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Archive for the ‘Poetry Friday’ Category

Happy Poetry Friday Birthday Treasures

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Teaching, Writing, tagged , , on August 10, 2017| 32 Comments »

Poetry Friday posts are here today. Scroll down and click the green frog.

Welcome to my birthday poetry party.  I am a birthday triplet with Linda Mitchell and Julieanne Harmatz, both of whom I originally met through blogging.  Now they are real life writing critique friends.  Hop over to their blogs to say Happy Birthday! Julieanne

Linda

I am sharing some poetic treasures.  Joy Acey sent me a beautiful watercolor painting of an iris along with a fluttering haiku for the Summer Poetry Swap.   She also sent a blank card, so I put it into WordSwag and wrote a response haiku to Joy.

Joy wrote in her note to me that she considered this alternate third line.
Blue Dutch Irises
flutter to the wind’s command
Happy Birthday wishes!

Sea blue echoes
Ukulele birthday song
Windcall my name
–Margaret Simon

School has started.  I found on a shelf in my classroom an old copy of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.  I read to my students the chapter “Be Specific” in which she quotes William Carlos Williams, “Write what is under your nose.”  Then I read aloud River of Words by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet about the life of William Carlos Williams.  Writing prompt: Write a poem that uses something specific and ordinary and begin with “So much depends upon…” after W.C. Williams’ poem with the same first line.

I was pretty pleased with my poem about the sparkles of condensation on a glass of mint iced tea until I was absolutely blown away by my students’ writing.

So much depends upon
the warm glow of the fairy lights,
silver and golden with gems and hearts
gently pushing me to the ocean of dreams.

Drifting calmly until the waves
rock me to the land of reality,
until the fairies and their lights
send me out again.

Erin, 6th grade

 

So much depends upon
the brass uniform of a senior dragonfly
soaring past
the barking, yelling, chirping, rumbling
noises of the day.

Lynzee, 3rd grade

 

I can already tell that this is going to be an amazing year of poetry writing. Did you notice “brass uniform of a senior dragonfly?” We were all blown away by that line.

Link your Poetry Friday post below.

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Poetry Friday: The Trouble (Joy) with Poetry

Posted in Poetry Friday, Writing, tagged , , on July 27, 2017| 10 Comments »

Billy Collins writes that “the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.”

To me that is the joy of poetry. Last week Heidi Mordhorst posted the summer poem swap poem that I wrote for her. She wrote a response poem.  See this post here.

I have connected to so many wonderful educators online, many of whom do work I greatly admire. One of these educators is JoAnne Duncan.  JoAnne is an assistant principal we would all want to have. She finds kind and gentle ways to deal with the everyday problems she faces. I love to listen to her tell stories about finding a child’s heart through reading and art.  She thinks outside the box.  So I should not have been surprised when she shared with me that she wrote a poem.  The surprise came when she said her poem was inspired by my poem to Heidi.  The poem used the same framework while JoAnne went back to the time she moved away from her Kansas City childhood home to Montana.

Art by Derek DeYoung. Click the image to read more about the artist.

She moved through Montana
as in a dream
floating over jagged rocks,
shooting down wild rapids
like new adventure in her life.
Montana spoke to her in the silence of the forest,
the scent of pines and sage
so foreign yet familiar.

She marveled at majestic peaks,
mighty rivers,
and expanse of land and sky.

Montana entered her
like skis on powder snow,
drift boat on water
and rainbow trout rising to the hatch.
She moved through Montana as in a dream.

–JoAnne Duncan

What joy to connect through poetry, to inspire JoAnne to visit her experience and share it. That’s what this Poetry Friday space is all about.

Today, JoAnne shares our connection on her blog.  She went on to research the art she found to illustrate her poem.  Yet another inspirational connection.

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Poetry Friday: Dancing with Poetry

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, tagged , on July 21, 2017| 16 Comments »

Poetry Friday posts are with Katie today at The Logonauts.

 

My Southern comrade, Keri Collins Lewis, sent me a gem of a poem this week.  She knows where I live and how much I enjoy dancing with my husband.  She captured this in a wonderful poem celebrating me.   Keri, I cherish your words.  Thank you, darlin’. (Say it with a Mississippi drawl.)

 

Last week I led a teachers writing institute.  I invited our PF friend, Catherine Flynn, to present via Skype about visual literacy.  She left us with a Marc Chagall painting to ponder.  Since Keri wrote about “my love” and we are nearing our 35th wedding anniversary, I am inclined to share my response with you.

The Promenade

In a geometric village,
sculpted lawns, a steepled church,
houses on the hillside,
a man holds his bride’s hand.
His touch sends her floating
on the wind like a pink kite
dancing with the clouds.

Your touch does this to me
even now, far from this village.
Over the landscape of life,
your soft gentle love
is enough to send
me flying, reaching
for the joy-sky.

–Margaret Simon

 

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Poetry Friday: Mac & Cheese & Poetic Gifts

Posted in Poetry Friday, tagged , on July 14, 2017| 17 Comments »

Tabatha is gathering a stew of Mac & Cheese poems today for Poetry Friday.

Tabatha sent out a call for a poetic celebration of Mac&Cheese for today, National Mac&Cheese Day. I stopped making Mac&Cheese long ago when my girls began to understand and worry about nutrition.  Mac&Cheese is packaged processed food, Mom.  Don’t you know it contains chemicals?

Now my cooking skills are not of the caliber to make Mac&Cheese from scratch.  My son-in-law made it for Thanksgiving a few years ago.  It was delicious, but he made it in vats, so we had to give some away. I have to admit it was better than anything ever made from a box.

For my Mac&Cheese poem, I decided to use a form.  Form helps me when I don’t know what to write.  I chose the Zeno form created by J. Patrick Lewis that follows a syllable count of 8, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1.  I think it’s quite corny, but if anything calls for a side of corn, it’s Mac&Cheese.

 

Tabatha also coordinates the Summer Poetry Swap.  This week I received a most precious set of salt & pepper shakers for my bayou home from Irene Latham.  She also sent a wonderful Nikki Grimes’ style word exploration poem in honor of my recent work-in-progress, Bayou Song.  Thanks, Irene for brightening up a rainy summer day on the bayou.

 

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Poetry Friday: Magic Sky

Posted in Photography, Poetry, Poetry Friday, Writing, tagged , , on July 7, 2017| 15 Comments »

Poetry Friday is Carol at Beyond Literacy Link

 

While I was vacationing for the 4th of July in Santa Fe, NM, my Voxer Good2Great friend, Jen Hayhurst tagged me in a post about her #ProjectPoetry.  I wrote about the project on my Slice of Life post on Tuesday. 

I have this self-assigned goal of writing a poem a day.  That gets tough when you have a husband who wants to walk all over New Mexico.  My writing muscles had to give way to my walking muscles.  Nevertheless, I took some pictures that planted some ideas in my brain.  Once home I had time to sit.  Sit with the images and process a poem.  Jen’s goals for writing poems are to synthesize experience and ignite curiosity.  This is what poetry should be, in our lives as well as in our classrooms.

Last night I watched Kylene Beers and Bob Probst do a Facebook live video about their book, Disrupting Thinking. When someone asked if poetry should be the first unit taught in the school year, Kylene answered, “Poetry is not a unit. Poetry is something we breath in.  We should breathe in poetry every day.”

Take a deep breath and look at the amazing sky.  I was astounded and mesmerized by the huge sky of New Mexico.  It seemed somehow bigger and brighter and mightier there.  Maybe because I was paying attention.  Maybe because there was something to be learned.  Maybe just to be captured in a poem.

The Magic Sky
Sculpts grey clouds
into bursts
of sparkling rain.

Then a rainbow,
a puffy horse
riding beside.

I stand above
this Rio Grande Gorge,
feel like a speck
of dust in the wind
to the magician
of the sky.

–Margaret Simon

Next Friday is National Mac and Cheese Day.  Who knew there was such a thing?  So Poetry Friday folks are planning to write about Mac-n-Cheese.  Join in the yummy fun.

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Juxtaposition Poetry

Posted in Poetry Friday, Writing, tagged , , , on June 30, 2017| 19 Comments »

Poetry Friday is with Dianne at Random Noodling

I think one of the most enjoyable things about writing poetry is playing with words. I’ve been known to have multiple tabs open on my computer to dictionary and thesaurus sites as well as research sites. I’ll Google a word and get lost in the direction it takes me.

This week one of my self-assigned poetry writing activities was to play with the juxtaposition of words. Inspired by activities in the book Rip the Page: Adventures in Creative Writing, I filled a few pages in my notebook with “words that need a friend.”

Then I wondered what I should do with these lists. I found more inspiration from Naomi Shihab Nye’s book A Maze Me. The poem “Where are You?” included this line that I borrowed, “I’m tucked inside each fresh paper page.” My friend Dani calls this “Taking a line for a walk” from her recent institute with the Montana Writing Project.

By giving myself the discipline of writing a poem every day, I am finding new and innovative ways to encourage my students’ writing when school begins again.

Pixabay photo

A Poem is Waiting

I’m tucked inside
each fresh paper page–
feathery poems
softly drizzled on Tuesday,
a perfumed whir,
blink in the sunshine
of your imagination.

A poem is salty chatter
of newly hatched chick-a-dees
twittering in the nest of cloud-joy.

A poem is a twister of whispers
rising on the weather front
of waving slurps of watermelon.

A poem is a show-off peacock
emerging from the bush
of brain bellows,
a scented thunder
from afternoon rain

sprinkling my face,
touching my hand,
this page.
Open gently.

–Margaret Simon

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Poetry Friday: Carolina Wren

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, tagged , , , on June 23, 2017| 18 Comments »

Poetry Friday is with Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe

Photo from Flickr: Kelly Colgan Azar

When I was home last weekend with my parents and my sister’s family, we watched a Carolina wren feed a nest of babies inside a flower pot.  I posted about this miracle of nature here.  ( I even made a short video of the nesting chicks.)

My summer discipline includes writing a poem every day. In the Practice of Poetry, Deborah Digges offers an exercise titled “Evolutions” that can be traced back to Philip Levine.  “When you can’t write, try writing about an animal.” This exercise takes some research.  Having the internet at my fingertips helped me find information about Carolina wrens.

This exercise came with warnings: “be careful not to sentimentalize, to usurp the animal you have chosen by turning it into a flaccid symbol for human emotions…The animal is itself.”  I tend to over-sentimentalize, so I tried to focus on the behaviors of the birds.  After some work and a few writing partner critiques, I feel good about this one.

 

 

 

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Poetry Friday: Remember the Clover

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Writing, tagged , , on June 16, 2017| 14 Comments »

Poetry Friday is with Carol at Carol’s Corner.

My writing group has decided to explore a book on writing poetry this summer. We chose The Practice of Poetry edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell.

I have been thumbing through and randomly choosing an exercise to try. On pages 51-53, Susan Mitchell’s exercise is titled “Experience Falls Through Language Like Water Through a Sieve.”

We write poems about what we can’t articulate, but feel pressured to say, which is why poems use language in unusual ways…And often, metaphor and simile may be a poet’s only means for capturing experience in its rich complexity.
Susan Mitchell in The Practice of Poetry, pages 51-52

She explains that when we use metaphor, we often write ahead of our understanding. When I write poems, I connect to a deeper part of myself, one who I don’t know as well, one who reveals more of myself to me.

In this exercise, I read one of the suggested poems Milkweed by Philip Levine and decided to use its form to inform my own.

Remember how
we sat in a field of clover
picking handfuls of white bursts
tying stem to stem
to make crowns, bracelets,
necklaces. We’d promenade
among the pine trees
overlooking Purple Creek,
curtsy,
loop our arms,
do-see-do
through those carefree
days of summer
that meant nothing
to anyone, even us.

Yesterday I walked my dog
through a field of clover.
While he stopped to sniff
and leave his scent, I watched
the clustering blossoms
sway and bow
to the coming
of a summer shower.

–Margaret Simon, after Philip Levine, all rights reserved

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Poetry Friday: I Spy

Posted in Poetry Friday, tagged , , on June 9, 2017| 13 Comments »

Poetry Friday is with Mary Lee at A Year of Reading.

 “Write a poem inspired by I Spy, the guessing game popular with kids during car rides and other long periods of downtime, in which the spy offers descriptive clues that hint at a visible object for other players to guess.”
Poets&Writers poetry prompt

I Spy

in the dome of the sky
a face
full and bright.

I spy
rising on the horizon
a sphere
of golden might

I spy
smiling through the trees
a force
moving the night.

–Margaret Simon

 

 

 

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Poetry Friday: Summer

Posted in Poetry Friday, tagged on June 2, 2017| 21 Comments »

Poetry Friday is with Buffy today.

I don’t think of myself as any kind of poetry expert, but I do love poetry in many ways. When my Voxer friend, Dani Burtsfield, asked for help with writing a poem for her mother, I was honored and humbled. Yesterday she went for a walk in the mountains of Montana where she lives and sent me a message about the lilacs and how their blooming means summer. “I think I feel a poem coming on.”

Thus began our late night discussion of her poem. This is what poetry should be, a walk in the woods that leads to talk that then becomes a poem. Jane Hirshfield writes in her poem, Mathematics, “Does a poem enlarge the world/ or only our idea of the world?” I believe that poetry and your own expression of it does enlarge the world. We experience the experience in a new and loving way. Please go to Dani’s blog and read her poem, her first brave contribution to Poetry Friday.

Our discussion of summer made me think about how summer reveals itself differently in different parts of the world. For Dani, it’s in the lilacs. Here in South Louisiana, the landscape is different. My poem attempts to capture my own summer landscape.

Summer

Summer waits
like the rope swing
hanging
from the old oak.

Summer welcomes
like sunflowers
opening
a morning

Summer vibrates
like cicadas
buzzing
at twilight.

Summer lingers
like the sun
hovering
the horizon.

–Margaret Simon, all rights reserved

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