Poetry Friday: Sick Edition

In this short life that only lasts an hour
How much - how little - is within our power

Emily Dickinson


I'm sick in bed today with most unpoetic symptoms, so glad for the distraction of Poetry Friday.  Check out Janet's Mortimer Minute.  She said some nice things about me that cheered me up no end.  And the roundup is here, at Merely Day by Day. 

Reading Update

Book #32 of this year was a teacher book, How's it Going?: A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers, by Carl Anderson.  I don't have the book in front of me the way I like to when I post these reviews, because as soon as I was done with it I immediately passed it on, first to my co-teacher and then to the elementary administrator at our school, so that the elementary teachers could read it.  It was that good, that full of wonderfully helpful ideas for any age of students.  I picked up this book because I was very dissatisfied with the writing conferences I was doing with my students, and this book did not disappoint.  I recommend it for anyone who is teaching writing to kids.  Lucy Calkins did the foreword, and her quote underlies the whole text: "Teach the writer, not the writing."  Anderson tells you exactly how to do that.  As soon as I can get the book back, I want to read it again.

Book #33 was Barbara Kingsolver's latest, Flight Behavior.  I hadn't heard great things about this book, so I hadn't been in a hurry to read it, but this summer I heard someone whose judgement I respect talking about how good it was.  What was I thinking?  I would read Barbara Kingsolver's grocery lists.  (In fact, I guess I almost have, since I did read her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which was about what she and her family ate for a year.)  This book is fabulously written, and although the topic, climate change and the way it is destroying the planet, is hardly uplifting, Dellarobia and her friends and family are so well portrayed, and the story so beautifully drawn, that I couldn't stop reading until I was done.  The flight of the title refers mostly to butterflies, and specifically the Monarch butterflies, which this year have migrated to Tennessee instead of Mexico.  When Dellarobia first sees them, she isn't wearing her glasses, and thinks the mountainside is on fire.  Soon enough, the presence of the butterflies changes everything for Dellarobia, her family, and her depressed community, where going to college is practically unheard of, and climate change is dismissed as a ridiculous liberal story. The book explores Dellarobia's relationships, globalization, and scientific research and how the news media simplify and misrepresent it, but the narrative never flags. 

Book #34 was recommended by one of my seventh graders.  I loved Wonder, by R.J. Palacio, the story of ten-year-old August Pullman, who was born with a cranio-facial deformity and who is just about to start school for the first time after being homeschooled. One of my eighth graders was doing a book recommendation a couple of weeks ago, and she warned us that the book was sad and "You can cry." That's my warning for Wonder, too. You can cry; I did, a lot.  But this is a beautiful story, and ultimately a happy one.

Book #35 was recommended by my daughter; it was the sequel to a book she suggested over the summer, The Year of Secret Assignments.  This one, The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie, by Jaclyn Moriarty, was similar.  It consisted mostly of Bindy's notes, musings, and correspondence, but Bindy really came alive (haha, see what I did there?), and in spite of the somewhat improbable ending, I enjoyed reading this.

Book #36 was Brian McLaren's Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words.  I wanted to read this because I was listening to a series of podcasts from a church that is basing a year's worth of sermons on this book.  This was my first book by McLaren, and I found it well-written, thought-provoking, readable.  I appreciated the way he made abstract spiritual concepts approachable and put words to ideas that are difficult to express.  However, there were several points at which I felt that the book wasn't intended to be exclusively about Christianity.  It almost felt as if McLaren was out to annoy his evangelical readers by a paean to Buddhism, an exhortation to gather for worship, "whether it's in a glorious cathedral or temple, a spacious megachurch facility, or a small local chapel, synagogue or mosque," and a friendly aside: "Now here I am being transparently trinitarian, and some may not be able to go here with me."  That said, McLaren uses scripture (yes, the Bible) extensively all the way through, and his writing is clearly informed by his own experience with God.  I enjoyed this book and found it gave me helpful ways to think about faith.  You can find more about the book, and the twelve words, here.

Book #37 only came out two days ago, and my daughter and I have both already read it.  It's Addie Zierman's book When We Were On Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over.  I have been reading Addie's blog for a while.  I started back when it was called "How to Speak Evangelical," and loved reading her beautifully written meditations on the cliches of the evangelical Christian world.  The book was no disappointment, but I didn't feel that we had parallel lives as much as I thought I might.  Many of the "growing up evangelical" details are similar, though I'm older than she is and grew up in another country, but the story, like all of our stories, was very much her own.  I wanted to hear more about her time in China with her husband; it seemed to me that coming back from that very difficult and life-changing experience must have had something to do with the development of her depression, and I would love it if she would explore that idea as deeply as she has mined some of her other experiences.   Although Addie's adult life is very different from mine, her writing started me thinking about many of the particulars of my own faith journey.  Here's a quote that will give you an idea of how fun her prose is to read: 

"These days, faith is a lot like Wisconsin: a series of repetitive ups and downs, the natural rise and fall of the road that stretches before you.  Boring.  Beautiful.  Ridiculous sometimes, as when the road eases into the Wisconsin Dells and there are suddenly giant plastic animals and water slides and a huge haunted mansion tilted along the road."

Addie's writing has encouraged many others to reflect on their journey, too, and you can read some of those reflections at the synchroblog she is hosting here.

Next Time, on the Mortimer Minute

In spite of my last minute request, my tag-ee for the Mortimer Minute has graciously agreed to post next week.  Janet, who blogs at Across the Page, and who also has a gorgeous nature blog called Discovering Nature, is a friend from college.  After spending several quite intense years of our lives seeing each other all the time, we moved to different corners of the planet, and haven't seen each other in - wow, it's a long time, when you stop to count.

In spite of not seeing Janet in the flesh since we were both much younger, I have enjoyed keeping up with her on her blogs.  She is as thoughtful and deep-thinking as ever, and now her own homeschooled children are reaping the benefits, instead of the college literature classes she use to take and teach. 

In addition to being a wonderful writer, thinker, and poet, Janet is also a rabbit-owner, and who knows?  Maybe Mortimer will make a friend at Janet's house.

Stay tuned for Janet's Mortimer Minute on Friday!

Poetry Friday: Mortimer Minute

I was tagged last Friday by Liz Steinglass.  Here are the guidelines for the Mortimer Minute:

1) Pose and answer three questions you’ve always wanted to be asked in an interview about children’s poetry. (Ideally, use one question posted by the person who invited you to the Hop.)
2) Invite one, two, or three other bloggers to go after you.
3) In your post list the names of the bloggers you invited and give the dates when they’ll be posting.

I don't know that I've always wanted to be asked anything at all in an interview about children's poetry, but using one of Liz's questions and two of my own, here goes...

How did you come to love poetry?

We always had poems in our home.  I remember my mother quoting, "How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the sky so blue?  Oh, I do think it's the loveliest thing ever a child can do," from A Child's Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson.  I remember my dad reading "The Bells," by Edgar Allan Poe, to me, and I was thrilled by the repetition and the wild way the sound of the bells builds through that poem.  (Incidentally, my students are less thrilled by this poem - I have tried it a few times, with no success whatsoever.)  In school we had to choose poems to memorize, and there was a big competition every year.  I remember learning "Disobedience," by A. A. Milne, and I can still recite it these many years later.  We had a teacher in high school who used to spend one period a week on poetry, and I always loved those purple dittos (I saved them for years - I wonder where they are now?).  Favorites were "The Great Lover," by Rupert Brooke and  "The Rolling English Road," by G.K. Chesterton.

In college, my love of poetry directly led to finding other love.  In an American Literature class, the professor asked me to read an Emily Dickinson poem aloud.   My husband says that when he heard my voice (which in those days had a trace of an English accent from my years in British boarding schools, apparently rendering me quite irresistible), he knew he wanted to get to know me.  He cleverly orchestrated a meeting by pretending he needed to borrow my notes, and now we've been married 24 years, and have regular poetry nights with our children.

How about writing poetry?  When did you start that?

I have always written poetry of various kinds.  I liked playing with rhymes, and as an adolescent I wrote many angst-ridden, emotion-filled poems.   For years I was inhibited by my studies of literature, and downplayed my own work, using words like "doggerel" and "little ditties."  It's only in the last few years that I've admitted aloud, "Yes, I write poetry."  After the Haiti earthquake, I seemed to get a little bolder, and I started sharing some of my own writing here on this blog.  For the last two years, I've participated in readings at the school where I work.  In my job teaching middle school English, I encourage kids to get involved in poetry, both reading it and writing it.  Many of them do!

If you could have any "superpower," what would it be?

After the week I've had, I'd have to say that I wish I had some extra teaching superpowers, like Seventh Grade Wrangling or Super-Speed Grading.  Both of those tasks (for which I am not equipped with superpowers) have occupied my week, which is why I waited until the last minute to ask my tag-ee if she would accept the Mortimer Minute next.  I'll write a post later in the week revealing my tag.

Meanwhile, check out the roundup, which is hosted here today.

Poetry Friday: Kofi Awoonor

One of the people who died in Nairobi in the attack on the Westgate mall was Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor.  The New Yorker published this tribute. 

One of Awoonor's best-known poems is, appropriately, called "Songs of Sorrow."  Here is part of it:

"Returning is not possible
And going forward is a great difficulty
The affairs of this world are like the chameleon faeces
Into which I have stepped..."

Going forward is a great difficulty in a world where such things can happen, and chameleon faeces seems a pretty accurate comparison, some days.

You can read the rest of the poem here. 

Poetry Friday: The Beach and Violence

I was looking for a poem about the beach, because we're going on our staff retreat this weekend at the beach.  But at the same time I was feeling despondent about what I've been reading since last Saturday about the carnage in Kenya, the violence interrupting a beautiful Saturday morning, the shoppers gunned down, and who knows why.  Kenya is the place where I first knew beaches, when we drove or took the train to Mombasa, spoiling me forever with the wide, white, expanses of sand and the warm Indian Ocean.  Kenya is the place where I first knew many things.  It was a beautiful, wonderful place to grow up, and I will always love it.  And it hurts to watch the suffering there right now.

This poem by Rabindranath Tagore perfectly captures the combination of the beauty and the pain, the children heedlessly playing on the beach, unaware of the potential of even those waves to bring death.  I'm thinking of the child in Westgate Mall who said to the killer with a huge gun, "You are a bad man."  And in response the murderer gave the child a chocolate bar and let him go.

"Death is abroad and children play."  As the Book of Common Prayer says, "In the middle of life, we are in death."

After the Tagore poem, I'm including the Kenyan national anthem, which is the least bellicose national anthem I've ever heard.  It's really a prayer.  You can read the words below the video.

On the Seashore
By Rabindranath Tagore

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.
The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous.  On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances. 
They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.
They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.
The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby's cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach.
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

O God of all creation
Bless this our land and nation
Justice be our shield and defender
May we dwell in unity
Peace and liberty
Plenty be found within our borders.

Let one and all arise
With hearts both strong and true
Service be our earnest endeavour
And our homeland of Kenya
Heritage of splendour
Firm may we stand to defend.

Let all with one accord
In common bond united
Build this our nation together
And the glory of Kenya
The fruit of our labour
Fill every heart with thanksgiving.

Amy has today's roundup here, at the Poem Farm.

Poetry Friday: Monet

I found this poem a couple of weeks ago by following a link from The Opposite of Indifference.  In "Monet Refuses the Operation," by Lisel Mueller, Monet is telling his doctor that he doesn't want his vision to be "corrected," because he likes the way he sees the world.

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.  The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

Here is the rest of the poem. 

I love the idea that Monet has taken his whole life to "arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels," and to discover that "Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun."  I wonder what aspects of aging I could see as benefits, if I just squinted my eyes the right way.

When I wrote this post, I didn't know who was hosting the roundup today.  What a coincidence!  It's Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference.  Go here to read what great poems everyone has today.

Poetry Friday

I had Parent/Teacher conferences today and was frantically rushing to get my grades up to date beforehand - so for today I just have a link to what everyone else posted.  Happy Poetry Friday!

What Everyone Else Posted

Poetry Friday: Seamus Heaney

I'm sure there will be a lot of Seamus Heaney posts today, since he died last week.  Someone posted this one on Facebook.  I wasn't familiar with it, but it's perfect for the occasion, speaking as it does of impermanence and seizing the moment.


Blackberry Picking
Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

for a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots

where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

we trekked and picked until the cans were full,

until the tinkling bottom had been covered

with green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

like a plate of eyes.



You can read the rest, and hear it read aloud, here. 


Bonus: this great story by a writer who tried - and failed - to get an interview with Heaney, but got a poem instead.

Today's roundup is hosted by Author Amok. 

Poetry Friday: Linda Pastan

I had a dream last night that I had been kidnapped.  I had managed to escape from the kidnapper, but he was still in the house, and I didn't want him to hear me.  I was sneaking around and being as quiet as I could, but guess who else was there?  In the inexplicable way of dreams, all of my middle school students.  And they wouldn't be quiet.  I was shushing them and explaining in a tearful whisper that our lives were in danger if they wouldn't stop talking.  They were behaving just like they do at the beginning of silent reading every day, except without that glorious moment when everyone finally relaxes into a book and there's that beautiful reading zone hush.  I woke up in a cold sweat.

So that dream pretty much shows you where my mind is these days.  I always forget what a job it is to break in a new batch of seventh graders, and we have changes this year in schedule, resulting in different pacing; it's a better fit, but it just takes time to get used to.  I feel swamped in grading, as though I never get out from under it.  I have no time or mental energy to think a thought.

Someone shared this poem on Poetry Friday a couple of weeks ago, and I've had it open on my desktop ever since.  This is where my writing is now; it's not happening.  In spite of all the other things going on in my brain, I need to, like Linda Pastan, "decide not to stop trying."

Here's her poem:

Rereading Frost

Linda Pastan

Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.

Here's the rest of the poem, including where she decides not to stop trying.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: In an Artist's Studio

I read this poem with my eighth graders every year and we speculate on the story behind it.  I love it because there is just the right level of mystery.  The kids always say, "Obsession!" when they get the picture of the studio filled with countless paintings of the same woman.  Yet it's an obsession with the artist's idea of the model, "not as she is, but as she fills his dream."

I found this wonderful analysis of the poem.

In an Artist's Studio

One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel—every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

Christina Rossetti

The Poetry Friday roundup is here today.

Poetry Friday: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I don't know anything about Aimee Nezhukumatathil except what I read on Poetry Foundation, but I like reading her poems.  My favorite is this one, which plays cleverly with the way writers use reality:

Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?

By Aimee Nezhukumatathil
 

If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck

in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick,

the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse—

then Yes, every last page is true, every nuance,

bit, and bite. Wait. I have made them up—all of them—

and when I say I am married, it means I married

all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves.

You can read the last seven lines of the sonnet here.

Another fun poem by Nezhukumatathil is her found poem made up of lines from emails she got from high school students, hence the title:

Dear Amy Nehzooukammyatootill,

By Aimee Nezhukumatathil

(a found poem, composed entirely of e-mails from various high school students)

You can read that one here. 

It's great to be back to Poetry Friday after about five weeks of hiatus.  Today's roundup is here.  Enjoy lots of wonderful poems!

Summer Reading

Although we started school on Monday, I already have a day off, since August 15th is the Feast of the Assumption.  I wanted to blog about my summer reading before school started, but this is the closest I can come to achieving that goal.

Book #24 of 2013 was Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton.  This book is a typical Victorian novel, except that all the main characters are dragons.  Picture a very correct, rules-bound society of enormous savage dragons.  It took me a little while to get into the proper frame of mind to enjoy this book, recommended by my fantasy-loving daughter, but once I did, I was captivated.  It has been a while since I've read anything this fun and satisfying. 

I chose book #25 because it occurred to me that I have read several books compared to Anthony Trollope - Tooth and Claw, for one, and Susan Howatch's Church of England series, and books by Joanna Trollope, who is a distant relative of Anthony's - but never read anything by the man himself.  I decided to remedy that.  I found a free Kindle version of The Warden to begin with, and when I liked that, I was able to find this collection of his complete works, 47 novels for $2.99.  That should keep me going for a while!

Book #26, Ruby Slippers: How the Soul of a Woman Brings Her Home, by Jonalyn Grace Fincher, was one I had been wanting to read for a while, since I enjoy Fincher's blog, also called Ruby Slippers.  She fearlessly takes on topics that other Christian bloggers might avoid, and her ideas have given me much to think about.  I found much to enjoy in the book, too, but ultimately I wasn't entirely satisfied with her explanation of what constitutes a "female soul."  I would like some friends to read this one, too, so we can talk about it.  Any takers?

I wish I had had more information about book #27 before reading it.  Specifically, I wish I had realized that Never Fall Down was a lightly fictionalized account of the experiences of a real person.  Patricia McCormick interviewed Arn Chron-Pond in English about his experiences as a child soldier with the Khmer Rouge, and she tells us in an Author's Note at the end of the book: "Trying to capture that voice was like trying to bottle a lightning bug.  Every time I imposed the rules of grammar or syntax on it, the light went out.  And so, in telling Arn's story I chose to use his own distinct and beautiful voice."  I wish I had known this because it would have kept me from being irritated all the way through the book by the unexplained pidgin-English quality of the writing.  Why, I reasoned, would the main character be speaking English at all?  In his own language he would be fluent and there would be no need for sentences like, "A lot of time kid throw stone at me."  Even in spite of not knowing the reason for the way the book was written, I did get drawn in by the horrifying story.

Book #28 was another Trollope title, Barchester Towers, and these absorbing stories about Victorian clergy and their families will be sprinkled in among the other books I read for some time to come.  Forty-five more titles to go!

Book #29 was another recommendation from my daughter.  The Year of Secret Assignments, by Jaclyn Moriarty, was a fun Australian novel about students at two rival schools required to write letters to one another.  I wouldn't give this to my middle schoolers; it's really for older kids.

Book #30 was Lucky: How the Kingdom Comes to Unlikely People, by Glenn Packiam.  This unpacking of the Beatitudes replaces the more traditional word "blessed" with "lucky," explaining that in the original language, the word used by Jesus isn't a particularly "religious" one.  This is a refreshing and enjoyable take on a familiar passage, and I think a small group would get a lot out of discussing it together. 

Book #31 was Bitterblue, by Kristin Cashore.  This is a companion book to Cashore's books Graceling and Fire, and characters from both books show up.  There was less of the mind-reading that so fascinated me in the other two books (though there is some), but this book is about a society healing after a time under the brutal regime of King Leck, Bitterblue's father.  Leck's abuses are described in some detail; ultimately I didn't find it too much, but I would understand if some did.  But I found this a very thought-provoking study of what a society would need to do to recover from a rule like this.  How have real-life countries done this?  Very differently.  Look at South Africa's amazing recovery from apartheid, due to the forgiveness modeled by Nelson Mandela, and bringing people's stories into the open during the Truth and Reconciliation process.  Compare that with the suppression in Japan of the atrocities committed during World War II, to the point that some of them are only now, sixty years later, starting to be talked about. 

Incidentally, I enjoyed this video by Christian author and literature teacher Karen Swallow Prior about the benefits of what John Milton called "promiscuous reading," meaning reading a variety of different material without much of a plan: "haphazard, mixed reading," Prior calls it.  Clearly I am a practitioner of this type of reading!

Another Poem-less Poetry Friday!

Today was our first day of school; the high school students came to register, get lockers, and other administrative details.  I spent the afternoon planning for next week, when I'll start teaching.  I had to put poetry at the bottom of my to-do list, but I really hope this is the last time!  Meanwhile, there are many great poems here, at today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Home Again - Poetry Friday!

After five weeks of traveling, I'm home, but still not quite up to jumping back into Poetry Friday.  Next week...

Meanwhile here's today's roundup!

Guest Post at Djibouti Jones

I've been watching the TCK series over at Djibouti Jones with interest.  She's featured many voices, and today she has mine.  Head on over to read my piece about Dave Pollock, a man who has been so important in my life and the lives of many other TCKs and their parents: Tribute to a Pioneer. 

Poetry Saturday - Again!

Traveling again yesterday, and next Friday too.  So once again, here's the link to what everyone else posted yesterday!  I'm looking forward to getting back to my Poetry Friday routine!

Poetry Saturday

I'm falling down on the blogging job, and didn't even manage a post yesterday.  But my Poetry Friday cohorts did not let you down.  Check out the roundup!

Poetry Friday

I've been away from my computer all week, and just got back to it.  But lots of other people posted poems today, so go check out the roundup here!

Poetry Friday: Good Night

Good Night

Many ways to say good night.

Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July

spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes.

They fizz in the air, touch the water and quit.

Rockets make a trajectory of gold-and-blue

and then go out.

Railroad trains at night spell with a smokestack mushrooming a white pillar.

Steamboats turn a curve in the Mississippi crying a baritone that crosses lowland cottonfields to razorback hill.

It is easy to spell good night.

                        Many ways to spell good night. 

 

Carl Sandburg

This poem was featured this week on YourDailyPoem.com.  It seemed appropriate for these relaxed, lazy summer days and nights here in the US.  It is wonderful to have a slower pace, no early morning meetings, and time with family and friends.  Even though our Fourth of July plans were rained out, I love this atmospheric, quintessentially American poem.  Hope you're enjoying your summer!   Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.