inklings to use 3 of these 4 randomly chosen words in a poem: knuckle, denial, turn, cautious.

And then I changed my project to cheritas.

Therefore, this:

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Here’s how the rest of the crew met my challenge:

Linda @A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche

Margaret has this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup at Reflections on the Teche.

Don’t forget to check up on the Progressive Poem! Links are in the sidebar.

Days 1-6 of my #NPM23 project can be found on FB, IG and at Poetrepository.

The hopscotch image is via Unsplash.

2023 Kidlit Progressive Poem, Day 1

About the Progressive Poem: Irene Latham began the tradition in 2012 and hosted until 2019. (Early archives here.) Margaret Simon took the reins in 2020. (Recent archives are tabs at the top of her page.)

Blogs where the next lines will be found are linked in the sidebar to the right.

The rules are few: “The poem will be passing from blog to blog with each poet-blogger adding a line. The poem is for children. Other than that, anything goes.” Each blogger will copy the previous lines exactly as written (unless permission from the previous poet is obtained) and add their line, including commentary on their process if they wish.

My process was scant. This line jumped into my head (and luckily, was captured in my notebook) on March 5. No other possible lines held up to the potential contained in this one. I love stories that start at the end, so here you go. Write me a story that ends with sudden clarity.

Happy National Poetry Month and Happy Progressive Poem! Let the fun and hijinks begin!