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#NPM19 Day 14 One Writer Recommends

Posted in Poetry, tagged advice for writers, Molly Dektar, Poets and Writers on April 14, 2019| 4 Comments »

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’ve somewhat abandoned the idea of playing with poetry. I’ve had my internal excuses, but in reality, I just don’t do well with a prescribed plan. To me, it doesn’t make me more creative; it gets in the way. I am still writing at least one poem a day. I’m just not using the tools in the playful kits.

Yesterday, I was reading Poets and Writers The Time is Now and became inspired by a feature called Writers Recommend. Molly Dektar’s advice this week was unique. This got me thinking about how every expert writer has his or her own advice to writers. I read writerly advice nearly every day. And feeling like I was abandoning my own project of “Playing with Poetry,” I wrote this poem.

One writer recommends
a thousand words a day,
another says to sit in words
for 2 hours at dawn.

Try writing while you’re falling asleep.
Let the pen run over the paper
making foreign marks
you will interpret later.

Maybe you should drink
two glasses of wine before writing.
Slur words together in a string
and drink them with a straw.

Molly likes to go to Sephora
and spray on all the different perfumes.
She writes with a tiny perfume bottle
while all her senses are aroused.

It really doesn’t matter.

Words will come.
Words will go.
Writers know this.
Writers count on it.

—Margaret Simon, 2019

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#NPM19 Day 13 Collaborative Poem Play

Posted in Poetry, Teaching, tagged #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, Poetry with students on April 13, 2019| 4 Comments »

Playing with poetry has led to a playful poetry attitude in my class. My first class is reading poems aloud on the intercom for morning announcements from Great Morning: Poems for School Leaders to Read Aloud by Pomelo Books. Each day they pass it to the next-up. He or she chooses a poem they want to read and go through a quick practice to make sure they know how to pronounce all the words (especially the author’s name). I am pretty much hands off. They remember whose turn it is, come by the room to get the book, and just do it. Their read aloud skills are improving as well as their confidence. They are also learning that poetry can be fun to read aloud.

In the spirit of playing with poetry, I pulled out the individual white boards and proposed a game of collaborative poetry. They quickly changed the title to “Friends Poems.” Each friend wrote a line in the poem as we passed the boards around. The originator of the first line got the poem back and could add to it if they felt it needed more. This was fun and playful and built a sense of a writing community.

This one was written by Karson, Daniel, Breighlynn, and Jaden

I love the color of the midnight sky
shining stars
dawn and dusk compete
to meet eye to eye
the night is complete

I played along with my second group. We’ve watching monarch caterpillars in the garden. One day we counted 11 caterpillars. I’ve brought some home for spring break, but I’ll share more about this later. Here’s my collaborative poem with Kaia, Landon, and Jayden.

In the spring-sprinkled garden,
Listen as the bird tweets.
Watch the water run and flowers sway.
Look closely at monarch caterpillars.
Praise this amazing day!

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#NPM19: Day 12 Progressive Poem is Here!

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Writing, tagged Progressive Poem 2019 on April 12, 2019| 27 Comments »

Poetry Friday round-up is with Irene at Live your Poem.

Irene is gathering Poetry Friday posts today. She is the originator/ organizer of the Progressive Poem. I’ve participated for four years. Each year, the poem progresses through different blogs as line by line, we build a poem for children. This year, Matt Forrest Esenwine started us off with found song lyrics. The trend continued, and we have this high energy, happy poem about summer.

I am a fan of musicals. This appreciation runs in my blood. I passed it on to my middle daughter. We’ve enjoyed Wicked, Moulin Rouge, and Waitress together and hope to see Dear Evan Hanson this year. My husband is not such a fan, but earlier this year he appeased me and went to the movie Mary Poppins Returns. He liked La La Land, so why not? We were both totally entertained. I downloaded the soundtrack the next day.

When I’m out walking my dog in the early mornings, some days I just listen to the birds, but a few days ago in anticipation of this required line, I listened to Mary Poppins Returns. Oh, the joy that music brings to my heart. A quick search for lyrics online found a just right line for today.

Endless summer; I can see for miles…
Fun, fun, fun – and the whole world smiles.
No time for school- just time to play,
we swim the laughin’ sea each and every day.

You had only to rise, lean from your window,
the curtain opens on a portrait of today.
Kodachrome greens, dazzling blue,
it’s the chance of a lifetime,

make it last forever–ready? Set? Let’s Go!
Come, we’ll take a walk, the sun is shining down
Not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eyes
Tomorrow’s here. It’s called today.

Found Lines:

L1 The Who, ‘I Can See for Miles’ / The Beach Boys, ‘Endless Summer’
L2 The Beach Boys, ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ / Dean Martin, ‘When You’re Smiling’
L3 The Jamies, ‘Summertime, Summertime’
L4 The Doors ‘Summer’s Almost Gone’/ Led Zeppelin ‘Good Times, Bad Times’
L5 Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine “You had only to rise, lean from your window,”
L6 Joni Mitchell, “Chelsea Morning”
L7 Paul Simon, “Kodachrome,” “Dazzling Blue”
L8 Dan Fogelberg, “Run for the Roses”
L9 Spice Girls, “Wannabe”/ Will Smith, “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It”
L10 The Beatles, “Good Day Sunshine”
L11 The Carpenters, “Top of the World”
L12 Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Underneath the Lovely London Sky” from Mary Poppins Returns

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#NPM19: Day 10 So Much Depends Upon

Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged #NPM19, magnetic poetry, monarch caterpillars, NaPoWriMo on April 10, 2019| 4 Comments »

National Poetry Month 2019: I am playing with poetry alongside Mary Lee Hahn, Jone Rush MacCulloch.Christie Wyman, Molly Hogan, and Catherine Flynn.

William Carlos Williams’ poetry has something to teach us about imagery and noticing the ordinary. His famous poem about the wheelbarrow describes a specific image. My students immediately imagined the setting as a farm. Using magnetic poetry words, we found images to create our own “So Much Depends Upon” poems.

The fifth graders are in state testing this week. They test on computers. Since my classroom is in a corner one of the computer labs, I had to find another place to teach. It was a gorgeous spring day, so we went outside to the garden. Kaia wrote this magnetic poem:

So much depends upon
a misty garden
spring smell symphony
near the white sea.

We were looking around the garden and found four monarch caterpillars eating the milkweed. Kaia talked about all she was learning in science about the caterpillars. Gathering words from the air (not using any toys), I wrote the following poem:

So much depends
upon

the tall
milkweed

dotted
with sunspots

feeding
hungry caterpillars

in
the school garden

You can read more student poems at our Kidblog site.

(A word about WordPress. I am having trouble with formatting my posts. They look correctly aligned to the left margin in the editor mode, but when published, everything changes to centered. I am getting frustrated with this and don’t know how to fix it. Does anyone reading this post know what’s going on with the wordpress editor?)

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#NPM19 + SOL = A Slice of Poetry Playtime

Posted in Poetry, Slice of Life, Writing, tagged #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, #SOL19, after William Carlos Williams, Books along the Teche Literary Festival on April 9, 2019| 5 Comments »

See more posts at Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life

This weekend I had the exciting privilege to participate in the third annual Books along the Teche Literary Festival. Early on Saturday morning, I spoke on a panel with my publisher Josh Caffery from UL Press, Carol Stubbs co-director of our local SCBWI, and fellow authors Denise Gallagher and Jess Butterworth. My friend, author illustrator Paul Schexnayder, moderated the panel. We had more than thirty people in the early morning crowd. We talked about writing and publishing for children.

Following the panel, ten children’s authors and illustrators joined me in Church Alley for story time, book signings, and a bookmaking workshop. My former student teacher brought her sons and their cousins to make zines with me. What fun to have these kids successfully write a Things to do poem and illustrate them in little zines. Look how proud they all were!

Another highlight of my day was when a former student came by. I taught her in my early years of teaching, some 30+ years ago. She’s a mother now, and she brought her 6 year old to meet me and get a book signed to him. Later, he drew a picture for me from one of the illustrations in Bayou Song. His mom texted me the picture. Oh, joy!

With Pam and Port at the Books along the Teche Literary Festival

This was a day to remember and treasure. My favorite part of this whole author business is making connections to kids (and reconnecting with their parents.)

For National Poetry Month, I am writing a poem a day. Today we are borrowing William Carlos Williams’ line “So much depends upon.” I played with magnetic poetry to create this one:

So much depends upon

a diamond rose
rising
from still rain

a thousand fiddle
symphony
rising
from birds in the trees–

a lazy spring moment.

–Margaret Simon, (draft) 2019

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#NPM19: Day 8 Seasons in Haiku

Posted in Poetry, tagged #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, Paint Chip Poetry on April 8, 2019| 3 Comments »

National Poetry Month 2019: I am playing with poetry alongside Mary Lee Hahn, Jone Rush MacCulloch.Christie Wyman, Molly Hogan, and Catherine Flynn.

Today I read aloud Hi, Koo, a book of seasonal haiku poems by John Muth. Then we played with Paint Chips to make seasonal haiku of our own.

I found that I didn’t have to add many words to the Paint Chips to create a poem. I wrote one about every season.

Fall

Boundary Waters
pyramid of grizzly rocks
hot-potato skip, hop.

Winter

Inside a dew drop,
memories of rainstorm,
blizzard, sea foam.

Spring

A verdant seedling
in left field–succulent
Garden of Eden.

–Margaret Simon (drafts) 2019

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#NPM19: Day 7: Where I Waited

Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged #NPM19, Books along the Teche Literary Festival, Darrell Bourque, Mary Ardoin Broussard, metaphor dice, NaPoWriMo, Paint Chip Poetry on April 7, 2019| 4 Comments »

National Poetry Month 2019: I am playing with poetry alongside Mary Lee Hahn, Jone Rush MacCulloch.Christie Wyman, Molly Hogan, and Catherine Flynn.

This weekend in New Iberia was the third annual Books along the Teche Literary Festival. On Friday, I attended a reading by former state poet laureate and one of my mentors, Darrell Bourque. He brought along accordion artist Mary Ardoin Broussard.

Mary Broussard plays the old Creole style of Zydeco music known as La La music. Darrell’s poems from his book Where I Waited (Yellow Flag Press, 2016) are written in the voices of early Cajun and Creole musicians from the 1930’s and 40’s. Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana spoke French. I don’t speak French, so sometimes I have a hard time following along. I love this music for its dancing beat, but I can’t sing the lyrics and rarely know what they mean.

Darrell wrote about the song Quoi Faire in his poem for Golden Thibodeaux with the title “Here and Here.” Mary said quoi faire means “Why you broke my heart like that?”

Darrell then spoke of the energy in Golden Thibodeaux’s music. I, however, listened to the energy between Darrell and Mary, making their own kind of music by echoing and honoring the voices of the past.

I played in a different way with my own poetry finding new lines within the lines of Darrell’s poem Here and Here.

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#NPM19: Day 6: Metaphor Wisdom

Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged #NPM19, metaphor dice, NaPoWriMo, Paint Chip Poetry on April 6, 2019| 5 Comments »

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#NPM19: Day 5: A Stormy Day becomes a Poem

Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged #NPM19, metaphor dice, NaPoWriMo, Paint Chip Poetry on April 5, 2019| 12 Comments »

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#NPM19 Day 4: Things to Do with Magnetic Poetry

Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged #NaPoWriMo, #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, magnetic poetry on April 4, 2019| 5 Comments »

This month I am playing with poetry with poet-teacher-blogger friends. Feel free to play along.

I am also playing alongside my students. We brought out the cookie sheets of magnetic poetry. I talked about two similar poem forms, the How to poem and the Things to do poem. You can read their poems here.

I also played with my Word Swag app in my phone to create a more beautiful and professional looking image.

Here’s another on the cookie sheet. I can’t remember who brilliantly suggested using cookie sheets for magnetic poetry, but it works great. For an itinerant teacher like me, it’s a convenient way to carry them. I also have some in a tin which works equally as well. The lid of the tin serves as a composition space.

I have a new student, Maddox, in 4th grade. Sometimes kids walk into my classroom already knowing how to be a poet. Here is Maddox’s first poem.

How to Be a Storm

rock the ships below
boom like a thundering drum
blast the air with a gale
use your wrath in a tempestuous storm
then let the sun shine again

—Maddox, 4th grade

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