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As a children's author, I have the privilege of reading to kids, mostly in schools and libraries, and I always start by telling them that my poems all come from my imagination. I continue by saying that they all have imaginations too, as good was mine or as anyone else's. That gets them thinking, and listening a bit more sharply.
During the reading of my poems, I ask for questions, a part I always enjoy because I never know what will come at me. What is most frequently asked is, where do I get my ideas? I remind them that I use my imagination but that
I am listening and looking and smelling the world around me for ideas or phrases or situations or animals or colors or jokes that can spark the beginning of a poem. By going towards life I am rewarded because life then comes back to me with buckets of stimulation.
I tell them that on my book jacket notes, it says: "'He spends a lot of time looking out the window,' reads one of Robert Forbes' report cards."
Daydreaming is healthy, and in our busy-every-minute high-tech lives, it's good to slow down and get out of the electronic bubble we have all put ourselves into.
We talk about word choice and how it is the vehicle of writing, while imagination is the perpetual fuel for it.
Poetry has many forms, and whatever they feel is right for them is what they need to use.
But poetry has rules that can be demanding too, and those rules make it more fun because of the challenges they present. I like rhyming, which can be hard. I also use meters, so there is rhythm to my poems. While metered rhymes can be difficult, I love the journey they take me on. I don't always know where I am going to end up and sometimes I know where I want the poem to go but I don't know how I will get there.
I wouldn't have it any other way!
In the end, I write poems to please myself, and I hope they please others. By reading to children, I hope to stimulate them to read poetry and to try to write some themselves.
I am scattering seeds in the belief some will sprout and scatter more seeds down the line.
Robert L. Forbes is President of lifestyle magazine ForbesLife and the author of the poetry collections Let's Have a Bite! and Beastly Feasts!
From swinging in time to Robert Louis Stevenson—
How do you like to go up in a swing,
— to teaching children manners a la the Goops, I'm a big believer in having a poem—tiny, massive, rhyming or not— learned by heart and at the ready.
When I was a school librarian, one of my favorite things about April was our annual Poetry Assembly. And although it was a few years ago, I'd wager a few still remember the third grade's marvelous recitation and dramatic presentation of I AM THE DOG, I AM THE CAT, with Donald Hall's genius alternating cat and dog voices.
But, really, why bother to memorize a poem when it can be called up at a moment's notice from some distant website? Does anybody care? Do you even remember a poem you learned in third grade?
The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen.
I think we writers need poetry inside us deeper than others, something to hear when we're searching for the perfect word or a phrase that creates an OH-MY-GOSH moment in our stories. They don't call it "learned by heart" for nothing.
Maybe I don't remember every word I sang, chanted, recited in school, in Sunday school, at summer camp.
I do recall enough to get me through a family supper with a smile.
The Goops
by Gillette Burgess
The Goops they lick their fingers
And the Goops they lick their knives:
They spill their froth on the tablecloth
Oh, they lead disgusting lives!
The Goops they talk while eating,
And loud and fast they chew;
And that is why I'm glad that I
Am not a Goop, are you?
Augusta Scattergood is former school librarian, a book reviewer and an avid blogger. GLORY BE, her debut novel, was named one of Amazon's Top Twenty Middle School books for 2012. A second novel has been sold to Scholastic for Fall, 2014 publication.
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Poetry has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My mother and father both read poetry, my father favoring the Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Service variety while my mother was a fan of Frost, Sandburg and Gerard Manley Hopkins. I had a big picture book of poetry I read and reread so often that many of those poems linger in my mind though I never consciously memorized them. "A violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye. Fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky" is a line that reliably comes to mind every time I go hiking and find wildflowers clinging to unlikely spots along the trail.
My fourth grade teacher, an exceedingly no-nonsense woman named Ms. Jacques, seemed to have two great loves to communicate to my nine year old self--long division and poetry. She taught me dozens of poetic forms from Haiku to the ballad and (what seems more impressive to me now) showed me how to scan a line to fit the meter of the line before it. I loved the structure of writing to a particular format. Hunting for just the right word to fill out the rhythm or rhyme of a line was so much more game-like than ordinary writing which I detested at the time for its irritating reliance on standard spelling and punctuation. With a poem I could invent words to my heart's debliss and dispense with punctuation entirely.
Ms. Jacques introduced me to my first literary crush, the deliciously uncapitalized e e cummings. Since cummings had neither a first name nor a gender, my nine year old self imagined a pleasant, furry alien who might, should I come across him in my ramblings in the woods, translate for me the poetry of slugs and squirrels and sword ferns.
Eventually college broadened considerably my repertoire of poetry while siphoning off much of the pleasure I found in reading it and all of the joy I took in creating it. I stopped writing poems for years and didn't miss it until I started reading poetry to my own children and writing my own stories.
Novels are so long, I leaned on poetry to give me the satisfaction of something I could finish in a day. When I was stuck or discouraged, poetry gave me a reliable lift and often a fresh perspective on a character. And for all the effort I took over making marketable novels, it was a huge relief to write something that I would not only never sell, but never show anyone. I think having work that lives in my own mind and heart but not in the world is extraordinarily valuable. Jack Gantos would appear to agree with this. He wrote very movingly of his relationship with his unpublished stories in this month's Horn Book Magazine.
So it was a great surprise to me that when a friend asked me to do a poetry event this April that I agreed to write and read my own poems in public. At first the prospect of a public reading filled me with dread. Not that I'm nervous about public performance. I'm far too Irish for that. But I did fear that my poetry would lose its luster if I gave it away. The thing that made the difference was choosing a topic that I cared about. Jim and I decided to write and share poems about love and war--a thing which has touched both our lives. The 10th anniversary of the war in Iraq seemed a good occasion for it.
There is a story I've been thinking about writing for several years, based on the combat experience of one of my nephews. I've begun it and abandoned it several times because I could never quite get the right tone. But I went all the way back to poems I remember my father reading to me, "The Ballad of East and West" by Kipling and "Christmas at Sea" by Stevenson, and decided to write the story as a ballad. I haven't written a ballad since I was nine, but to my amazement, this simple sturdy poetic form fit the story like a glove and what was too hard--too sad--to write in prose, flowed like a stream in verse.
If you happen to be in The Dalles, Oregon on April 18th you'll have a chance to hear what I sincerely hope will be my only poetry reading ever. But it will be worth it for the music and the companionship of fellow poets and the chance to bring a story I've struggled with to light in the form of a poem.
Rosanne Parry is the reluctant poet and enthusiastic author of Heart of a Shepherd, Second Fiddle and the upcoming Written in Stone. www.rosanneparry.com
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 4/2/2013
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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:
There will be two concurrent features on the blog next month. We will continue with The Lucy Maud Montgomery Journals Read Along, with the introductory post running April 1 and the discussion post April 29. We'll take off the month of May and resume reading Volume III in June.
If you're interested in learning more, click through to the idea behind the read along and the reading schedule.
The rest of April will be devoted to National Poetry Month. There will be a variety of posts from poets, authors, readers, and teachers talking about their experiences with poetry. And there will be a really fun giveaway. More on all this in the days to come.
Here's a Lucy Maud Montgomery quote that nicely ties the month together:
I love best the poets who hurt me -- who offer me the roses of their thoughts with the sharp thorn among them, piercing to the bone and marrow. When in reading a poem I come across some line or couplet that thrusts itself into my heart with a stab of deadly pain -- then is my soul knit unto the soul of that poet forevermore. Browning hurts me worse than any poet I have ever read -- and so I love him most.
By: Caroline Starr Rose,
on 4/25/2012
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My 4th grade daughter, PickyKidPix, came home furious a few weeks ago. She said that she was the only person in her grade that got poetry for her MCAS open response standardized test. Worse, I had kept her home sick during the one day they practiced poetry open response essays at school.
I'm sure it went fine, but she will be forever scarred associating poetry as something designed to confound her for a multiple choice Common Core Standard test. I had felt the same way about poetry too until just a few years ago. Sharon Creech's Hate That Cat novel in verse had completely blown my mind. I had no idea that 1) novels in verse existed, 2) that novels in verse could tell a story and 3) that I would actually enjoy it.
I read Love That Dog next also by Sharon Creech (out of sequence, I know) to see if I'd feel the same way about another novel in verse. And, yes, the water was fine!
5 Comments on Poetry in Motion, last added: 4/28/2012
Love this, Augusta. The poems I've memorized over the years are dear to me. And The Goops remind me of The Gloppers. Are you familiar with those "globs of undulating glopper ooze"?
I never heard The Goops before! How funny.
I memorized my share of poems growing up, especially A.A.Milne (Disobedience begins: James James/ Morrison Morrison/ Weatherby George DuPree/ Took great care of his mother,/ though he was only three...) and Robert Frost (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening). My problem is I now remember snatches of them, but not the entire poem.
Augusta, I love the idea that writers need poetry inside us deeper than others.
You must never go down/to the end of town/without consulting me!
I LOVE this post. There is so much to learning poems by heart and I have been doing this for 10 years with my 3rd graders. What I have learned is that if you approach it the way I do it, the kids LOVE to do this. They enjoy it, and realize how much they learn from knowing poems by heart. AND the amazing thing is that they do this with no test, no pressure, no homework and no requirement to participate. Plus I have learned a lot of poems along with them. Random repetition and a pleasant, happy method of invitation will work. Too many people shy away from poetry based on unpleasant school experiences and feeling like they could not "understand" the poem (this has happened to me a lot, too, and I wonder who actually does understand some of the more "out there" poetry, but I digress) or can't memorize and remember or feel nervous to be on a stage. My system works. Kids embrace this and come to love poets and poetry. They perform and some even request to do solo recitations at our June Poetry Night. My emphasis is on learning as a group. But I do it naturally. 3rd graders join in with little to no effort and if you keep it positive, they recite along. Leads to increased vocabulary, reading fluency and more.