What words will call to you?
Irene Latham, introduction to This Poem is a Nest
Irene Latham is as charming and lovely in person as her poems are on the page. Her new release This Poem is a Nest opens with an invitation. In Part I, we read the poem “Nest.” This seedling is divided into 4 seasons of 3 stanzas each of free verse poetry. “Nest” has everything I love in a poem, lyrical language, alliteration and onomatopoeia, imagery of nature, and inquiry that touches my heart, “Won’t you climb inside?”
Nest is the seed poem for Irene’s creativity that grows into day poems, before & after poems, calendar poems, color poems, animal poems, feeling poems, and just when you think she could not possibly find any more poems in Nest, there is word play, alphabet, and ars poetica.
With all of these nestling poems, you would think the poems would lose magic, lose originality, or become repetitive, but the experience of them is quite the opposite. Each new poem needs to be held for a minute or two. Each one reveals a surprise, all the way to the last poem:
Last Poem
birdsong
Irene Latham, This Poem is a Nest
nothing more
The end papers of this wonderful book offer writing advice to budding poets. Irene gives tools to me and teachers like me who want to inspire students to write. The art of “found poetry” has been elevated to “nest-poem” or “nestling.”
I wanted to try it out, so I went to a poem by Barbara Crooker that I had cut out and glued into my journal. “How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn Into a Dark River.”
Step one: Circle words that appeal to you. I circled drizzling, air, careening.
Then I looked up careening to check my understanding of the word.
“move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction.”
Step two: Choose a subject. I thought a lot about this. Air, careening…a kite.
Unlike found poetry, nestlings do not have to follow the order in which you find the words, so I went back and grabbed “reach” from the first line, which led me to “wonder” and “for,” finishing my image of a flying kite.
Now as I look again at the nestling I created, I think it would be better like this:
How to be a Kite
Careen
with drizzling air
Reach
for wonder.
By going through this process, I realize how much work went into Irene’s book of poems. Writing nestlings is a fun challenge. I had to use critical thinking skills that are imperative to teaching students to write. I encourage you to try writing nestling poems. Thanks, Irene!
Reflections on the Teche 