Poetry Friday

It was a busy day and I never got a poem posted, but plenty of other people did, so go read what they shared here.

Poetry Friday: Sestina: Like

While looking for a poem to share today, I found this one that is so very clever that I had to choose it. If you're not familiar with the sestina form, I explained it here. In this example, instead of choosing six different words to end the lines, A. E. Stallings has chosen just one, the omnipresent word "like."  She uses it to skewer Facebook, careless language, and the current lack of nuance in friendship. 

Sestina: Like
By A. E. Stallings
 

With a nod to Jonah Winter

Now we’re all “friends,” there is no love but Like,

A semi-demi goddess, something like

A reality-TV star look-alike,

Named Simile or Me Two. So we like

In order to be liked. It isn’t like

There’s Love or Hate now. Even plain “dislike”...

Here's the rest.

And here are some more Stallings poems I shared back in October 2010.

 

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup, where you can find out what poems have to do with Doritos.

Poetry Friday: The Art of Losing

I've been thinking about the earthquake this week, and the aftermath of it, particularly how it affected people in my life. I learned that people are much closer to falling apart than I had ever realized, and that we have no idea how a huge, unexpected, and completely uncontrollable event will affect us and the people we think we know. I learned that permanence is largely an illusion. I learned many good things, too, and I have shared them on this blog, but right now it is more the negative which are preoccupying me.

I decided to look back at where I was in May 2010, three years ago this week, and to post the poem that spoke to me then.

 Here's that post.

 And here's the poem:


One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like a disaster.  


So much lost.  So little progress towards mastery of that art.

But don't worry! I'm sure most of the people at this week's Poetry Friday roundup are in a better mood this week!

Poetry Friday: Any Fool Can Get Into an Ocean

I'm writing this on Thursday night because I'm heading to the beach in the morning for the Eighth Grade Retreat.  I went looking for an ocean poem and immediately found this one, which seems perfect.  

"Any fool can get into an ocean..."

Jack Spicer

Any fool can get into an ocean   

But it takes a Goddess   

To get out of one.

What’s true of oceans is true, of course,

Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming   

Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed

You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess

To get back out of them

Here's the rest, including a reading of it.

Off to wade through the metaphor's seaweed.  Back on Saturday.


The roundup is here this week.

May Day

April, Poetry Month, is over.  As always, it ended up being such a busy month that I didn't have time to savor all the fabulous poetry-related projects going on in blog-land, and barely even got to finish reading the Poetry Friday posts each week.  I traveled to the IRA conference in San Antonio (and still haven't organized myself enough to write a post on the sessions I attended).

We have the day off from school today, because here in Haiti, as in many places around the world, May 1st is Labor Day.  I have spent most of the day working on my talks for the Eighth Grade Retreat we're having this coming weekend.  I've been thinking about what I want to say to these kids, looking at photos of them from their middle school years, and reflecting on how far they have come since I first started teaching them.  May is an ending; our school year goes on a little bit into June, but graduation is at the end of May, and everything is winding down into the summer pretty much from here on out.

Probably other middle school teachers will understand me when I say that spring in eighth grade is a challenging time.  It's a little bit like teaching seniors; you are wanting to maximize your time with them, to teach them all the things you know they're going to need next year, and yet in some ways you're ready to say goodbye to them.  They've become restless, ready to move on.  Some days they feel hostile from my vantage point in the front of the room, so different from those little kids who first entered my room at the beginning of seventh grade.  They tolerate middle school now, but they are made for bigger things, their attitude conveys.  These small desks can no longer contain the people they are.

So it's May, and another school year is almost history.  This has been a difficult year in some ways, mostly unbloggable, and I'm ready for the summer to come.  But I want to be present in this last month of school, focused on the task at hand, enjoying the people in my room each day. 

Poetry Month: Day 30

Today is the last day of National Poetry Month, and here is the entire Progressive Poem:

P.T. BARNUM'S GREAT TRAVELING MUSEUM, MENAGERIE, CARAVAN, AND HIPPODROME
by Thirty Poets on a mission in the Kidlitosphere 

When you listen to your footsteps
the words become music and
the rhythm that you’re rapping gets your fingers tapping, too.
Your pen starts dancing across the page
a private pirouette, a solitary samba until
smiling, you’re beguiling as your love comes shining through.

Pause a moment in your dreaming, hear the whispers
of the words, one dancer to another, saying
Listen, that’s our cue! Mind your meter. Find your rhyme.
Ignore the trepidation while you jitterbug and jive.
Arm in arm, toe to toe, words begin to wiggle and flow
as your heart starts singing let your mind keep swinging

from life’s trapeze, like a clown on the breeze.
Swinging upside down, throw and catch new sounds–
Take a risk, try a trick; break a sweat: safety net?
Don’t check! You’re soaring and exploring,
dangle high, blood rush; spiral down, crowd hush–
limb-by-line-by-limb envision, pyramidic penned precision.

And if you should topple, if you should flop
if your meter takes a beating; your rhyme runs out of steam—
know this tumbling and fumbling is all part of the act,
so get up with a flourish. Your pencil’s still intact.
Snap those synapses! Feel the pulsing through your pen
Commit, measure by measure, to the coda’s cadence.

You've got them now--in the palm of your hand!
Finger by finger you’re reeling them in—
Big Top throng refrains from cheering, strains to hear the poem nearing…
Inky paws, uncaged, claw straw and sawdust
Until… CRACK! You’re in the center ring, mind unleashed, your words take wing--
they circle, soar, then light in the lap of an open-mouthed child; the crowd goes wild.


Here are the poets who contributed:

April
1  Amy Ludwig VanDerwater
2  Joy Acey
3  Matt Forrest Esenwine
4  Jone MacCulloch
5  Doraine Bennett
6  Gayle Krause
7  Janet Fagal
8  Julie Larios
9  Carrie Finison
10  Linda Baie
11  Margaret Simon
12  Linda Kulp
13  Catherine Johnson
14  Heidi Mordhorst
15  Mary Lee Hahn
16  Liz Steinglass
17  Renee LaTulippe
18  Penny Klostermann
19  Irene Latham
20  Buffy Silverman
21  Tabatha Yeatts
22  Laura Shovan
23  Joanna Marple
24  Katya Czaja
25  Diane Mayr
26  Robyn Hood Black
27  Ruth Hersey
28  Laura Purdie Salas
29  Denise Mortensen
30  April Halprin Wayland

It's been fun!  Let's do it again next year!

Progressive Poem: Line Twenty-Nine

Can you believe how fast this month went?  Tomorrow is the last line of the progressive poem.  Here's today's line.

Poetry Month: Day 29

Walls are everywhere here in Haiti.  They surround people's property and are often topped with razor wire.  Something there is that doesn't love a wall, for sure.  When people's walls fell down in the earthquake, neighbors could glimpse other lives, but for security's sake, the walls went right back up.  Maybe some day I will write a poem about walls in Haiti, and if so, I hope it has a tiny fraction of the metaphoric resonance in this one, by the master, Robert Frost.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Robert Frost