Category Archives: Poetry

This morning’s Daily Create prompt for Write Out is all about Pocket Parks, and I wrote a poem about a bench in one of these tucked-away places.

Peace (In Parks),
Kevin

One of our special guests for this year’s Write Out is the writer Nikki Grimes, whose new picture book with Jerry and Brian Pinkney is A Walk in The Woods. The book is a beautiful, thoughtful look at loss and remembrance, through the eyes of a young boy who has lost his father, and yet, reconnects through a walk in the woods. A discovery by the boy of poems brings the story to a new level. (And knowing that illustrator Jerry Pinkney passed away during the creation of this book, and his son, Brian, helped finish some of the artwork is an entirely other level of this story)

This picture book is a perfect fit for Write Out, which has a theme of poetry and place, and tomorrow night (Tuesday, October 17th at 7 pm EST), Nikki Grimes will join Write Out in a Zoom session to talk about her new book. See the Write Out page for events to get more information and to sign up for the Zoom session.

For my Found Poem, I borrowed a line from each sequential page in the picture book and then brought them together for a poem. The only pages I did not borrow lines from are the ones with the poems the young boy found in the woods, as I wanted to leave those as a kind of sacred text for the story.

I then composed some music, used Keynote to stitch the book image and the Found Poem together, and then in iMovie, I added my voice narration. I felt as if my voice would be important here, letting the reader listen to the lines I borrowed from Nikki Grimes’ text.

Meanwhile, after reading the book, we did our own “walks in the woods” this weekend here in New England, where Autumn is well underway.

Peace (Finding It),
Kevin

Created for Write Out.

Peace (and poems),
Kevin

It’s the first week of Write Out and I have been using the Daily Create prompts and some Write Out inspirations each morning for some poetry writing. Here is what I have been up to.

And some prose:

Peace (in Poems),
Kevin

The Write Out project (Poetry, Prose and Parks!) kicks off today, and the Daily Create will be featuring creative prompts for the next two weeks (Thanks, Sarah) in connection to Write Out. This morning, it was a Window Poem, and our Mountain Ash trees have been very busy places these days.

I’ve been doing Word Art poems lately, so I might keep tinkering with the visual elements as I write for Write Out this year.

Peace (Fluttering),
Kevin

Hey — Write Out 2023 kicks off tomorrow, and there’s a whole range of activities available for educators, student writers, community organizations and more. The theme this year is “Poetry, Prose and Parks.”

Write Out is a partnership between the National Writing Project and the National Park Service. Each year, National Park Rangers record video writing prompts that easily shared in classrooms, for place-based writing.

Share your work on social spaces with the #writeout tag.

My poem (above) is from a one-word prompt that had me thinking about the dense world of Mangroves.

Peace (and Place),
Kevin