2019 Poetry Month--Playing With Poetry

#playwithpoetryNPM

Nothing Gold -- After Robert Frost

Nothing Gold
after Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold
or, in the case of that bush
with its six inches of new growth,
red.

Or, in the case of that forsythia
on the south-facing side of the house,
an unbelievable shade of bright
yellow.

Or, in the case of those new shoots
knifing up from exposed iris bulbs,
a simultaneously fragile but violent
green.

All these early hues
in leaf, in flower
hard to hold as the earth moves
along its path
hour by hour
by day by day
by season by season,

not so much subsiding
as being subsumed
in the golden Eden
of Life.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019


The first draft of this poem happened in one of our five-minute quick-writes in writing workshop this week. Another reminder that these small rituals are powerful not just for our student writers, but for our own writing lives.

I have a love-hate relationship with Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost. I landed in the honors program at the University of Denver based on good grades in a sub-standard rural high school. I was over my head in so many ways. There was so much I didn't even know I didn't know. A professor attempted to teach me how to craft a critical essay by humiliating me -- by showing me the work of a classmate who was already clearly on the path to his fame as a writer. Then he asked me if this poem by Robert Frost was hopeful or hopeless. My humiliation had turned to stubborn anger, and I argued that the poem was hopeful. And then I figured out on my own how to be the kind of writer I wanted to be.

It was that experience more than any other that taught me how to teach the writer, not the writing. Every writer can move to the next level, but you can only begin from where they are the moment they show you their own work.


Rebecca has the Poetry Friday Roundup at Sloth Reads, and how perfect is that? Tomorrow is National Goof Off Day, when our spring break begins!

Poetry Friday -- Climate Change Edition

For today's Climate Change Edition of Poetry Friday, I'm reposting a poem I wrote for my 2017 Poetry Month project featuring Malvina Reynolds.

“...it was while doing graduate work in English there (University of California Berkeley) that she did some student teaching. She used pop songs to teach her high school students about rhyme scheme and meter, as they were not poetry readers."

http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/malvina-reynolds/

Malvina Reynolds would have been at Berkeley in the 1920's, and "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue" was a popular song then. Perhaps it was one she used to teach about rhyme scheme and meter.

I used this song as my mentor text for a poem about Mother Nature.

Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue
Words: Sam M. Lewis and Joseph Widow Young; Music: Ray Henderson (1925)

Five foot two, eyes of blue,
but oh, what those five foot could do:
has anybody seen my gal?

Turned-up nose, turned-down hose
Flapper? Yes sir, one of those
Has anybody seen my gal?

Now, if you run into
a five-foot-two
covered with fur,
Diamond rings,
and all those things,
Bet your life it isn't her

But could she love, could she woo!
Could she, could she, could she coo!
Has anybody seen my gal?


My Gal, Mother Nature

Birds and bees, rocks and trees
Oh the breeze and green green leaves
Has anybody seen my gal?

Skies of blue, rivers too
Nature? Yes we need her hues
Has anybody seen my gal?

Now if the skies are hazed
Parks are paved
Trash everywhere,
Species dead
Sewage spread
Bet your life there’s no clean air

The temps are high, could she die?
Could she, could she, could she die?
Has anybody seen my gal?


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2017


Heidi has today's Poetry Friday Roundup at my juicy little universe. Head over and get inspired!

The MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT Blog Tour is HERE!

In the Middle of the Night: Poems from a Wide-Awake House

by Laura Purdie Salas

illustrated by Angela Matteson

Wordsong, March 12, 2019

True story: my dolls sat on my closet shelf until just a few years ago when we had to empty mom's house to sell it. I tried to pack them away in a trunk several times, but it never lasted. Because, you see, my dolls were alive. They needed to be out in the open where they could breathe and see.

And, if Laura's new book of poems gets it right, maybe where they could hop off the shelf and take part in a "late-night talent show" while the house slept!

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Laura's imagination roams all through the house bringing to life a Kleenex parachute, an overdue book playing hide-and-seek, a very punny toilet, a basketball with a headache, and many more.

This is a book of poems that's sure to be a hit in our classroom for Poetry Friday presentations!

Check out other links on the blog tour for interviews, give-aways, a peek at the online resources for the book, a Padlet of contributor poems, and more!

Blog tour links:

Monday, 3/11 Mile High Reading
Tuesday, 3/12 Reflections on the Teche
Wednesday, 3/13 A Year of Reading
Thursday, 3/14 Check It Out
Friday, 3/15 Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme
Sunday, 3/17 Great Kid Books
Monday, 3/18 Simply 7 Interview/Jena Benton blog
Tuesday, 3/19 My Juicy Little Universe
Wednesday, 3/20 Live Your Poem
Thursday, 3/21 Reading to the Core
Friday, 3/22 KidLit Frenzy       Beyond Literacy Link

Poetry Friday -- A Tribute to the Women Who Made Me Who I Am

The women who made me who I am
     gave each other home perms
     led Cub Scout dens and Brownie Scout troops
     grew asparagus for the challenge of it
     ran the swimming pool and coached the swim team.

The women who made me who I am
     opened businesses
     drove tractors
     canned pickles
     read voraciously.

The women who made me who I am
     put meals on the table
     put kids to bed
     put petunias in the planter
     put family first.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019


Happy International Women's Day! This poem's for you, Harriet, Verta, Rae, Phyllis, Rita, Vonnie, Evelyn, Adrienne, Joy, Bonnie, Rose Mae, Faye, and all the others whose names have left my memory, but whose mark remains.

Catherine has the Poetry Friday Roundup at Reading to the Core.

Next week, Heidi (my juicy little universe) is inviting us to join her in sharing Climate Change poems for the worldwide School Strike for Climate.

Poetry Friday -- A Small Sized Mystery

Our Not-So-Small-Sized Mystery

A Small-Sized Mysteryby Jane Hirshfield

Leave a door open long enough,
a cat will enter.
Leave food, it will stay.
Soon, on cold nights,
you’ll be saying “Excuse me”
if you want to get out of your chair.
But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat
is “Excuse me.”

(read the rest of the poem here)

Here's another small-sized mystery, if you have nine minutes to watch (make time...it's worth it). The Kid Should See This is a most excellent site filled with videos that are vetted for kid viewing. I've used these videos in every subject area for every reason: instruction, inspiration, and just plain FUN. 

Are you planning ahead for an International Women's Day poem next week for Catherine's roundup at Reading to the Core? Get on it! (...I'm saying to myself, too!)

Linda B. has today's roundup at TeacherDance.

Poetry Friday--Student Poems

photo via Unsplash

Helping My Mom Cook

I let my hands go on an adventure with cooking,

chopping away the evil monsters.
My cooking is like an adventure,
Turning the stove on,
and seeing the boiling water,
like lava.

When it boils,
the lava
is letting out all the smoke.
Turning the stove off,
and seeing the boiling water stop,
like the lava
stopped letting out smoke.

Then grabbing the plate,
like finding a map for the loot.
Finally eating the food,
like finding the loot.

by Sarkees K.

photo via unsplash

Snow

The white clouds
the frosty air the dazzling
snowflakes that fall from the skies

You can do all kinds of things
in the dazzling snow

You can make a snowman a snowball
you can also watch it snow

Don’t you feel the frosty air
don’t you feel how cold it is
don’t you feel how cold the snow is

It’s all because of the axis pointed
away from the sun, the indirect
sunlight.

by Shadman M.

In our pacing guide for 5th grade writing instruction, we've come back around to narrative writing. When I looked at what I'm expected to teach ("Use concrete words and phrases and sensory details to convey experiences precisely; use a variety of transitional words, phrases, and clauses to manage the sequence of events") it seemed like this work could definitely be done using the story telling medium of poetry. 

We began by brainstorming ordinary daily events. Even though video games are likely the most ordinary thing most of my students do on a daily basis, we didn't use those examples for our writing topics. We've also begun doing 5 minute quick writes at the beginning of most writing workshop times. This has seeded their writer's notebooks with lots of good material for their poems.

I was thrilled with Sarkees' poem about cooking with his mom. Without ever being taught about extended metaphors, he brought his adventure metaphor all the way through his poem. Sarkees wants more than anything to be a chef when he grows up. It is fun to see students' passions coming through in their writing.

Shadman's poem is so like him. He worked hard to be very poetic in his first stanzas, even including some repetition. But the logical, scientific side of him gets the last word in the conclusion, an echo of what he learned about the seasons in science earlier in the year.

Thank you, Sarkees and Shadman for sharing your poems!

Robyn has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at Life on the Deckle Edge.

The Art of Reading, Lost or Otherwise

AJ recommends lots of books that we both know might wait years before I get a chance to read them. But when he slid this small trim size, 150-page book across the table, I decided to give it a go. I'm glad I did.

It took me about 50 pages to get past his description of a reading life that is nothing like mine, and which made me feel more than a tad inferior. But then he got to some big points.

"We come to books (or at least, I do) to see beneath the cover story, to be challenged and confounded, made to question our assumptions, even as the writers we read are compelled to question their own. 

What does that mean? On the one hand, it's an argument for nuance, for the role of narrative as a mechanism to confront the chaos, to frame a set of possible interpretations while acknowledging that these could shift at any time. Yet even more essential, I would argue, it's a call to engage. Stories, after all--whether aesthetic or political--require sustained concentration..."

Ulin defines reading as an act of creativity that requires sustained concentration, which, in a world of "endless information," has become harder and harder to maintain.

"Technology is rewiring the neurology of our brains," but we shouldn't be too alarmed by this. It's been happening since the first symbols were carved into clay. We need to remember that Gutenberg shifted the world of reading only about 600 years ago. Ulin quotes Jane Smiley, from 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel when he gets to the heart of what should worry us about the loss of book readers,

"When we talk about the death of the novel, what we are really talking about is the possibility that empathy, however minimal, would no longer be attainable by those for whom the novel has died...If the novel dies, or never lives, for children and teenagers who spend their time watching TV or playing video games, then they will always be somewhat mystified by others, and by themselves as well."

Ulin sees reading as "an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage...We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little...."

Pretty heady stuff, and all of it a hard sell for my fifth graders. I have one foot back in the world of no Internet; they have both feet fully planted in the world of distraction. Luckily, at the same time I started reading The Lost Art of Reading, a book I had on reserve at the library came in.

This gorgeously illustrated book is filled with over 100 letters to young readers describing the joys of books and reading. Perhaps a couple of these read each day to my students will help them to see the breadth and depths of what books and story can mean to a person.

The Universe didn't decide to stop there in making me think hard about the meaning of reading and books in this time of distraction. When I finished Ulin's book, I picked up the January/February Horn Book Magazine and found Uma Krishnaswami's article, "Why Stop at Windows and Mirrors?: Children's Book Prisms."

"A prism can slow and bend the light that passes through it, splitting that light into its component colors. It can refract light in as many directions as the prism’s shape and surface planes allow. Similarly, books can disrupt and challenge ideas about diversity through multifaceted and intersecting identities, settings, cultural contexts, and histories. They can place diverse characters at these crucial intersections and give them the power to reframe their stories. Through the fictional world, they can make us question the assumptions and practices of our own real world."

Then, just a few more pages into the Horn Book issue, I found Grace Lin's article, "Speak with Us, Not for Us."

"What diversity needs is not white authors to write heroes of a minority race, but rather for them to redefine the white hero. We need authors to create white characters who are (or are learning to become) socially aware and who fight alongside people of color, without being saviors, and we need authors who know how to do the same."

Okay, Universe. I hear you loud and clear. It's worth it to keep trying to fall my students in love with books and reading, even though it feels like I am swimming against an impossible tide of technology and distraction. A Velocity of Being will help me with this. It is still worth it to provide books that are windows and mirrors and sliding glass doors, but I will also look for more prisms. And I'll cheer on not just the #ownvoices authors, but also the white authors who are working to redefine the white hero.

Poetry Friday

Photo via Unsplash

Scent of Spring

His back went up
stopping me in my tracks.

I backed up hastily
hands raised (as if that could protect me).

He hissed. We both walked away.
Ten paces later, I spotted his backup,

although the back and forth of squeaks and squeals
that soon broke the predawn silence

took me aback. Was this love or war
wafting through the air?




Jone, at Check it Out, has the Poetry Friday roundup this week AND she's announcing the Cybils Poetry Winner! Check it out, indeed!

Picture Book 10 for 10: Books Filled With People Who Changed the World

Today is #nf10for10 --a favorite day of the year. Thanks to Mandy, Cathy, and Julie for organizing! Head over to Enjoy and Embrace Learning for the Round Up --have your library card or credit card ready! It's a great day to add more nonfiction books to your stack!

I have a new favorite kind of book that I am collecting--I am not sure exactly what to call them but each of these books introduces readers to so many amazing people.  Just like picture book biographies, these books take an idea (Protestors, Women Who Made a Difference, etc.) and share a little bit about each of these people under the umbrella idea of the book.  I have found that these books invite incredible conversations. They also invite readers to learn more about one or more of the people in the book.  And I've found that these books have taught my students the value of the Author's Note. I love that you can read many of these from cover to cover and then read more about the people who you become more curious about through the reading. Many are books that you can dip into and read the pages you'd like.  I keep thinking back to the days of Biography Reports and Wax Museums when our students were required to read one long (from birth to death) biography and report on/dress as that one person. One thing books like these do is they introduce us to MANY change makers who we don't know as well as the more famous change-makers. Readers can see so many ways to make a difference.  And, how much more powerful to see people in the context of something bigger, in a group of others who are fighting for the same things? So these are my Top 10 that I've purchased recently forty 5th grade classroom.

Enough! 20 Protesters Who Changed America by Emily Easton

Limitless: 24 Remarkable American Women of Vision, Grit and Guts by Leah Tinari

Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History by Vashanti Harrison

Go Show the World: A Celebration of Indigenous Heroes by Wab Kinew

Shaking Things Up: 14 Women Who Changed the World by Susan Hood

Grover Cleveland Again by Ken Burns

People of Peace: 40 Amazing Activists by Sandrine Mirza

First Generation: 36 Trailblazing Immigrants and Refugees Who Make America Great by Sandra Neil Wallace

Never Too Young: 50 Unstoppable Kids Who Made a Difference by Aileen Weintraub

Her Story: 50 Women and Girls Who Shook Up the World by Katherine Halligan