Poetry Friday

The Round-up today is at A Teaching Life.

BUILD A POEM is the poster name for my upcoming poetry workshop for kids. We’re going to use Patricia MacLachlan’s beautiful book Word After Word After Word as a springboard to create our own poems. Ms. Mirabel talked about the importance of landscape, so we’ll start there. Nephew Mike Beane photographed this lovely tree across from the Maine home we both grew up in.

A dear furniture maker friend donated wood blocks and scraps. We’ll talk about this wood and how once it was growing as a tree. We’ll brainstorm what the tree’s landscape might have looked like.

Poem #1 Be the tree. On the wood, write a poem showing what you saw, felt and heard in your landscape.

We’ll brainstorm words and phrases for our own personal landscapes.

Poem # 2 Turn the wood over. Write a poem that makes the reader feel your landscape.

My own landscape poem:

Sandpit

Warm sand sifts through my hand.

I sculpt curved roads,

plant trees of sweet fern,

then climb the pine to my platform

and snug my back against bark.

Year after year, I bury broken dolls.

The last hole I dig is for my dog.

Welcome to Poetry Friday

 Re-visit an Inspiring Book

Violet is hosting today. Be sure to check out more poetry links on her Comments page.

In Patricia MacLachlan’s short novel, Word After Word After Word, Ms. Mirabel inspires a 4^th grade class to love words.She gives them tools to express their feelings in response to the death of a pet, a parent’s life-threatening illness and other real-life situations. The children are changed.

 Here is a poem written by the character Evie: 

Nothing is what you think.

A square is round

A circle is square

The earth is flat

The grass grows

Down,

The roots search for

Sunlight,

Happy is sad.

And surprise!

When

Unhappiness comes

I smile.

I’ve just re-read MacLachlan’s delightful book published by Katherine Tegen Books in 2010. Who wouldn’t want to have Ms. Mirabel for an author-in-residence? Some of us even want to BE Ms. Mirabel. And I know many Poetry Friday poets and educators are!

I’ve been asked to lead a Word After Word After Word book discussion for 4^th and 5^th graders. At my suggestion, the discussion will be followed with a two-session poetry workshop. I am thrilled and have begun planning which poems I will use to inspire my workshop participants.

There’s a Joan Didion quote at the beginning of the book: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

The five students in the book proceed to do just that. Ms. Mirabel challenges them to find their own story, "or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time. When you find it,” she says, “you will write it. Word after word after word after word."