Poetry Friday: This Poem is a Nest, by Irene Latham

I’m not sure how many reviews of Irene Latham’s new book This Poem is a Nest I had to read before I decided I had to order the book. I’m pretty sure I wanted it after the first one. Now that my copy has come in the mail, and I’ve read the whole thing, I decided that I need to write my own review. (And here's an interview with Johanna Wright, who drew the lovely pictures.)

I already own several of Irene’s books (here's a post about her I wrote for National Poetry Month last year, including links to several reviews of her work). One thing I love about her writing is how it always inspires me to try some of the same things she’s doing. And this one was no exception. After telling you about the book, I’m going to share some of my own efforts at nestlings.

Irene starts this book with a long poem called “Nest.” It explores the four seasons of a birds’ nest. In spring the nest houses baby birds, in summer it watches young robins fly away, in autumn it overlooks deer and a turtle, and in winter a mouse moves in. Each season is full of memorable language and perfectly chosen words. And it’s those perfectly chosen words that lead us to the next section of the book, when Irene presents 161 found poems using those words from “Nest.”

All I can say is wow as I look through the variety of subjects she’s found in her own writing. She writes of times of day, months (all twelve), colors, planets, emotions. She writes alphabet poems and a whole “Ars Poetica” section. This is a tour de force, ideal for sharing with a class of just about any age, and fun to read for an adult, too. She calls these found poems “nestlings,” and at the end, there’s a three page section of tips for writing your own.

 

Here are a couple of examples of Irene's nestlings:

 

I loved the idea. First, I was fascinated that you could find poems in one of your own poems. I tried it. And then, I tried finding one in Irene’s “Nest,” with its evocative words.

I picked this one of mine, written last summer after my husband and I took an anniversary trip while visiting family and friends in Kentucky.


30th Anniversary

When we were newlyweds,
we went to the cemetery.
Remember?
We just had two weekends for our honeymoon
with our first week of graduate school in between,
and when we wanted to see at least one tourist sight in Frankfort,
we found everything closed.
So we visited the floral clock behind the Capitol building
and we walked around among the dead.

Daniel Boone’s grave overlooks the Kentucky River,
a proud monument with scenes of his exploits on three sides,
and then on the back,
with no view of the river,
his wife Rebecca, mother of ten,
can be seen milking a cow.

Daniel and Rebecca are surrounded by other graves,
two hundred years’ worth.
There’s a monument devoted to Kentucky soldiers,
and the Civil War tombs
house both northern and southern boys.

Thirty years later,
we went back to recreate our honeymoon.
We drove around looking for familiar sights,
revisited the floral clock,
found the bed and breakfast where we stayed
(you remembered the blue stained glass window),
ate fish at the same restaurant by the river.

And yes,
we stopped by the cemetery.
We took pictures this time:
the river,
American flags, Confederate flags,
monuments of all eras,
Daniel and Rebecca Boone’s spot.

I don’t remember if back then,
young as we were,
we discussed thinking about
death on our honeymoon,
whether either of us made the obvious remark
that one day one of us would bury the other.
 
We’re both grayer in our riverside anniversary selfie
than we were in our wedding photos
(though you were already bald when I married you).
Thirty years have given us plenty
to be happy and sad about,
births and deaths and earthquakes and Caribbean adventures.

I hope we have another thirty years to love each other,
to remember the promises we made on that steamy August afternoon,
and that long-ago walk in the cemetery,
and the blue light in our honeymoon suite.

Ruth, thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

I wrote two nestlings from this poem. First I just chose words, and then in the second one, I tried Irene’s alphabet technique of writing down all the words starting with a particular letter in the poem (in my case, A), and then taking out the ones that didn’t go together. Both of my nestlings really fit in with the original topic of the poem, so I didn’t achieve Irene’s variety at all.


Newlywed
weekends
we walked,
surrounded
by adventures,
love -
remember?



Anniversary
and
adventures -
August
afternoon.


Then I tried writing a nestling from Irene’s poem, “Nest.” I picked one word from each section of the poem to write my own four word nestling.


Blue seaglass,
imagine boat.

You should buy Irene's wonderful book! Read it and use it to inspire your writing!

The lovely Linda at TeacherDance has today's roundup.

Slice of Life Tuesday: Morning

 Out of the Morning

 

Will there really be a morning?

Is there such a thing as day?

Could I see it from the mountains

If I were as tall as they?

 

Has it feet like water-liles?

Has it feathers like a bird?

Is it brought from famous countries

Of which I have never heard?

 

Oh, some scholar! Oh, some sailor!

Oh, some wise man from the skies!

Please to tell a little pilgrim

Where the place called morning lies!

                             

Emily Dickinson

 

 

No matter how many worries there are the night before, morning keeps coming, with its new chance to get things right, its new light and its birds singing. I usually wake up well before light, and I lie there quietly, adjusting to life again, remembering the people I love, praying for them. I get up and visit the bathroom, take my medicine that needs to be taken pre-food.  I get back in bed and check my email on my phone. I read my notifications on Facebook. I post my daily photo. 

But soon the light comes. None of that other stuff can compete with the light. Sometimes, when it's especially breathtaking, I rush downstairs and out my gate to take pictures of it. My pictures don't ever come close to doing justice to that beautiful light. Here it is, another morning! What are you going to do with it? 

By the time we leave for work, the spectacular morning colors have faded. There is such a thing as day. Here goes.

Poetry Friday: Conversation with a Ghost from Derek Walcott's Omeros

I've been rereading Derek Walcott's Omeros, a Caribbean retelling (sort of) of Homer's Odyssey. I could keep reading it forever, always finding new aspects. Sometimes something incredibly complex like this work is what you want to read, something that you have to wrestle with and read again and again. At least, that's how I feel. (I wrote more about Omeros here.) After I share an extract from Walcott, I've got a poem I wrote using some of his words.

 

I picked this to share today because of the way I've been kept from travel the last 16 months or so. I'm "stuck" here on a Caribbean island, which is not at all the worst fate one could imagine. I miss the family members I can't go to see, especially my daughter, but there's so much that's beautiful here.

In this extract, Walcott (or the version of him in the poem) meets the ghost of his father (who died when Walcott was a child) on the cold beach in Boston. (You can see what I meant by calling this "a retelling (sort of)." There's a lot of other stuff in it as well.) 

By the way, in the Odyssey, Odysseus goes to the underworld to meet the ghost of his mother, but he never goes to Boston to meet the ghost of his father.

 

Walcott is talking as the extract begins, telling his father's ghost that this place is too cold for them to talk. His father suggests a warmer place, and then talks about his travels around the world, and how he ended up coming back to his island and loving it.  

"cherish our island for its green simplicities"

I said, "This is hardly the place; maybe I called

but it's too cold for talk; this happens to old men,

and I'm nearly there. You could have been my child,

and the more I live, the more our ages widen."

"We could go to a warmer place." My father smiled.

"Oh, not where you think, an island close to Eden.

But before you return, you must enter cities

that open like The World's Classics, in which I dreamt

I saw my shadow on their flagstones, histories

that carried me over the bridge of self-contempt,

though I never stared in their rivers, great abbeys

soaring in net-webbed stone, when I felt diminished

even by a postcard. Those things I wrote to please

your mother and our friends, unrevised, unfinished,

in drawing-room concerts died in their own applause.

Way back in the days of the barber's winding sheet,

I longed for those streets that History had made great,

but the island became my fortress and retreat,

in that circle of friends that I could dominate.

Dominate, Dominus. With His privilege,

I felt like the "I" that looks down on an island,

the way that a crested palm looks down from its ridge

on a harbour warmer than this one, or my hand.

But there is pride in cities, so remember this:

Once you have seen everything and gone everywhere,

cherish our island for its green simplicities,

enthrone yourself, if your sheet is a barber-chair,

a sail leaving harbour and a sail coming in,

the shadows of grape-leaves on sunlit verandahs

made me content. The sea-swift vanishes in rain,

and yet in its travelling all that the sea-swift does

it does in a circular pattern. Remember that, son."

The surf was dark. The lights stuttered in the windows

along the empty beach, red and green lights tossed on

the cold harbour, and beyond them, like dominoes

with lights for holes, the black skyscrapers of Boston.

Derek Walcott, from Omeros, Chapter XXXVI

 

 

I took a quote from this passage and wrote a golden shovel poem:

 

 

Sometimes you don't know what you cherish

Until you can't have it any more - our

Affectionate kiss of greeting on this island

                                Is gone for now; for

Now we stay apart as contagion spreads its

Dangers. But rain falls gently, the world is green,

We hold our families, fall back on simplicities. 

 

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Jama has today's roundup.

Slice of Life Tuesday: Weight

"I lost 17 pounds!" announces my husband triumphantly as he bursts out of the bathroom.

"Seventeen pounds? Really? How on earth did you do that so fast?" I ask. I mean, it just isn't fair the way he decides to lose weight and it's gone.

"Well," he says virtuously, "I've been eating better, and I've been exercising. Yeah! I was..." and he tells me what he weighed to start with and what he weighs now.

"Um," I say, manipulating the numbers in my head, "that's not seventeen pounds. That's twelve pounds."

I think now I know how he loses weight so fast. It's a matter of the math. 

Poetry Friday: Short

Today I have three short poems for you. I wrote one back in March, and the other two, this week.

 

I’m reading in bed
in the early hours of the morning
because I can’t sleep,
and suddenly a mosquito appears.
I kill it with my thumb
against the background of
the article about the breakdown of the healthcare system in Italy,
so that its body,
filled with blood already drained from me,
is smooshed on my phone screen.
Seems appropriate.

 

Birds on wet branches -
Dislodged by palmchats' breakfast,
Last night's raindrop falls.

 

Bougainvillea:
fruit-punch colors, spiky thorns,
Haitian October.

 

 

Here's today's roundup.

Slice of Life Tuesday: Hair

My last passport had a terrible photo on it. It looked as though I hadn't even combed my hair that morning (maybe I hadn't). I had a baby at the time, and was taking him to get his first passport. His photo was adorable. 

 

Every time I traveled with that passport, I wanted to explain. I don't really look like that. I was getting my baby ready that morning, and didn't even look in the mirror. That's why it looks like a mugshot. I'm not a felon, honest. 

 

I feel that way all the time now, now that I haven't had a haircut in eight months. Honestly, I didn't grow this terrifying mop of grey elflocks on purpose. I prefer to have my hair cut every eight weeks. I don't really look like this. 

 

So I was surprised the other day at work when a high school student walked by me and commented, "Miss, you're so pretty! I love your hair! It looks like the seventies!"

 

I managed, "Thank you," but other than that I was rendered speechless. Probably just as well.

Reading Update

Books #64, 65 and 66 were the last three in Gary Paulsen's series about Brian, Brian's Winter, Brian's Return, and Brian's Hunt. I enjoyed this series very much, and I think my students will too, now that we've finished reading the first one together. "He had forgotten the most important thing about living in the wilderness, the one thing he'd thought he would never forget - expect the unexpected." In one of the books, Paulsen has an author's note where he explains some of his own experience in living and surviving in the wild, and reading that helped me understand how vivid his descriptions are, both of Brian's surroundings and of his sensations, physical and emotional. 

Book #67 was a reread, Learning to Walk in the Dark, by Barbara Brown Taylor. I often read this when I wake up in the night and can't sleep. I've written about it before here, here, and here. 

 

Book #68 was Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred D. Taylor. This is the very heavy, sad story of the Logans, a sharecropping family in Mississippi in the 1930s. It goes well with a book I read recently, The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson. (I wrote about that book here.) Because of reading Wilkerson's book, I didn't take any of the Logans' experiences as fictional. They were so real, so typical of the way African-Americans lived at the time, with a maddening lack of justice and agency, as possible victims of whatever white person might happen to come along. It's not that I wasn't aware of these realities before reading The Warmth of Other Suns, but that book added context and depth and emotion. 

Book #69 was Jacob Have I Loved, by Katherine Paterson. I liked this book (it was the second or third time I'd read it), but I'm not sure it's a great choice for eighth graders.  From the crush on a much older man to the lactation-related resolution, this seems more appropriate for someone with a little more life experience, like, maybe, my age. I didn't pick it, but I'm going to teach it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Book #70 was The Mirror and the Light, the third in Hilary Mantel's trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's secretary/fixer/victim. I wrote about the first two here after I read them in 2013. This was absorbing and kept me reading even though I knew exactly the tragic way it would end. ("Sometimes it is years before we can see who are the heroes in an affair and who are the victims.")

 

Book #71 was A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle. I read this first when I was ten years old, then again (at least once) as a teenager, then again a few years ago when I taught it to the seventh grade (they begged for it because the movie was coming out). It didn't go very well in seventh grade; I had forgotten how static and full of philosophy it is. I'm going to teach it to the sixth grade now (again, not my choice). But oh, it's so good. I sobbed through the last chapter. If anything, the book has even more power over me than it did over my fifth grade self. 

Poetry Friday: Louise Glück and a Zoom Poem

I read this week that Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Some of her poems I have shared before: here and here. Congratulations to her!

 

Last Sunday I tried to go to the Family Quarantine Assembly (which is what my brother has named our family Zoom meeting), and failed. For over an hour I tried, but never succeeded for more than a minute or two at a time. 

 

So I wrote about it.

 

 

Zoom Poem

 

Zooming
away from here
to see you all,
I
got sidetracked
by who knows what.

Somehow
I
couldn’t reach you,
just sat here
watching the circle spin,
promising connection
sometime.

A few times
I
reached the virtual room
where you all sat
but only for a moment.

Someone said
I
sounded as though I was melting
and someone else
wondered why
I
was singing.

It stretches out every syllable you say,
someone started to explain
but 

I 

was already gone
Zooming
away
from there,
from the Family Quarantine Assembly.

Someone said
She’s trying to be here,
and
I
was,
until the meeting was over,
and 

I 

was left
sitting here
(not there)
alone.

 

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

 

Bridget has today's roundup.

Slice of Life Tuesday: First Year Teacher

 

Today I said to someone that my job in 2020 feels like being a first year teacher. I'd said it before, and I'll probably say it again. I'm learning new software, teaching almost all novels I've never taught before (some of them I'd never even read), making do with half as much class time as last year, adding on a new grade level. I'm keeping a week or two ahead of my students, using a curriculum I've never used (purchased by the school to make the back and forth between online and in-person more doable), and managing both groups (online and in-person) at the same time. I'm Zooming and wearing a mask and disinfecting desks after the kids leave the room. It all feels new and strange.

 

Then I started thinking about my actual first year of teaching, a very long time ago, in a different millennium from this one. I was 21, a first year graduate student, and in addition to the courses I was taking, I was given two sections of college French 101 to teach. I was a newlywed, living in our first apartment, reading many fat novels, and writing about them, in French. Those were exciting days.

But though I would love to relive some aspects of that life, I wouldn't want to be a first-year teacher again. I'm grateful for that year of experience, and all the others since, and in spite of everything that is new this year, it's the experience that makes the difference. 

I remember how I used to agonize over the mistakes I made in class, and there were many. Each one would bother me for weeks, and I'd get hot and cold all over when I thought of them. I had a tiny fraction of the grading I have now, but it overwhelmed me. I dreaded teacher evaluations, from my students or my professors, and would fixate on the (few) negative comments and forget all about the (many) positive ones. I had no confidence at all, none. I faked confidence every day, pretended I knew what I was doing, and knew deep down that I didn't. 

 

And now? While still a pretty intense over-thinker, I am completely chill compared to that long ago youngster who had the same name as I have now. When I make mistakes, I fix them and move on. Although I have mounds of grading, I can handle it, and in fact I pride myself on getting it done and turning work back quickly. I don't love being evaluated, but I don't worry about it, either. (And it can't really happen this year, anyway, since we can't fit any more people in the room and still distance appropriately.) Best of all, I have confidence now. I do know what I'm doing. There are still many things I don't know - I learn new facts and skills every day - but I know now that it's not about me, performing at the front of the classroom, but about my kids, and figuring out how to reach them. I'm not faking any more. If I don't know the answer, I don't hesitate to say so and to look it up, sometimes right there in front of my students. (We didn't have the internet when I was a new teacher - how did we manage?) I've been teaching much longer than my kids have been alive, and I've learned a trick or two along the way.

Yes, 2020 brings challenges I haven't faced before. No, it won't be an easy year. But as the T-shirt says, "You can't scare me; I'm a middle school teacher."

Poetry Friday: Joyce Sutphen

The more ridiculously busy I am, the more I find I have to read in order to maintain my equilibrium. So, among other things, I've been reading some Joyce Sutphen. Many of her poems are about lost love. Here are a couple I really liked. They are very personal, and the emotions come through, and yet there's also a universality in them.

 

Notice

 

Notice how you show up here and there among

The words I use, that there are small details

 

that only you would notice, especially when you

notice that I am saying things that I never  

said before. And see how easy it is to hear

them now that I am not speaking directly

to you.

(Here's the rest.)

 

 

Not for Burning

 

I come across your old letters,

the words still clinging to the page,

holding onto their places patiently,

with no intention of abandoning

the white spaces. They say

that you will always love me, 

and reading them again, I almost 

believe it...  (Here's the rest.)

 

 

Tabatha has today's Poetry Friday roundup. 

Michelle Kogan shared my Poetry Swap offering and responded with a poem of her own.