Oh, Wind published in Fly Like the Clouds of Time, 2022 California Poets in the Schools Statewide Anthology

Oh, Wind published in Fly Like the Clouds of Time, 2022 California Poets in the Schools Statewide Anthology. Available from CaliforniaPoets.org and Amazon. I was late submitting and didn’t realize it was selected until today’s Zoom reading. I had never read it aloud before. Until today.

And one of my student’s poems was selected for the CPITS newsletter and book announcement. I had ten student poems from four school, selected.

CPITS annual zoom symposium

Asia Moore is speaking on the power of perspective, it is ironic. I am annoyed by our guest speakers who clearly have not done their homework, and decide to tell us what they think we need to know without knowing who their audience is. They don’t realize that we are fully fledged poets in our own right, contributing to the state and national poet laureates of America. But I can’t share that thought in the Zoom chat because it’s disabled. So I will take the easy way out and not participate at all. Abdication too is a tool.

She plays hip-hop, edgy music as we freewrite which totally derailed me. Moving me right out of the piece and the moment. I can’t completely shut off the sound. Students may like to write to music to make it different. But I don’t. OK I get that totally, but I am disappointed that we didn’t have a choice and we had to listen to the awful music. How can I possibly pick up from where I left off? Now I am in time present and no longer in the moment. Where is my river? Where has it gone to.

8/20 CPITS, annual symposium, Asia Moore

Notes from California Poets in the Schools Symposium

San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin is our keynote speaker. Hopefully this workshop will be better than the May Poets & Writers workshop. The last workshop was random ramblings, but he sure has raked up the accolades and awards. I read with him during the 2019 Petaluma Poetry Walk. Though I didn't care for his work, I am amazed by the way he speaks his poems, as if extemporaneously off the top of his head. But people say that's how the poems are written. He must have an eidetic memory. 

Tongo talks about arts disciplines, gives us a caveat, offers an apology, or a disclaimer. His thoughts are pretty fluid, but he comes across as almost cray-cray with his rambling dialogue. I am trying hard not to bail. But I really don't want to be here. Yet the CPITS conference is always one of the highlights of my year. This is our second virtual conference. Last year was amazing. 

Tongo talks about how the critical dialogue with yourself is important. Inner and outer dialogues. Let’s see if I can glean something. The problem is, he reminds me too much of my mother when she rambled on, street crazy—and yet here we are sitting at his feet, a gaggle of older white women layering accolades on him, saying Woo. Brilliant, etc. I hold my tongue.

Is he brilliant, or merely rambling all over the place? He works extemporaneously, off the top of his head, which I dislike. I want to have a sense of where we are going. The talking head approach to poetry doesn’t work for me. He said, Poetry is outside of real time and communication. OK I can relate to that.

Everyone is hunting for pearls. 

I am out chasing swine who've escaped again. 

Actually they are my Shetland ponies, 

who still haunt in my dreams 50 year s later, 

the consummate escape artists. 

Decades after they died, 

they still run through the streets of my dreams.

TO WRITE after Bei Dao

TO WRITE
—after Bei Dao

It began in a dream
ending at the source,
a reign of ice. Melting glaciers
become part of the story
of water returning to the source.
But an alien rain is falling
on the icefields of Greenland,
the first time ever,
it opens the sluices, veins of time,
and Shasta stands naked, without snow—
another first within living history.
New rivers seeking the sea
all at once, a cacophany of stories
unleashed from the beginnings of time,
the last tear falling
from the corners of the eye,
that saline bath, words
worn smooth as stone.

8/21/21

IF I WERE THE STARS OF FIRE

If I were the stars of fire, 

I would dream of meteors lost in the night. 

I would dream of lost moons 

and wayward planets, rogue stars
wandering the universe. 

If I were hidden inside your heart 

I would make your dream this big. 

I would bring you courage 

bundled up in fistfuls of raggy flowers, 

or trapped on a long wave

approaching the shore 

with no other thought than the speed of dance, 

where the birds test the air with their wings, 

and the sky answers.

MalcolmX ES teaching journal, Berkeley Day 3

Thinking that Sunday was Mother’s Day, in a panic, I switched around my lesson plans around and taught Mother’s Day Poems. To my detriment, Kathy Mapps had already done a great job on teaching Mother’s Day Poems. That’s twice now she’s taught my lessons, which is fine, but she didn’t tell me. I had them talk about making weird bump in the road lines to get them to write something where they’re making comparisons in every sentence. I told them that one line needs to be weird. And then part two was to write an ode to their best friend. There are too many wandering minds in this class and making sure everyone’s on the same page is tricky. Not my best teaching moment. But we made it through the lesson with grace.

THE GIFT OF THIS DAY

THE GIFT OF THIS DAY

I am offering this day filled with fog and sunlight. 

My hands holding the air up to the sky. 

The pine trees whisper such secrets
that the cat climbs up the trunk in search of lost youth.
The birds scold her for her transgressions.
And she retreats, having nowhere else to go, but down.
Only the sky overhead, but it is overcast today.
I love you said the sky to the clouds.
I love you said the wind to the trees
and they whispered back secrets to each other
which I could not translate. The sun breaks through,
warming the bones of the old cat
and she is grateful for this gift, this day.

4/20/21, 

Pádraig Ó Tuama refers to these types of prayer exercises as Collect poems

Published in The Freedom of New Beginnings: Poems of Witness and Vision from Sonoma County, California, 2022, edited by Phyllis Meshulam, with Gail King, Terry Ehret, and Gwynn O’Gara

I will be reading from the anthology, The Freedom of New Beginnings: Poems of Witness and Vision from Sonoma County, California for Petaluma Poetry Walk on Sept 18, 2022 at Aqus Cafe, 189 H St, Petaluma, CA, 6 to 8 PM.

Cleveland Elementary School Day 10, teaching notes: Offerings, Colors, journal

Today we talked about final expectations and how many finished poems (3-4) students needed for the upcoming poetry book. I noticed that some students have not written anything in their Google.doc folders. I said, that if I don’t have their poems, then I cannot make a poetry book. That this is Day Nine (actually it’s Day 10) that they should have about 18 poems total, including freewrites, for me to choose from for the poetry book. 

Ms. Loeser contacted the students who didn’t manage to get their work recorded in their Google.docs folders and hopefully that will be ameliorated soon— otherwise several kids won’t have any work at all. I’m concerned about that because it’s something I haven’t been able to keep track of because I have not been able to access their folders. I’ve been locked out since the beginning.

There are several students whose files I still cannot access. Ms. Loeser said she will copy and paste their work, if needs be. I’m kind of panicking for Emily‘s sake because her poems appeared, and disappeared, or rather there were only three poems when I opened her file, and then suddenly there were a lot of poems, and then, there were only three poems again. I know she’s been writing a lot, she is one of my star poets. I may have copied the full file and saved the ephemeral poems, but I have the wrong computer with me, so I can’t tell if I have saved them or not.

So, to reiterate, we discussed expectations, then we did a freewrite, then we went onto the day’s lesson, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Ofrendas, or offerings—our hands could offer up gifts, or offerings. A good followup to last week’s Dorianne Laux heart poems. Some great poems came out of the process. Hopefully students are beginning to make the heart and mind connection in their writing.

Cleveland Elementary School Day 9, teaching notes: Laux Heart, journal

Weirdly, last week I got all geared up and ready to teach—only to discover that it was Easter vacation. Oops. During this these Covid times, school holidays like Easter vacation are relatively meaningless. I meant to introduce the idea of the Ofrenda, or offering lesson (Jimmy Santiago Baca) as a follow-up to the hand lesson, but for some reason we got bogged down and I wound up introducing Dorianne Laux’s Heart poem instead. 

What I discovered was that the two-week gap was more than enough to derail my students to the point where they did not really remember what we had accomplished. So I wound up re-introducing the hand lesson and many of the kids did not do the homework which is to draw their hand filled with symbols, drawings which we will be using for the poetry book as illustration, so it’s a problem.

As it turns out I don’t think Ms. Loeser had a chance to give the kids the handout, a dictionary of symbols so we went over that. There is definitely a time lapse problem with this class that makes it a little more challenging to get through things with some sense of equilibrium.

Next week I want to introduce the Ofrenda lesson as a possible link between the two recipes. Today we looked at Dorianne Laux’s Heart poem and I had each student read one sentence aloud versus one line aloud, which was interesting because we all had to think a little differently that way. Students are used to being asked to read only one line each. But I wanted to work enjambment in. They had to pay attention to the lines in a different way.

It was great to do a a class generic catch-up after the Easter break. We talked about the upcoming poetry book at the end of the residency at the end of April. And I was able to share with them the two published California Poets in the Schools broadside posters. All three posters were of my students’ work, and two of the posters had to do with hands so it was a good segue into today’s lesson—not only a segue, but it picking up on the themes that I had introduced two weeks ago.

I am always striving for continuity when I teach—trying different languages and patterns to bring forth the poetry recipe from the previous session, and making a bridge to time present. I am not always successful. But I do strive for that contiguous quality.

We talked a little bit more about using Zoom, making our drawings and just sort of a chatty catch-up, unscripted as it were. But that’s good too.

MalcolmX ES teaching journal, Berkeley Days 1-2

Day 1: We began our MXES residency with I am poems, but since Dr. Mapps had already taught the class my I am lesson plan, I had to come up with a way to make it a different type of I am poem on the spot. Talk about a curve ball. Luckily, I had calendar photos of endangered species in my teaching bag so I passed handfuls of those photos out.

Moral of the day, always have at least 2 to 3 extra lessons ready to go The I am animal poems came out surprisingly well even though I was having to use untested photographs to generate material.

I’m not too sure of the skills of this particular second grade class. They have been sequestered most of their school careers because of Covid. Distance learning has been a challenge with these little guys.

Day 2 with Dr. Mapps. The class went better. This is only my second day in the classroom since the epidemic began. It feels weird. I am all thumbs. I have lost my teaching mojo. And one of the things that is most difficult to do, is to try and teach with a mask on, because the students cannot see your face—they can only see your eyes. It’s like teaching in a burka.

So today, I used my whole body as an expressive teaching tool. Big steps, big arm gestures, and way over the top big voice to try to compensate for the fact that they could not see me speaking. Total improv. Cardio workout. After class I am exhausted and my throat hurts.

Another problem with teaching while wearing a mask is that no one can hear each other read. The students are behind plexiglass kiosks and they’re wearing masks so when they read their poems. They’re talking down to their desks in their little cubicles, not projecting the sound back out again. It is an interesting dilemma, I think we are all losing our hearing at this point.

I had forgotten it was Earth Day. I thought that was yesterday, so we all sang Happy Birthday to the earth. Dr. Mapps played a pollution song and after I leave the students will write poems to the earth

Since I was already set up to do if /then poems, I continued with that lesson plan. But I said, think about all the things on the earth and so on and so forth. It was not my best switch hitter moment, but it did work. I began with a group poem on the board. Some thing I do when kids are either preliterate or don’t have solid writing skills.

If I were a dragon fire
I would live in a cave of the melting son.
If I were the seahorse of the stars,
I would shine like the moon of flowers.
If I were the shooti g star of the rainbow
I would fly like the clouds of sorrow.
We dream of happiness in the universe.

Dr. Mapps’ 2nd grade group poem

P&W CA town hall meeting: poetry in a time of crisis

Two trilliums. yes, there was a third. Green Hill Rd., Sebastopol.

I joined the most recent Poets & Writers California Town Hall Zoom meeting: Poetry in a Time of Crisis. Lucille Lang Day, Ruth Nolan, and Molly Fisk introduce themselves via the native names for the lands we inhabit. Ohlone, Shoshone, Nisean. 

They talked of their community work, and how their anthologies came into being—a reaction to what was happening to our state (of mind). Diversity. They read selected poems from their anthologies. Lucille talks about bio-regions and fire ecology, she reads a poem about about the evolution of redwood seed cones, and a ladybug poem from Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California.

I think: Ladybugs fly hundreds of miles to mate and congregate in my grandmother’s old bedroom, why that place, who knows? Every year they come, and cover the walls. A living mosaic flickering like fire. My childhood room. We haven’t the heart to fix the windows. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, and your children do roam. Oh, the pheromones of home.

Ruth Nolan talks about the drought and her experiences being a firefighter during the 1980s. She lives in a cabin in the Mojave desert. I keep thinking of fire, fire is always on my mind, but then I am born under a fire sign. Mend and weave. Fill the word basket with fire words. A song fragment is stuck in my head. Old Woman, Weave and Mend. In the darkness of the storm she is watching. Gathering the fragments. This becomes my backdrop. My ear worm.

Molly Fisk reads selections from California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology. She talks about the program, and how CPITS poets taught residencies to kids about how to deal with climate crisis. She shares that she came to poetry via personal crisis. How, through that experience, teaching poetry became her life’s work. She asks us, how can poetry help people to heal? An old woman is weaving, her bones become the loom.

I think: The fire season came early this year, it’s a drought year, too soon. Too soon. Poetry is the language of emotion. It is the perfect vehicle to understanding the problem. It is the way to heal. She says, if you can’t understand something or you can’t put it into words, put it into the third person and then write about what didn’t happen. 

I think: Poems are like baskets holding the past. Poets see things differently, we have acutely honed observation skills, we are the watchers. This is why I like to watch murder mysteries. Honing my skills. Looking for clues, the divine mystery. We are gathering the fragments. The old woman, she is weaving the sacred circle, gathering in the colors, she is watching over you. Oh, sisters, weave and mend.

We are spreading the word, we are saving all we can save. It turns out everything burns—asphalt becomes a molten river. I remember how last year, during the wildfire, we were under evacuation alert mode, how the ghost leaves drifted across the valley, and fell, glowing like fireflies on the wind. Leaves drifting like snowflakes, like feather down. Such hot kisses. A torch song. On warm days, the attic still remembers the acrid odor of wildfire smoke. A constant reminder of the past, and what is to come. Oh women, weave and mend.

Can poetry change the world? Its narrative is where things begin. Jamie FitzGerald says, We need to change the narrative. How do we go about teaching in a time of crisis? Working with landpaths and creating eco-poetry. Call it passing the baton of social awareness to the next generation. Oh, Sisters, weave and mend.

Jamie said, During the Covid crisis, the penny dropped, the disparate pieces of climate change became a puzzle, the picture came into focus. How do we name it, this thing called climate change, without distancing from it? Oh, women weave and mend.

Molly says type up lines from poems and put them under windshield wipers at night when no one is looking. I like the idea of guerilla poetry for April Poetry Month. The tapestry we weave with our words. Grandmother Spider. The song, what does it want? So insistent.

We talk about Carolyn Forché’s latest book, Against Forgetting, the role of the poet. This is how we bring about change. Bearing witness. Never forget. 

And finally the song’s earworm message is revealed. I look it up. The Elderwomen of Nanaimo, a place lately on my mind. Songs and poems work in funny ways, an undercurrent below the conscious level of the psyche. The elders are speaking to me through the song:

For years I’ve been watching, waiting for Old Woman, 

Feeling lost and so alone, I’ve been watching.
Now I find her, weaving, gathering the colors.
Now I find her in myself.

A call to action. Become the loom. Weave and mend.

Cleveland Elementary School Day 8 teaching notes: Hands, journal

We began our class a little late because I could not get online via Zoom for the longest time. No matter that I had tried to join too early which thoroughly confused Zoom. That was OK because Ms. Loser was talking with the kids as to how she spent her weekend, and how she would spend her Easter break. I realized that these normalizing moments are important. That led to a segue into April Fool’s Day. 

I asked them what they thought April Fool’s Day was all about. We got some interesting answers. I told them that during Roman times, the beginning of the year was in spring which was in March, and April 1 was sort of an extra holiday where people could clown around and do silly things. I said that in the medieval world, about 1200 years later, the court jester could actually be king for a day, and people could change places, step outside of their normal roles—usually this happened before Lent. I asked students if they had ever played an April Fool’s Day trick on anyone. Some kids told me what they planned to do which was quite funny as it usually involved fooling their parents.

Because Mr. Grant wasn’t with us last week I use the opportunity as a teaching moment, to have the students recap what we did last week by telling to Mr. Grant. Recall. Cameron gave a really good synopsis: he told Mr. Grant how we wrote about odes, which were small songs to ordinary everyday things, and we included what it reminded them of, their feelings, and memories. I asked them, did they write the poem from the point of view of their object, or were they speaking about it? They agreed, they were talking about it. We were discussing narrative, and the idea that sometimes an object itself could speak. I suggested that they might want to try having an object tell a story during Freewrite.

We yoga stretched, we breathed deep, we shook out our hands, we made starfish hand, and we made moose antlers. And I told them that making moose antlers was a visual sign to cue your audience in that you were going to change the subject and say something completely different. I was secretly leading them up to today’s lesson plan. So we wrote for five minutes. I said they could write about anything they want to as long as they used comparisons and strong imagery. I said, you could go back and revisit an old lesson, you could write from the point of view of your object telling you a story, or you could even choose a different object to write about. But Freewrite was like warming up before a soccer game. I said if you get stuck you can write down I don’t know what to write about and see what else comes up. I wrote: 

ODE TO ADIRONDACK CHAIRS

ODE TO ADIRONDACK CHAIRS

Ode to the Adirondack chairs

that hunker down on my bookshelf, 

toy models dreaming of a past 

where a young man constructed them,

another facsimile, another lifetime,

still he choose each board carefully 

for grain warp and and texture

as if he were building a sailboat.

Place-holders for other chairs 

that once graced summer porches 

say, at the cabin by the lake 

where the afternoon wind 

ruffled and knitted the water

into a frothy shawl,

and the family reminisced, 

told stories, threading the past

to the present.

And the occasional slap 

and splash of fish 

leaping skyward 

toward the clouds, 

interrupted daydreams 

of summers long lost, 

where the family once gathered. 

But the cabin was sold 

when the grandparents died, 

and the family, 

once united by those chairs, 

scattered to the four winds,

set sail for other realms.

3/23/21

Cleveland Elementary School Day 7 teaching notes: Neruda’s Odes, journal

When I joined the class, the fourth grade students were talking of difficult math and how they were having trouble getting it, how they felt so rushed. They have not learned how to ask for help. I said that I really sucked at math but my math teacher was extraordinary man. We talked about favorite teachers. I have worked with many teachers, I said that Mr. Sugarman, who is teaching you math, is a really great teacher, like Ms. Loeser. These are the people that will stick with you all your life. Then I told them the story of my math teacher, Archie Williams, a long distance runner who didn’t succeed in turning me into a math whiz— which is ironic because so many people in my family are math wizards. But not me. But I remember his stories. And that’s equation enough.

Archie was an athlete from Oakland who broke many barriers, not only did he break racial barriers, he broke a track record with Jesse Owen in the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. He also broke records in the sky, he was a Tuskeegee pilot and he taught pilots how to fly fighter jets. In those days, African-American men could not be pilots but Archie came along and he changed things, so I asked this, what is important to you? What juices you? Asking them if they understood what the term juicing means and they said yes. I asked, where does time stand still for you? Or disappear completely? 

One student said that when he plays video games, he completely forgets about time. Many similar electronic devices were rabbit holes, or wormholes of time. I asked them to identify a place where they lost time and to do a freewrite on it. I said it doesn’t have to be a poem. I asked them what are some other things they did during the course of a day, where they lose track of time? Another said that she loved to watch the timer ticking away, knowing when something would end. Boundaries, a different approach to time.

We got into a lively discussion about sports. Ms. Loeser mentioned a story about baseball. We talked about baseball, how time stands still. I asked Ms. Loeser what does it mean when I say it’s the top of the ninth and the bases are loaded? We add more data, the teams are tied, it’s ball two, strike two. Like poetry, baseball is a specialized language, and it’s really about suspended time. When Archie told us about winning the 440 m race, he said the time stood still. It was as if he was in suspended animation.

One thing that’s amazing about this distance-learning teaching process is that you can bring extraneous things in, like this old poem which I would totally never be prepared to share. O Brave New World. We are Caliban lurking in the cave, we are Miranda discovering the treasure. 

We read a bit from Casey at the Bat and I asked about what do we know of this culture, through this poem written in 1888? Team spirit, identity, mud. I tell them, as poets, we are archaeologists mining the past. As poets, we are anthropologists examining culture. We are observers examining everything. We are sleuths looking for clues. We put on our poetry eyes. They notice that the poem is written in paragraphs, I tell them the word for it is a stanza in poetry. We also note how it rhymes. I say that poems don’t have to rhyme, but that was the style in the 1880s.

I talked about what I’m working on right now—the short biographies that I’m writing on Irish American women for Women’s Herstory month. And how in the morning, whenever I read or write—even something boring or banal, like correcting typos, I lose all track of time where 20 minutes becomes 45 minutes—just like that. Sometimes I look down and read for five minutes and the next thing I know, I am late for class, I’m late for appointments, I am late for everything. 

Creativity juices us, it makes us forget about time. That’s the happy place where we want to be. Someone talked about his piano, how he loses time playing it. I say music is like that, it makes us lose track of time. I also tell them that today we will be talking about odes which are a kind of song but in poetic format. Next time I think I will bring in the Salvador Dalí painting with all the melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory.

Cleveland Elementary School Day 6 teaching notes: I Am & Chain poems, journal

During the week, Ms. Loeser gave students homework to create their own chain poems, but the students wrote singular words down the page—a shopping list—and from the examples, it sounds like they did not take it to the next step, which was to flush out the list to create their own poems. So, we decided to go back and expand our ideas from last week's lesson and begin again. 

I said they could revisit last week's poem, or they could visit another older lesson, or write something entirely new—as long as it had a comparison in it. Atziri wrote about lemonade, but didn't have comparisons. So we identified places where she could add or expand her ideas. First you pick the lemons, then you cut them, heir insides like the sun, then you squeeze them, add sugar, water, ice, The sound of ice in a glass in hot summer. She worked on it some more to flesh it out.

Returning to the theme of a chain poem, writing down 5 to 6 nouns or verbs down the page and filling in the poem around those linked words (adapted from an old Teachers&Writers lesson) we made a group poem choosing 5 associative nouns. We brainstormed: ice, city, mountains, snow, grass. I said, you might find this assignment easier if you write it down first on paper. Writing is messy, we often change our minds and cross things out. it's OK. I hold up some writing with lots of cross-outs by way of example. We wrote:

Freezing ice from ancient glaciers
moves freely toward the city where the mist rises
and surrounds the mountains of trash
where the snow melts
and where the grass grows toward the sun.

    Class poem, Ms. Loeser's 4th Grade

After our second freewrite, a few students shared their work. Whenever a cool line comes up, I repeat it aloud. Or ask a student to read it again so we can savor the imagery. Most notable were the stellar poems of Natalie and Emily. They are naturals.

ODE TO VICTORIA

ODE TO VICTORIA

Above Victoria‘s head, the gilded fan,
like a golden bird, graces the wall.
She twirls and twists her long dark hair up in a knot.
It becomes a comb holding up a mantilla to the sky.
We cannot escape the confines of our rooms, 

but she time travels across the universe anyway.
She has a field of virtual stars behind her.
The fan is painted with cypress trees 

or perhaps willow, I can’t tell from this distance.
She tells me There is a bird nests in their branches.
It is a poem referring back to the ancient past,

perhaps by Wu Wei, a deep canyon, 

that faint promise of spring.
She combs and brushes her hair,

a wave, or a river singing of sorrow and hope.

She is like a Chinese princess of olden times

softly singing in the garden, 

while the birds come to listen.

3/9/21

ACROSS A BLIND SEA

ACROSS A BLIND SEA

Across a turbulent sea,
the waves quail and argue
about who goes first.
It’s a desert of thought in my mind.
They roar and toss the boats
loosened from their moorings,
lost on stormy seas,
and the blindness is deafening
against the rocks.

3/9/21

Cleveland Elementary School Day 5 teaching notes: Chain poems, 4th Grade, Oakland, journal

Day five, hump week. It’s four weeks until spring break. We chitchat and discuss the origin of April Fool’s Day, it falls on a Thursday. Ms. Loser tells us a story of how she once sent a memo out to her colleagues saying that there was no school on April Fools’ Day, and because they didn’t read to the end of the letter that said April Fool’s! everybody believed her and didn’t come to school. And then someone piped up, Don’t you have to wear green on April Fools’ Day? That made me laugh and then that was my entrance que, as I was waiting in the wings. I said you have to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. It represents freedom. It would be fun to do something with customs and aphorisms. I say, Thank you Connor, for the poetry lesson idea. He chuffs.

We go over last week’s work which were based on acrostics, and India reads a poem about a sparrow. Because I can see the document on the screen, I say make it look like a poem too. And so we add commas and line breaks. Atziri read a poem about sunflowers. Some of her lines are very long and we talk about indenting three spaces, or using the tab key when a line continues past the confines of the page. 

Today is a little bit more shoptalk, we are delving further into the revisioning and editing process. We focus on how to make it look like a poem. And whether or not it needs punctuation and/or commas. I say one line, one idea. I often make line breaks at commas. I say, one unit of breath, one idea. We talk of personal choices whether or not to punctuate. I mention that like with Emily Dickinson changing the face of poetry, e.e. cummings, who eschewed capitalization and punctuation, also changed the shape of poetry. 

Emily reads a poem from last week, then Natalie—her ocean poem has a lot of potential. I tell her, make it also look like a poem. Again, we reiterate the process of line breaks. We also discuss using strong verbs versus weak verbs. I tell her that I cannot see the word fun. I cannot see the word get. I cannot see the word go. Are there stronger verbs we can use to make our poems really sing? We look at the worksheets, lists of verbs and feelings, words for invoking the senses. I tell them, these worksheets in your Google folder are resources for you to use when you get stuck.

Freewrite time—we can revisit old poetry lessons, or write new work. The only thing I am looking for are comparisons. I make the comparison sign—two fists, or two ideas, crashing headlong into each other to create similes and metaphors. 

We breathe deep, we make vroom vroom noises, we shake out our hands, we become race cars, we grab the proverbial steering wheel, and screech out, making our words fly across the page. We drive them around dangerous curves, not braking for what lies ahead. It’s all out, flat out, drag racing through the back roads of memory. Dead man’s curve coming up, the twists and turns in the road become sinuous as snakes. We don’t know where we’re going, or where we’ll end up, but we’re going there, fast as we can, pedal to the metal, across the finish line. But a writer’s work is never done.

IN EMILY’S GARDEN

Imagine Emily alone in a white room 

wrestling with words still in their nightshirts.
Sunlight seeps in through lace curtains
The garden beckons, spring unfurls its finery,
seeking the warmth of the hesitant sun.
Emily tends to her garden and her words take root
in the depths of the soul, to offer solace
and nourishment during these darkest of times.

Here, amidst the pale greenery of midwinter,
Orange blossoms struggle to reach
     the secret heart of the sun.
Poppies remind the sun of its filial duty to return
every year, relentless time. The wheel of the year.

3/2/21

Cleveland Elementary School Day 4 teaching notes: HOPE, Acrostix 3/2/21 Journal

3/2 We begin class with housekeeping: I remind my students that they need to use only one Google document with their full name at the top of the page, not several documents. They also need to date each day’s work. I expect at least two poems per day.  I still cannot open any of their documents, nor do I have permission. We are working on it. But for now, the only way I can observe their work is if they screenshare their document when they read.

I remind them that they have two writing times. 1. during freewrite, when we review and share last week’s work. A freewrite could also be brand new work. It’s a good chance to revisit some of the previous week’s poetry lessons and redo them, but you don’t have to. The only thing I am looking for is strong images, and comparisons. The worksheets are there to help you if you need starter lines. During freewrite, I tell them you can write about anything you want, you do not have to revisit an old poetry lesson. Make sure you use comparisons. 2. The new day’s poetry lesson.

Last week we looked at a poem by Emily Dickinson. I tell the students the story of Emily, who was a recluse in her own home, she, who had only 10 poems published during her lifetime, changed the shape of poetry, especially American poetry. And here we are, all of us recluses, we are all Emily, alone in our secret gardens of the mind. I repeat a line, Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. We hear poems from India, Justin, and Connor, who share their work from last week.