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!
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.
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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
It’s a Poetry Quadfecta this week! It’s the last Friday of the month which means it is time for the Poetry Sisters’ challenge AND it’s the last day of March which means it’s National Poetry Month Eve AND the Poetry Friday roundup is here PLUS the 2023 Progressive Poem will launch right here tomorrow morning! (See sidebar for links to the rest of the lines/month.)
Let’s start off with my poem for the Poetry Sisters’ challenge. This month, we wrote etherees, a poetry form that begins with one syllable in the first line and continues growing each line by a syllable until the tenth line has ten syllables. Additionally, we tried to stick to our year-long theme of transformation. I’m using my etheree to announce my Poetry Month project.
I wrote my etheree to announce my National Poetry Month project, which will be a month of cheritas.
This year, my National Poetry Month project will feature the cherita form. At the website The Cherita, the form is defined thus: “Cherita is the Malay word for story or tale. A cherita consists of a single stanza of a one-line verse, followed by a two-line verse, and then finishing with a three-line verse…The cherita tells a story.” Like last year, I will be publishing my poems daily at Poetrepository and crossposting here each Friday for Poetry Friday.
And now, for your poems! Click to add your link to the roundup:
The image doesn’t really have much to do with my cherita, except for the unreadable but definitely not antagonistic silent stare that passed from those four-leggeds to this two-legged in the early morning light earlier this week.
March. It does what its name says. Here we are, all of a sudden, a week away from National Poetry Month Eve, from Progressive Poem Eve, from the Poetry Friday roundup right here. Have I nailed down my NPM project? No. Have I written the first line of the Progressive Poem? Maybe. Is the roundup post ready? Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.
Let’s take a deep breath and see what everyone else has to offer this week. Rose has the first Poetry Friday Roundup of spring at Imagine the Possibilities. Next week will take care of itself, all in good time.
It’s been a dry month for poems that are Poetry Friday material. My challenge poems for the Poetry Sisters and for the Inklings are drafted and I am filling a project folder with poems that…well, you’ll have to wait and see! Luckily, I have the well of Laura Shovan’s February Poetry Project in which to dip, and look what I found! In lieu of a traditional Irish blessing, I wish you all the books you can read and all the time you need to read them and the joy of getting lost in the story as you cross its bridge.
In other news, I still haven’t nailed down my National Poetry Month project, but three poems from last year’s project were published in The Be-Zine! Click on the “Introduction & Table of Contents” button and scroll down to find the link to my poems. While you’re there, check out the poems from Michelle Kogan, Heidi Mordhorst, and Laura Shovan, too!
Laura Purdie Salas has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup. She HAS nailed down her National Poetry Month Project, and I’m tempted to join in! She also uses the word doohickey in her post, which makes me love her even more!!
A(nother) Year of Reading 