I’m migrating a bunch of old videos from Google Videos into Youtube, and it has become sort of like a trip into my video composing past, in a neat way. A few years ago, I gave a keynote at the Hudson Valley Writing Project and then sat in on a session around poetry and digital storytelling. I had Charlie Parker on my mind, I guess, and wrote this:
Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin
Category Archives: Poetry
Why I Was Writing a Poem Every Day
For the past few years, I have been writing in the shadows of Bud Hunt, as he spends April posting images at his blog designed to spark poetry in his readers. I’m not sure why I am always obsessed with writing a poem at his site every single day … but I do, and I did. Some of the poems are just junk — throw-aways that I composed in minutes as I start my day and best left forgotten as digital debris. Others … have some potential, and that is the reason why I like writing every day.
Sometimes, something sparks, and a poem in particular might grab hold — some line, some word, some sentiment — that might be developed later on. I tried to podcast my poems with Cinch as much as possible this year, although I suspect I was mostly the only one listening to my voice. Which is fine. I did it as a way to archive my inflection as I was writing — where is the stress of the line, and maybe, what is the emotional underpinning of the poem itself. (What I didn’t do so much this year is archive each day’s poem in Google Docs, which I usually do, so now I will need to spend some time at Bud’s blog, grabbing my words back.)
I love writing poems because they are so different from much of the other things that I write on a regular basis. I’m not sure I always succeed in what I am trying to do with my poetry. I don’t have enough discipline all the time. But the writing of verse taps into something interesting, and it reminds me that poetry for my students can often do the same thing. The poets who emerge when we write poetry in the classroom are often the unexpected students — the ones who struggle with the essays and the longer stories and other pieces of writing. There are poets hidden in all of our classrooms. We just need to find them.
Here is the last poem I wrote for April with Bud. He showed us an image of a car, from inside the dashboard. Somehow, I had this idea of being pulled over by the police for writing poetry too fast (I do).
The cop pulled me over and asked:
why so many poems in so many days
and where the hell do you think you’re going, anyway?
He demanded my poet’s license and writing registration
so I dug into my pocket for my papers and my pens
and assorted ideas,
shoving them into his outstretched hands,
and watching him shuffle back to his cruiser,
deep in thought.Out of his sight line,
I secretly pulled out the scrap of paper
where I had been dabbling with rhythm and rhyme for some time,
thinking of how this might work here
or how I might just save that for some other line
when I heard his boots scraping against the pavement,
and saw his face peering in at me.He let me off with a warning
of writing too fast in an overly connected world
and later, I noticed, in the margins of my poems,
he had jotted down a few ideas for an unfinished piece
and it all worked perfectly.
Peace (in the poems),
Kevin
Still writing poems …. Cluttered Memories
It’s Day 26 and I am still writing poems almost every day with Bud Hunt, who provides images for inspiration at his blog site. I liked today’s poem, so I figured I would share it out. (You can see the image that he provided here).
Cluttered Memories
You hide in here with my scrapbooks
my photos
my poems, my stories, my scripts
amid cluttered boxes of old garments
that no longer fit
in a space between the hours in which I live
I think, today’s the day I look for you,
but then, again, I forget.
The podcast of the poem is here and embedded down below.
Peace (amid the poems),
Kevin
The Mystery of the Poetry Book I Can’t Find
This is so odd. I have written a few posts this month about this neat little book of poems that I bought from Scholastic Books from their catalog a month or two ago. It’s called Post This Poem. Essentially, it is a collection of 100 famous poems (or excerpts) on colorful sticky notes that you can hand out. It’s a great way to share out poetry and I used it last week with my students, who loved it.
Well, a number of teachers asked me where to find the book. You’d think it would be easy enough.
I went to Google and typed in the book title. Nothing. I went to the Scholastic book site and used its own search engine. Nothing. Amazon? Nothing. I grabbed the ISBN number, thinking: this will surely do the trick. No such luck. I got more of my nothing in Google and then an extra dose of nothing in a ISBN search engine. (This is the ISBN number: 978-0-545-46976-0 if you think you can help me out)
What is going on here?
I’m starting to think that the book is a poetic mirage of some sort, and I feel bad that I wrote about it with such glowing praise and now can’t send readers to find it. I suppose my next step is to call Scholastic directly and ask about it. But it is as if the book had vanished completely out of every system, or never existed.
Given that this is April and poetry month, this whole things deserves a poem of its own.
This book never existed –
the poems, never written –
you’re nothing but an imaginary reader
engulfed in an imaginary page
of poems you’ve stuck to your mind
as if that would help you remember
the space between the lines ….
Peace (in the mystery of the undiscovered book),
Kevin
PS — seriously, though, if you have some ideas on how to find the book, can you let me know? I need to hire the Poetry Book Detective Agency.
Ode to Sliderule Angst
Bud Hunt put up an image of a sliderule this morning, asking us to write a poem. (It’s part of his poem-a-day visual inspiration project). I know my kids have trouble with rulers (!!!), never mind a sliderule. So, this humorous take is told from a student’s perspective because I had this visual of a kid looking for places to plug in their headphones as they did some math problems.
Batteries won’t work in this analog computer
you placed in my hands today
and I can’t find the port to plug in my headphones
so what music am I supposed to play
while I work out that problem you put on the board
on trigonometry, logarithms and roots?
I’m completely befuddled by this ruler-kind-of-thing –
The device refuses to boot.
The podcast of the poem is here.
Peace (in the rule),
Kevin
Writing a Poem
Inspired (again) by Bud the Teacher:
Take wing –
Take heed –
Find the wind that leads you forward –
Take care –
Take stock –
Your journey ahead is marked by what it is you have left behind you after all this time –
Protection –
Hardly worn yet battered by the breezes, shaken yet never torn from where it stood among the trees –
You emerged anew as a child born again –
Take flight –
Take care –
Be gone now and follow the slow arc of the Earth towards your destination-
Take wing –
Farewell!
And the podcast version:
Peace (in the poems),
Kevin
A Small Gift of Post-it Poetry
I began class the other day by telling my students that I was going to be giving them a gift. There was an excited murmur. What was it? Pencils? Candy? Nope. Poetry. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I ordered a book from Scholastic called Post This Poem that is a collection of poems and pieces of poems on sticky note paper. I had been putting the poems up in the hallway trophy case, as a secret poetry project for our wing of the school, but now decided that since the art teacher needed the display case and since I had many poems left, I would give the rest of the poems away to my sixth graders.
I went through the room, passing out poems to every student. It may not have been pencils or candy (which we don’t give out anyway), but they were pretty excited about getting a poem (some were excited because of the color paper but you take excitement where you can get it, right?). “What’d you get?” they were asking. I gave them a few minutes to peruse the poems, and then I asked, “Anyone want to read theirs?”
I was expecting maybe one or two students to volunteer. I was therefore pleasantly surprised as more than three-quarters of each of my classes wanted to read their poems out loud. I also shared poems from the collection. They stumbled on some difficult vocabulary, and the Olde English in some of the poems tied their tongues up knots, and the lines and stanzas didn’t always flow the way it would with practice. Still, that didn’t matter. Wordsworth, Dickinson, Whitman, Rossetti, Tennyson and more joined us in the room that day as they read the words, and the rest of us listened, silently, to some of the most famous poems in the English canon.
It was a nice way to wrap up our poetry unit, and it was one of those lessons that started as a spur of the moment — “Let’s get rid of these poems” — and maybe touched a few students with the poetry bug.
Peace (in the poems),
Kevin
PS — I still have not had any luck finding a link to the Post This Poem book online. I’ll need to grab the IBSN number off of it.
Making Writing Poetry Visible (or Maybe Audible)
This morning, as I got ready to be inspired to write poetry at Bud Hunt’s blog, I decided to do something a little different. I turned on Audacity and “talked through” the entire process of writing — from the first moments when I saw the picture that Bud had posted and his one word inspiration, and then as I was writing, I tried to verbalize my thinking.
So, if you want to crawl into my meandering mind for a bit, take a listen.
Here is the poem that came out the other end.
Red Crate, Abandoned
Nothings remains
empty
for long …
not even red crates in deserted alleyways
on familiar spacesThe gaps inside
echo
with past objects, leaving trails behind –
memories lost –
along the byways of the forgettingIf you should come upon this carriage
of history
be gentle with me
and overflow the space with
new thoughtsTogether, we’ll fill the emptiness
with words,
and fill the alleyways
with ideas.
Here is the podcast of the poem itself.
Peace (in the alleyways of ideas),
Kevin
Today’s Poem: Heavenly Body
Bud Hunt had a neat picture of planets this morning, as he encourages us all month to write poems every day. His image sparked this poem from me this morning.
Heavenly Body
You’ve been outside my orbit for years now –
a floating, beautiful body in deep space.
I have been so centered around the Sun
that I barely noticed you
until little bits
– words like meteors crashing into my atmosphere –
made me wonder what it is I have been missing,
out here, in my own system of heavenly bodies
too far away to touch.If this poem is to become a telescope,
my eyes are now fixated on the ways our gravities intersect,
and I feel your pull more than ever.
I stretch my fingers until the breaking point
only to see you fade behind the shadows
of the moon,
so I wait … wondering …. worrying …
writing so that I may never forget
what you look like.
You can listen to the poem as a podcast, too.
Peace (in the poems),
Kevin
Inspired Poetry with Bud the Teacher
I’m starting to write some poetry this month with Bud Hunt (aka Bud the Teacher). Bud, a friend of mine through the National Writing Project, is posting visual prompts each day, and he asks that we consider a poem inspired by the image, and his short bit of writing. What I have always liked about Bud’s poetry prompts (this is maybe the third year?) is how open the direction can be. It’s always cool to see how other people take the idea embedded in the image, and push it around in different ways.
I did write a poem yesterday, but it wasn’t anything too special.
This morning, he had an interesting image and description about water, and what I think is a pebble or rock. (I’m not quite sure but that’s OK. I saw it as I see it, and used what I think I saw.) I also added a podcast of the poem I wrote, using Cinch.
The pebble drops –
I fall with it
splashing, crashing into surface tension
as my outline echoes from the center
on out.
If I could, I would surf this surface viscosity forever,
and never let me fall
but gravity has other ideas –
family, and school, and the whole wealth of obligations
that keep me grounded day in and day out –
so I drop, the pebble,
twisting and turning until I hit the bottom
and wait.
You come, too. Each morning, Bud will be posting an image and inviting you to write a few lines of poetry.
Peace (in the poems),
Kevin