I am so happy Douglas Florian could join us as a guest poetry poster! He is an amazing artist, and an hysterically funny poet. Just read on, and you’ll see!
Writing poetry’s not hard.
Grow a poetree in your yard.
Feed it rhythm.
Feed it rhyme.
Feed it love most all the time.
When the poems are bright and fun
Then you’ll know your job is done.
Poetry writing tips:
1. Study your subject. If you’re writing about bears go to The American Museum of Natural History, a national park, a zoo, or maybe interview some bears in your backyard.
2. Vary your poems. Try different rhyme schemes (ABAB is one of my favorites, where the first line rhymes with the third, and the second line rhymes with the fourth.
3. Use alliteration, where two or more words start with the same sound like lovely little llamas.
4. Use bad spelling or grammar if it’s funny: llovely llittle llamas. That’s poetic license.
5. If a rhyme doesn’t come switch the words around a bit. Use a rhyming dictionary for big rhyming words.
6. Don’t be afraid to make up words. Your a poet, so show it! For example, A big tree is Treemendous! Get imagi-notions.
7. Have fun.
Poetry is important because it’s a terrific use of language and sound and usually meant to be recited.
My favorite childhood poem was written by Ogden Nash:
Kitten
The trouble with a kitten is that
Eventually it becomes a cat.
I hope you guys enjoy my latest books:
Poem Runs: Baseball Poems (Harcourt)
and
UnBEElievables: Honeybee Poems and Paintings (Beach Lane Books)
Today’s guest poetry poster (despite the title) is my talented friend April Pulley Sayre. When I got to the part about what her teacher did to her, I gasped.
Here is what April sent me:
I don’t think of myself as a poet. The moniker “poet” kind of scares me. Like I’d have to act more dignified, or serious, or something if I say I’m one. I only went to my first poetry reading last year. That might be a crime if you’re a poet. Not sure.
Admittedly, thirteen of 32 my picture books and out and under contract have regular rhythm and rhyme and, if typed out, look like poems. (Hear some kids read my chant poems here.) But I don’t know the words for different kinds of meters or why something works or does not. I can scan for meter but I make up my own markings and have no idea how anyone else does it. It just feels right or it doesn’t feel right. That is my measure.
I love lyrical language and just plunking, revising, and playing around with language. When I started doing school visits, an elementary school teacher informed me that my books are full of alliteration, onomatopoeia, and internal rhyme, I was amazed. Really? I’d forgotten what you actually call these devices because they are organic to how I work. I just call it playing with words.
My first instinct is almost always to write in rhyme but for the first ten years of my career, on purpose, I broke that rhyme and wrote in prose because I didn’t think I could “get away with rhyme.” Then I gave up, went ahead and rhymed, and sold three rhymed picture books in a row. Well, why couldn’t I have done that all along?
Okay, so maybe I write poetry. Does that make one a poet? I don’t have cool reading glasses yet. But I wrote lots of poetry when I was a little girl in the back of the car as the dog shed all over me and my parents drove me up into the snowy mountains to ski. That was before I guess I realized “poet” wasn’t something you just were.
I once thought I won a county art museum’s contest because of my poetry. It turned out that I won the category for essay, instead. From then on, I thought, I’m not a “poet” but an “essayist.” Then, I was labeled “science journalist” then “nonfiction writer.”
Perhaps I first abandoned my “poet” moniker in high school. My high school A.P. English teacher disliked me because I thought a lot of her interpretations of poetry were a crock. Maybe that’s why, when my poems were published in the state poetry magazine, she never told me or took me with the others on the award trip. It was fine; we would have driven each other crazy in the car. Thankfully, another of my high school English teachers gave me Japanese poetry to read and many other teachers were supportive along the way. Thank you, Mrs. Kobelt, Mrs. Joye!
Still, I wasn’t a poet. No, not when I ducked out of my journalism job at National Wildlife Federation and secretly left a moose poem on a wildlife biologist’s door, just for fun.
No, surely not when I wrote political (or, you might say non-political poetry) for my sister’s graduation from graduate school.
Okay, so maybe I published poetry, work for hire, to go with some science curricula for Delta Education. But that was just a little detour from prose nonfiction. Does that apply? I’m not sure exactly what the requirements are, but I’m pretty sure you have to be extremely cool to be a poet. I’m still working on that. I’m looking for a better hat. (I aspire to Anita Silvey’s hats.) Perhaps I’ll start with an excellent scarf, because you need that, too, right? I’ll let you know when I find them and I’m ready to be a poet. In the meantime, I’ve got to polish up a chant.
In “Running with Trains,” two boys speak in alternating poems. By the end of the book they do meet, but for most of the novel, they observe one another at a distance. They come to imagine and envy the other’s life.
Steve is 9 and lives with his parents on the family farm. He spends much of his time with his border collie and the herd of cows he shuttles from pasture to pasture.
Perry, who speaks this poem recorded here, is aboard the B&O Railroad that crosses Steve’s acres. He’s on his twice weekly trip between Cincinnati, where he spends his weekends with his mother, to Wapakoneta, where he stays with his grandmother while he finishes middle school.
Steve’s father, fighting in Vietnam, is MIA. His mother has started nursing school. And his free-spirit of a sister is at college with no time to answer Steve’s weekly letters: “…along with taking classes to be a social worker, she’s busy crafting rainbow candles so she can open a shop with her friend Sunshine, who used to be her friend Cynthia, who creates far-out jewelry with beads and shells. The last time I saw my sister she looked like a cross between my braces and a coral reef.”
The novel takes place in 1969 and 1970. As Perry writes in another letter: “We’re riding the current of current events. We’re swirling in a whirlwind of news from all over…as if a hurricane had uprooted everything, from Vietnam and Israel and Washington and Africa—and flooded together everyone’s future.”
The funny and fabulously talented Lisa Wheeler is today’s guest poetry poster! Why not check out (and LIKE) Lisa’s Facebook Page?
Mother Goose was my very first introduction to poetry. Equally attracted to both the metered rhyme and colorful artwork, I embraced the poems wholeheartedly.
I still do. I’ve been collecting Mother Goose books for nearly two decades.
Though most of these bouncy rhymes were not originally intended for children, I find they hold an appeal for readers of all ages. For oldsters, they bring back fond memories. For young children, they hold a newfound delight in the rhythm and rhyme.
I often tell wannabe rhymers to study Mary Had A Little Lamb for an example of perfect meter. I recall my daughter’s preschool teacher walking around the story circle and gently patting out the beats on the children’s shoulders as they recited Mother Goose. She explained that a sense of rhythm in words is an important pre-reading skill.
As a poet and children’s book lover, I’ve always been intrigued by the parodies of Mother Goose in my collection. I wanted to do my own parody and that is how Spinster Goose: Twisted Rhymes for Naughty Children was born. The premise being that Mother Goose is far too kind to ever punish the naughty children in Mother Gooseland. So she sends them to her sister, Spinster Goose, who runs a school for these horrid little urchins.
It is my hope that we keep Mother Goose alive for future generations of children and I implore poets, teachers, librarians, and parents to share these old favorites with the child in their lives.
In the meantime, try taking one of Mother Goose’s rhymes and twist into your own new creation—have fun!
Please welcome Charles Ghigna as today’s guest poetry poster!
“I hate poetry.” I’ve heard that a million times. I used to say it myself.
As a teenager, I thought poetry was for sissies and grandmothers. I didn’t want any part of it. I was only interested in cars, sports, and girls — not necessarily in that order. I thought poetry was something I had to agonizingly memorize and embarrassingly recite in front of the class. Something we had to study, analyze, and write essays about. Something we had to take tests on. Something whose meanings only teachers and poets understood. I thought poetry had no place in my life. I was wrong.
“Show, don’t tell.” I learned that from a teacher. “A poem should not mean, but be.” I learned that from Archibald McLeish. I learned that just like a good poem, the meaning cannot be told, it must be shown.
I was in high school when a teacher finally showed me the truth about poetry. He invited us to write poems from the inside out. When we read poems from our textbooks, he did not tell us the meaning, he invited us to tell him what the poem meant to us. Poems are like that. They invite us in, show us around, hope we enjoyed the visit.
We always left his class with that joy, with a new sense of discovery, of seeing the world and ourselves from new points of view, of wanting to express ourselves freely on paper in new ways.
I always try to remember that feeling whenever I write my poems and whenever I talk about poetry with young people and teachers.
Teachers often ask, “How do you get ‘em hooked on poetry when they say they ‘hate it?’” I had that same question in mind when I was a teacher. I always wished I had a book of poems that I could whip out and hand to my students who avoided poetry like the plague.
If we writers, educators, and parents cannot interest our children in the reading and writing of poetry during their teen years, we have probably lost them to the joy and wonder of poetry for the rest of their lives.
Poet John Ciardi once said that he wished he had written a book of poems for boys who hate poetry. My poet-friend X. J. Kennedy reminded me of Ciardi’s wish. My 14-year-old son, Chip, reminded me of it as well. I knew I had to face that challenge, that reward. I knew I had to write that book for the boy I once was, for the son I now have, for the kids who still say, “I hate poetry.”
Charles Ghigna (a.k.a. Father Goose) is the author of more than 30 books of poetry for children and adults. He is presently working on a book of poems for teenagers that will be out next year from Boyds Mills Press — its working title is Poems for Boys Who Hate Poems.
His recent books include Animal Trunk: Silly Poems to Read Aloud, Christmas is Coming! and One Hundred Shoes.
It breaks my heart when I talk to a kid who says they “hate poetry” or that they “can’t read poetry.” Especially if they think it’s “too hard.” Poetry is the easiest thing in the world. Or it can be. If it feels hard, and you don’t want it to (some people like for things to be hard)—you’re overthinking it.
When I was little, my dad read me poems. This may well be the single greatest thing he ever did for me. He read me Blake’s Songs of Innocence. He read me The Fairies. But most of all, he read me Yeats. Night after night. The Song of Wandering Aengus. Long before I knew what any of it meant, each night, until I fell asleep.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized how much I’d stolen from Yeats, by accident. How often, as I write my own poems, I come back to his meter. How often, in a novel, I find myself inserting a silver fish or an apple. How often things “glimmer.” These words and images, branded into my brain, long before I could think about them as a writer. I often have to edit out the Yeats.
But this leads me to wonder how much that early love of words itself came from those nightly readings. Not because the specific poems mattered so much. But because, when I was young enough that anything delivered in a loving way was received happily, I was given poems. They belonged to me, as much as Itsy Bitsy Spiders or Smurfs or Angry Birds belong to some kids. So of course they weren’t hard for me. They were just part of childhood.
Hollow lands and hilly lands! Hollow lands and hilly lands! Hollow lands and hilly lands!Hollow lands and hilly lands! Hollow lands and hilly lands! Hollow lands and hilly lands! Hollow lands and hilly lands! Spin around in your backyard, screaming that, in bare feet, and see how many times you can do it until you fall down, dizzy. Do you think that’s hard? Well, that is how I experienced poetry. Singing it to myself while the blood rushed in my ears and I tore down a hill on my bike. Or as I swam in the neighborhood pool.
Poetry is like any other art form. You take it in, and then you’re in charge of what you do with it. Some people hear music, and it makes them dance. Some people hear music and it makes them cry. Some people hear music and it makes them want to go for a run. Some people hear music and try to understand it. But not all of them!
I wish I could go back in time and read every kid a poem ten times before they turn three. Unfortunately I can’t. But I’d encourage every kid reading this to try doing something else with a poem. Something besides trying to understand it, in a homework-sort-of-way.
Not that there’s anything wrong with homework! But if that’s the only way you encounter something, that’s the only way you encounter it. Hey—I bet if you had to write a homework assignment about Angry Birds, you’d find that a little harder too!
I love to write about science and technology, so I’m doing more of that for National Poetry Month, and I invite you to join me! Give it a try and write a STEM haiku.
Q. How do you write a STEM haiku?
A. Try this.
Select a STEM (science, technology, engineering or math) topic.
Brainstorm a list of words about your topic.
Count the syllables in each word.
Use the words to share a short STEM thought using the haiku format.
Today’s guest poetry poster is Rebecca Kai Dotlich, giving a very serious lesson, so pay extra attention.
1. Put yourself in a rhyme trance, focusing only on rhyme.
Hummmmm cat bat hat hmmmmmm sat fat rat hmmmmmm …. Get the point, joint?
2. Make sure the rhyme is forced.
Frog loved to play music and he loved to sing.
To prove it to his teacher, the bells he did ring.
3. Use lots of adjectives instead of verbs.
Batter SPLASHED all over the cat
Batter went all over the fluffy cat
4. Revise only once or twice, or not at all:
It would be very hard to show an example of this, but I will try:
It would be very hard to show an example of this
An example of this might be
An example might be
An example:
(pretend those revision steps above do not exist (you are entering the Twilight Zone)
5. Use clichés. A lot. Use 5 of them if you can
The park was covered in a sea of grass.
He saw two bears, black as midnight,
but he was cool as a cucumber.
The air was thick as molasses,
and the sun was hot as fire.
6. Don’t take the time to weave-in poetic elements. It’s too much work, anyway.
And so this space is empty.
7. Make sure the poem never gets to the heart of what it needs to say.
So if a friend moves away, and you are sad, tell the whole story; tell the reader how he went to Ohio and how now he goes to a different school (because it really happened that way) and don’t write with an economy of words like this:
“I loved my friend
He went away from me
There’s nothing more to say
The poem ends,
Soft as it began-
I loved my friend.”
~ Langston Hughes
8. A good poem takes time. (Usually. Almost always.) Chunks of it. Hours and days and weeks of it.
So slap down a rhyme and call it a day.
9. Do not read your poem out loud over and over and over and over, and don’t waste too much time listening for the rhythm . . .
And if someone reads the poem and trips over the lines a little, just tell them they aren’t reading it right. Like this, you say, and then you read it the right way.
It breaks my heart when I talk to a kid who says they “hate poetry” or that they “can’t read poetry.” Especially if they think it’s “too hard.” Poetry is the easiest thing in the world. Or it can be. If it feels hard, and you don’t want it to (some people like for things to be hard)—you’re overthinking it.
