Poetry Friday -- What We Save

This is a repost from 2008.

My brother and I just spent three days going through the last of the boxes of Mom and Family back home in Colorado. Among other treasures, we found a stack of clippings Mom had pinned on the bulletin board in the kitchen -- pithy quotes, comics, phone numbers...and this poem, printed from the blog eleven years ago.

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This is a chant for the landscape of my growing up years -- the wide, flat, empty, semi-arid short grass prairie of eastern Colorado. The chant is comprised of images, authors, and, in italics, book titles.



The Solace of Open Places
or
It's Not the End of the Earth, But You Can See it From Here

High, Wide and Lonesome
unbroken sod,
O Pioneers! and
my Uncle Bob.

Great Plains: jackrabbits
antelope and Deere,
wagon ruts, meadowlarks
and tumbleweeds found here.

Kent Haruf, Hal Borland, Ian Frazier,
Gretel Ehrlich, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner.

Eventide, Plainsong
A Sense of Place,
Wolf Willow, My Antonia
Nothing To Do But Stay.

Lark buntings, windmills
towering thunderheads,
grasshoppers, feedlots
the family homestead.

Pioneer Women,
amber waves of grain.
Close my eyes, open a book,
I can go home again.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2008



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

Poetry Friday -- Playing With Poetry

I picked up a few poetry toys at nErDCampMI last week.

With Instant Poetry, poetry forms meet multiple choice. You might want to try a nursery rhyme, a poem in the style of William Carlos Williams or Emily Dickinson, an ode, free verse, or more.

 

click image to enlarge

I've been wanting to try writing a sonnet, so I chose the Shakespearean Sonnet (bottom left in the collage above).

Before the Fates (b) cut in this checkout line
Let all who (a) brought some queso dip please stay
And find our (c) kids out back making green slime.
Neither king nor fool (a) returns their lunch tray.
Though time (b) cares not when chickens come to roost,
We hear the (a) band at least will take the stage.

Ok. I'm going to stop there. There are others that have options that string together with more sense. Let's try the Nursery Rhyme (top right).

Mary, Mary, quite contrary
(a) loved sarcastic commentary.

scribble-out poetry (aka blackout poetry) has a lot more poet-ential. This spiral-bound book has 45 bits of text ready for you to modify by scribbling-out the words you don't want with your permanent marker and leaving behind your poem. The text comes in different shapes (see top of collage) and amounts (see bottom of collage). Sources for the text bits include Frankenstein, The Count of Monte Cristo, War and Peace, and Pride and Prejudice, just to name a few. Each page is perforated and includes "to" and "from" lines and the attribution for the original text on the back so that you can gift your poetic creations!

click image to enlarge

I scribbled-out a bit from Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (top right in the collage). This poem goes out to all the teachers who are enjoying their last weeks of living-and-learning-at-a-relaxing-pace.

Great 

fortune 

if you teach.

You contribute to the happiness of

life,

consume the

daily

pleasure of being

a good

instrument.

Scribbled-out by Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Carol, at Carol's Corner, is just one of those teachers for whom this poem was written! She's got the Poetry Friday roundup this week.

Poetry Friday -- 3, 6, 9, 12

Journal Sparks helped me with my poems for this week. I used bits and pieces of ideas from the book. First, I made some watercolor boxes and cut them out when they had dried. Then I randomly chose the numbers 3, 6, 9 and 12. From a list of prompts in the book, I chose four words -- tree, lines, buildings, and cake. I wrote the numbers and the words on little scraps of paper and shuffled them up, then paired each number scrap with a word scrap. The number told me how many words I could use in each poem, and the word became the topic of the poem.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

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Tabatha gave Jone a creative way to compose poems -- a poetry fortune teller! Check out Tabatha's triolet and all of the other Poetry Friday offerings at Jone's Deowriter.

Poetry Friday -- The Choice is Yours

Before

After

Detail

Before

After

Detail

The Choice is Yours

There will always be fences
there will always be walls
keeping out, keeping in
dividing
hiding.

And there will always be beauty
there will always be art
reaching out, seeking within
exciting
inviting.


(draft)
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019



The photos tell the story of our neighbor's fence built the wrong way out, and my artistic response. Those are polished rocks, slices of rock, geodes, and fossils that our rockhound friends gave me. Murals might be next, who knows?

Tricia has the Poetry Friday roundup today at a blog named after a book that would pair nicely with my post -- The Miss Rumphius Effect.

The Joy of ARCs

MAKERSPACE FUN

Build Your Own Theme Park

by Liz Lunney

Andrews McMeel Publishing, June 2019

I can't tell you how badly my ten year-old self wants to get out the scissors and start building this theme park! Hopefully, I'll have some detail-oriented students who want to work on this during Genius Hour this year! I'll pair it with This is My Dollhouse by Giselle Potter.

#OWNVOICES

Amy Wu and the Perfect Bao

by Kat Zhang

illustrated by Charlene Chua

Aladdin (October 1, 2019)

Even though Amy Wu can do lots of things, making the perfect bao eludes her. Amy and her parents and grandmother are making bao together. Amy's dad preps the dough, while Amy's mom makes the filling. As they work making the bao, the adults always create perfect bao and give Amy advice that doesn't work. Just when all seems lost, Amy realizes that she has been using an adult-sized ball of dough in her kid-sized hands. Once she has a smaller amount of dough to work with, she, too, creates perfect bao -- enough to share with her classmates. There's a recipe included so you can make them, too!

YOU WILL WANT TO READ THIS

Beverly, Right Here

by Kate DiCamillo

Candlewick, September 24, 2019

Now I need to go back and read Raymie Nightingale and Louisiana's Way Home. But I'm pretty sure Beverly will still be my favorite. She and Iola and Elmer and Doris and Charles (and Nod, and the seagull at the back door of the restaurant) have found their way into my heart. Oh, Beverly. How much do I love that you saw into Elmer's heart and cared about what was there and not what you could see on the outside?

This book is so full of all the hard parts about life -- age, loss, death, the amount of crap in convenience stores -- but it is also full of all that makes life meaningful -- art, music, poetry, friendship, believing in and finding the goodness in others.