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When people ask me where I got the idea for LIES BENEATH, a YA novel about murderous mermaids on Lake Superior, I tell them that the initial image came to me in a dream, which is the truth. But the inspiration--the thing that fueled the novel--was Victorian poetry.
I’ve always had a love for the Victorian-era poets: Shelley, Tennyson, Dickinson, Rossetti, and the Brontës, just to name a few. In particular, I’m drawn to the way they mix their images of death and romance: the beautiful corpse, so to speak. For example, Dickinson speaks of death being a suitor come courting in a fine carriage:
Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me.
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.
But the Victorians don’t have a monopoly on this juxtaposition of romance and death. It is also a familiar image in modern-day paranormal romance.
The paranormal genre is filled with vampires, faeries, angels, and mermaids--all beautiful creatures who bring romance to unsuspecting mortals, just as easily as they bring death. So why are we drawn to them? They should repel us, but we are transfixed. Perhaps it is because we long to be consumed by love, just as surely as death will consume us all. Perhaps it’s the notion of “‘til death do us part” taken to its most extreme conclusion.
LIES BENEATH (the first book in the trilogy) is the story of Calder White, a merman, who falls in love with Lily Hancock, a human girl whose family has a history with monsters in the lake. The novel was inspired by three Victorian poems about beauty, love, and death, all written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “The Merman,” “The Mermaid,” and “The Lady of Shalott.”
Tennyson describes the merman as a beautiful creature, living a king’s life. He’s flirtatious and bold, but without real love, his life is lonely, empty, and shallow:
But the mermaids are more straightforward in their warning that death lurks behind the beautiful façade of their lives:
Till that great sea-snake under the sea
From his coiled sleeps in the central deeps
Would slowly trail himself sevenfold
Round the hall where I sate, and look in at the gate
With his large calm eyes for the love of me.
-The Mermaid
In LIES BENEATH, Calder recognizes the emptiness of his life, wants more, but fears he cannot escape his own nature. That is, until he meets Lily Hancock, a modern-day Lady of Shalott.
Like the Lady of Shalott, Lily Hancock lives under a curse. While the Lady is teetering on the edge of a mental breakdown, Lily’s perception of the world is colored by her belief that she is destined for insanity, just like her grandfather before her. Both Lily and the Lady long for love and an end to the curse, even if seeking it out will surely lead to death.
When the Lady sees Lancelot, the object of her desire, Tennyson describes him just as dazzling and golden as he described the merman:
The gemmy bridle glittered free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy.
The bridle bells rang merrily
As he rode down to Camelot:
Both Lily and the Lady put on white dresses, board a boat, and seek an end to their family curse. One of them is successful. The other pays the ultimate price. But can we say they did not both achieve their goal?
Some argue that YA paranormal romance sets a bad example of love for teens. I disagree. I would suggest that argument is looking at the genre through the wrong set of lenses. Rather, if considered through the lens of poetry, the reader quickly realizes that paranormal romance--like so many Victorian-era poems before it--presents a metaphor for sacrificial love. And, in the end, isn’t that the greatest love of all?
Anne Greenwood Brown is the author of Lies Beneath (Random House/Delacorte June 12, 2012), Deep Betrayal (Random House/Delacorte March 12, 2013), and Promise Bound (Random House/Delacorte spring 2014). She lives in Minnesota with her amazingly patient husband and their three above-average children. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
It's a huge honor for me to share the words of Paul B. Janeczko today, a poet I discovered in college and whose work I used in my classroom for years.
I didn't start out to be a poet. I started out as a kid in New Jersey who had two major goals in life: 1) to survive one more year of delivering newspapers without being attacked by Ike, the one-eyed, slobbering, crazed cur that lurked in the forsythia bushes at the top of the hill; and 2) to become more than a weak-hitting, third-string catcher on our sorry Little League team. I failed at both.
Had I announced at the dinner table, “Mom, Dad, I’ve decided to be a poet,” my parents -- particularly my mother -- would have been thrilled. In truth, they would have been thrilled that I’d decided to be anything other than the top-40 disk jockey, Edsel salesman, or bullpen catcher that I constantly yammered about becoming in grammar school. But at that point in my life -- as an affable kid who endured hours sitting in a desk whose design, I was convinced originated in a 15th-century Spanish dungeon -- poetry meant no more to me than 1066 or George Washington’s wooden teeth. You can tell, I suspect, that as a student, I did not have what you might call an “inquisitive mind.” The only time I was “gifted” was on my birthday and on Christmas.
My path from grammar school to high school teacher to poet gave me many opportunities to heed my internal GPS when it declared, “Recalculating.” For some inexplicable reason (dare I call it a blessing?), poetry was a constant companion along the way, whether I was teaching or writing my own poems. Whenever I worked with kids and poetry, I have wanted the kids to feel that all poems have a purpose, described well by Jonathan Holden:
“to give shape, in a concise and memorable way, to what our lives feel like . . . Poems help us to notice the world more and better, and they enable us to share with others.”
And today, with civilization seemingly destroying itself piece by piece, we all need to share. That’s what poets do. That’s what I try to do with my books. Isn’t that what we all try to do with words? I want young readers to feel that with each collection. Every poem in them is a sharing. My hope is that my readers will carry on that sharing.
As for me, although I never even sat in an Edsel or played ball above the Little League level, I did become a reader and writer of poetry. I consider myself lucky, given my staggering lack of interest and effort in school, not to mention the poetry I was expected to read. But kids don’t need to rely on luck to become readers of poetry. Exciting books of poetry are available. I hope parents and teachers share our love of poetry with kids. And let’s give them a chance to share their love of poetry with us. And, when we are touched by a good poem, we may recall the words of Stanley Kunitz, who said that if you listen hard enough to poets,
“who knows--we too may break into dance, perhaps for grief, perhaps for joy.”
Paul B. Janeczko aspired to be the teacher he never had, when he decided to pursue a career as a high school language arts teacher. From his own days as a student, Paul was obsessed with poetry of all kinds, and as a teacher he wanted to spread his own love of poetry to young people. Today, Paul Janeczko is better known as a writer, poet and anthologist.
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**Congratulations to Donna MacDonald, winner of Lee Wardlaw's WON TON, A CAT TALE TOLD IN HAIKU. Please contact Lee with your shipping address. **
Acrostic poems are written by taking the letters of a word or name and using them as the first letter of each line of the poem. I like to use acrostics in both in my writing and in my teaching, even outside the language arts classroom. In social studies for example, acrostic poetry can be a very useful way of exploring a topic. Sometimes I give students an exercise to write an acrostic poem about Canada. Most of them end up starting with the word “cold”!
After starting with this students have the makings of an essay outline with paragraphs about Canadian climate, vegetation, history, culture (we are known worldwide for saying “I’m sorry” a lot), political system, and a conclusion.
*A printed dictionary is essential for this exercise. All the more reason to do it. Kids should use dictionaries more often.*
Both in and out of language arts, there are several ways of approaching the writing of acrostic poetry. Say we wanted to write a poem about “Mothers”. We might write something like:
This is the simplest kind of acrostic – basically it’s just a list of adjectives that fit the word you choose. Another thing to do is to use short phrases or sentences instead of single words.
Make our breakfast
Open their hearts
Think of us first
Hold us tight
Enjoy our successes
Read to us
Say “I love you” to us every day.
Now we have a more detailed description of mothers. This poem talks about the things mothers do for us. But that’s not the end for acrostics. Another approach is to go back to single words, only this time all the words together make sentence about your word. Like this:
Now finally we can go back to our phrases and sentences. Only this time we can make them connected into one idea. Kind of like this:
Maybe we don’t appreciate that they’re the
Ones who make us who we are
They selflessly, carefully
Help us grow. To them
Every child is like a seed in a flower garden.
Rising up, our petals open in their
Sunlight
The great thing about using acrostic poetry in the classroom is that students can write about any topic that interests them, and at a level they are comfortable with. More advanced students can write with complete sentences while struggling students will get a sense of accomplishment from completing the simpler word list form.
Even within a topic, students can narrow their focus to suit their interests. Writing about Canada, some students might focus on sports:
While some might prefer to focus on wildlife.
Caribou
And moose
Narwhal
And seals
Ducks
And Canadian geese.
We’d all love to get more poetry into the classroom, as well as new ways of approaching curriculum materials in general and the development of writing skills in particular. Acrostic poetry is a great way of doing all these things.
As writers and poets acrostics can help us to get to know our characters or explore our themes. Certainly as a verse novelist, a simple acrostic can sometimes salvage an otherwise unproductive day.
And we all have those.
Gabrielle Prendergast is the writer of the feature film HILDEGARDE, starring Richard E Grant. HILDEGARDE was also published as a novel by Harper Collins Australia. She wrote for the cartoon series Gloria’s House and Fairy Tale Police Department and worked on the drama series White Collar Blue. Her middle grade novel, WICKET SEASON was published in the Spring of 2012 with Lorimer Publishers. AUDACIOUS and its sequel CAPRICIOUS will be published by Orca Books in 2013 and 2014 respectively.
Gabrielle is also a creative writing teacher and mentor specializing in helping gifted young writers (11-21), reluctant writers of all ages and pre-literate writers up to age 7.
In Room 407 each fall, I begin the first couple of class meetings with a poem. Perhaps I start off the class kind of quietly bringing everyone in the room into the moment I launch into a reading of James W. Hall’s “Maybe Dat’s Your Pwoblem Too,” Elmer Fudd-like impediments and all.
And poetry can be about subjects like self-identification and the difficulty that comes of attempting to “burn our suits.” And if that suit is sewn together with a hatred of poetry, you can easily find your kin in just about any given English classroom as you might a swoosh on several pairs of sneakers.
The next class meeting, I might mysteriously roll up a piece of newspaper walking up and down the rows asking for a volunteer for a poem I would like to share. Students in Room 407 look at me a little sheepishly as a 6’3” 250 pound man asks for volunteers while he swats his own palm with a rolled up newspaper. It’s very early in the year, you must understand. This is a time of great risk.
And opportunity.
To introduce poetry.
And when I have my volunteer, I share Taylor Mali’s “Falling in Love is Like Owning a Dog” from his poetry collection, What Learning Leaves. When the moment comes that the whole class realizes that this might not be an act and a classmate might really get a rolled-up newspaper to the nose. . .
Well. . .we’ve hooked them.
Early on.
Onto poetry.
As the lead learner, I recognize that an appreciation of poetry must begin within those very first days of class vs. the tradition of approach of waiting until April to find out that most of the students hate poetry.
Hate poetry.
My students come to me hating poetry.
As a lead learner, you can almost see the faces go blank upon the mention of the word “poetry” like an electronic device that has just gone into its default rest mode.
As a poet, I cannot help to feel a little heart-broken. Poets are like this. We tend to wear embellishments—to include our hearts—upon thin gossamer sleeves. We are fragile when we encounter something as anti-poetical as “hate.” I cannot even bring myself to say something teacher-like such as “Well. . .I’ll tell you what. . .I’ll love it and you learn it.”
This is not what a learning community looks like. And poetry tends to shrivel up and die, pressed like dried leaves between the pages of textbooks that will be stacked in piles at the end of the school year. This keeps the poems preserved for another group in the off chance that perhaps they will appreciate them.
But this is not where poetry lives. At least not for this poet.
This might be because I have yet to become anthologized. When this day comes, I may have to finally purchase a textbook.
Wait. . .they would tell me first, right? I want to make sure that I have a good headshot vs. one of those artist renderings of the poet in the thumbnail by the poem.
Ever notice that the questions related to the poem designed to make sure that students have read the poem take up more space upon a textbook page than the poem itself.
I hate that.
And I will give a nod to the canon as a poet and as a scholar. Students need to know about Whitman, Frost, Dickinson, Hughes, Giovanni. . .
But when it comes to bringing poetry to an audience that brings a predisposition of dismissal of poetry in their toolboxes, I go with performance and spoken word poetry every time.
One of the poems we have had great success (if success is measured by the number of students that requested a repeat of the poem or those same students who sat with heightened attention during the TED Talk that showed the actual poet reading his piece. . .or the number of students that went home and favorited the poem at Twitter or posted it to their Facebook and Pinterest profiles) with this year is Shane Koyczan’s “To This Day.” The internet community has embraced this spoken word piece as a sort of anthem for the bullied and the animated version of the poem has gone viral in the past couple of months since its initial posting.
I wonder if students make their “hatred of poetry” manifest in their walking up to the front of the room to gather up tissues for one another as they wipe their ironically-detached eyes from the humidity in the room. It’s either poetry or pollen counts. And since the day we shared Shane’s piece in the room was the coldest day of the season in southern Indiana, I would give poetry a point here. Be sure to watch Shane’s TED Talk to see how he seamlessly moves into his performance piece after a bit of monologue. Stick around until the end to see the humble response of this poet to an audience of professionals in their respective fields who honor Shane’s poem with a standing ovation.
U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser once intimated that poetry isn’t something one could trade for a tank of gas so poetry is very little use to the public. And I agree with this appraisal of the genre, until we unpack the genre for what is most useful to us. The need for succinct connection that—sometimes—only poetry can provide.
In Room 407, we have the following DVDs in our library: LOUDER THAN A BOMB, TAYLOR MALI AND FRIENDS, THE UNITED STATES OF POETRY, Various Individual World Poetry Slam DVDs, and a host of other poetry related documentaries and offerings. I encourage my students to think about poetry they have only read before and to give that same poetry a turn in an audio format. You’d be surprised how many students who say they at least like Shel Silverstein have never HEARD Shel Silverstein. We make sure students hear Shel in Room 407.
My students come to at least a “like” of poetry because their teacher is a poet. And I don’t think that every lead learner has to be a poet in order to appreciate poetry, but can you at least sense that it goes a long way to demonstrate to your learning community that you follow the current trends of poetry vs. filing away the same pieces we might have shared out of a sense of tradition?
By the time you have an opportunity to read this post, Room 407 will have been recognized as a Spotlight Feature on the Mattie J. T. Stepanek Foundation website. Mattie is another poet we introduce our students to early on in the year. Mattie’s Heartsongs series of books brings many of our students back to poetry. We are super excited to not only rekindle a love for poetry in the room, but to be part of a larger community of peace and poetry that honors a poetic voice taken from us far, far too soon.
I promised Caroline that this would not go long. . .and look. . .I got all excited here. . .I would like to end the post with a list—at least—of cannot miss poems that we have shared in Room 407:
“Weather is Here; Wish You Were Beautiful” by Rachel McKibbens (Pink Elephant)
“Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon (from THE UNITED STATES OF POETRY)
Paul W. Hankins teaches 11th grade English and AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION at Silver Creek High School in southern Indiana. A presenter on education topics at the local, regional, state, and national level, Paul’s passion is for kids and books and bringing the two together. Paul lives with his wife, Kristie, children Noah (12) and Maddie (10), two cats (Butterfinger and KitKat) and a hoplessly-devoted dog (Mia). You can friend or follow Paul at Twitter and Facebook. He is very easy to find on the internet under the name, Paul W. Hankins.
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By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 4/3/2013
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Meditate, Louise Hawes said. What?
Some writers take acting classes to find a character’s voice, said my then teacher at Vermont College of Fine Arts, but her favorite method was meditation. When you close your eyes and breathe, she promised, you will become your character.
Not me. I was too fidgety; I felt ridiculous sitting on the sofa.
But my writing was flat in my work in progress. I was describing events more than living them through the eyes of Dillon, my protagonist. I was decades away from adolescence, and I needed to get in touch with my inner 13-year-old boy.
The cure? Poetry.
Poetry works as a path to the heart of a character because it requires you to focus on specifics. The red wheelbarrow. A Bird on the Walk. Writing down what you observe in a finite group of words is the beginning of a poem. As Ted Kooser noted in The Poetry Home Repair Manual, “Meaning arrives almost unbidden from an accumulation of specific details.”
Good poetry cannot have generalities. Something stops your mind—a broken laundry basket on the highway median, a hand gripping a child’s lunchbox—and it evokes something in you. Mary Oliver observed, “the poet used the actual, known event or experience to elucidate the inner, invisible experience.”
We know our own internal landscape. The trick, then, is to uncover the invisible landscape of your character. What telling detail will trigger an emotional response in your character?
This exercise has worked for me over and over. I don’t always love the poem I’ve written at the end, but I always feel a new connection to what my character wants. And not coincidentally, the poem usually gives me a scene idea. The specificity of the images gives my character something to do. It’s through doing that character is revealed.
Here’s what happened when I wrote in the voice of Dillon:
Clean Shaven
Mom told me
he shaved off his moustache
right before he left
for Desert Storm
I hold his photo
next to my face
Our eyes match
My nose is hooked
like his
I jut my chin out
checking for a shadow
I run my hand down
my cheek
It’s smooth
like his
in the soldier picture
Ten years gone but
everyone will see
we are father and son
Immediately I knew the core of my novel. The story, which had many other plot twists, was fundamentally about the rebuilding of the relationship between Dillon and his father. Dillon’s every action must stem from a desire to please his father.
So if you are stuck, write a poem. Take a close-up of your character. The short form requires words with impact. Verbs and nouns can’t be weak; the sound and rhythm of the phrases must sing. Words are what matter, after all. Slowly, word by word, sentence by sentence, you will write a novel with characters made real by specific details.
And if it doesn’t work, try meditating.
Jennifer Gennari is the author of My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2012), an Association of Booksellers for Children Spring 2012 New Voices title and an American Library Association Rainbow List title. A graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts and a former reporter, her poems have appeared in the Marin.
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By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 4/2/2013
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I've been preparing behind the scenes since January, working with eighteen different teachers, readers, librarians, authors, and poets to bring you their thoughts on poetry. For the rest of the month* this space will be devoted to their words. I'm excited to share these wonderful posts with you and to join in the discussion !
4/3 -- Jennifer Gennari :: Opening the Heart of Characters Through Poetry
4/4 -- Paul Hankins :: Coming Back to Poetry and Leaving the Textbook Behind
4/5 -- Lee Wardlaw :: 8 Things I Learned From My Cats About Writing Haiku
4/6 -- Caroline Starr Rose :: Words Inspiring Words -- a Poem for Sharon Creech's LOVE THAT DOG
4/8 -- Lisa Taylor :: Three Poems and Why I Know Them
4/9 -- Gabrielle Prendergast :: Using Acrostic Poetry Both In and Out of the Language Arts Classroom
4/10 -- Paul Janeczko :: Poetry is to Share
4/11 -- Rosanne Parry :: The Reluctant Poet
4/12 -- Anne Greenwood Brown :: Victorian Poets and Paranormal Romance
4/15 -- Jessica Bell :: The Vignette
4/16 -- Augusta Scattergood :: Learning by Heart
4/17 -- Robert L. Forbes :: Looking Out the Window
4/18 -- Laurel Garver :: Stories that Sing -- Poems with a Plot
4/19 -- Amy Ludwig VanDerwater :: Poem Spools -- Stitch by Stitch
4/22 -- Jayne Jaudon Ferrer :: C'mon, Give It Another Chance
4/23 -- Margaret Simon :: The ABC's of Poetry
4/24 -- Kathryn Fitzmaurice :: On Destiny and Emily Dickinson
4/25 -- Kathryn Burak :: First Poems and My Mother -- The Sleever and Muse
4/26 -- Theresa Milstein :: Becoming
4/30 -- Giveaway winner announced
*4/29 We will return to our Lucy Maud Montgomery Read Along discussion briefly before the final poetry post on 4/30.
Giveaway:
Mmmm . . . sounds like just my thing!
Yes!
"We long to be consumed by love"---> powerful! And oh, those covers!!!!
Really enjoyed these snippets of Victorian poetry. I always loved Robert and Elizabeth Browning. "How do I love thee, let me count the ways . . . " Your books sound very intriguing.