Kick the Poetry Can’ts

It’s Poetry Friday and I decided this was a good day to introduce the concept of using a more well-known poem as model for a poem of your own. I have a selection of them that I like to use with my students and one of my favorites is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens. I like this because really, it is just another list. Make a list of thirteen different ways to look at something. It can be something as simple as your dog, your car, your bedroom. Or maybe you want to get fancy and try thirteen ways of looking at your job or a friendship. Just pick a topic and give it a try.

I decided to use this poem as an opportunity to say goodbye to Lily, the hummingbird who has built a nest in my yard but who did not get to see her eggs hatch. I’m sure I’ll be dinking with this poem for a while but it felt good to get a draft of this out. (You can click on the photo to see it larger, if you like.)

13 Ways of Looking at a Hummingbird

1
wings whirl
in place
my face
smiles
swivels
tiny dancer
chirps
cheeps
chitters
hello

2
greengold glitters glides
lands atop the waterfalls
shimmy shakes
a water dance

3
spider silk
blades of grass
lichen
moss
one gray hair
two red threads
building blocks
a mini mansion

4
picture pose
turn left
now right
chin up
hold still
I’ll keep my distance

5
in out
out in
tall wall
soft floor
ready wait
wait some more
egg one
egg two
soon
each morning
each evening
I check
just in case

6
the plum tree a
perfect preening place
ruffled nest feathers
bugs picked flicked
feathers smoothed
stretch once
stretch again
bask in the sun
before babies come

7
stormy days
stormy nights
quivery
shivery
forgetting generations
that came before
I worry
flashlight in hand

8
she disappears deep
within the overgrown honeysuckle
seeking bugs
protein power
for motherhood
alone
I measure
one nest
one half a walnut shell
one egg
one jellybean
one miracle
waiting to happen

9
my days equal
part
inspection
observation
research
photographs
my days equal
bliss

10
camera ready
I await her homecoming
hidden only slightly behind the fence
fifteen minutes
two hundred photographs
my mini model
is a star

11
morning comes
empty
no mama snug atop her nest
no tiny eggs safe and sound
no babies waiting
to say hello world
sometime between
the darkness and dawn
disaster

12
overcast and gray
rain soon
but I am stubborn
searching beneath the bushes
until I find evidence
until I find a tiny white shell
until it hits me
miracles don’t always come true

13
crying
crying
crying
camera clicks
shot after shot after shot
most will be out of focus
unable to capture the pain I feel
at all the days that should have been ahead
suddenly suspended beside me
close enough to almost touch
no chirp
no cheep
no chitter
she hovers there
ten seconds maybe more
just long enough
to say goodbye

— Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn.

Tabatha Yeatts has the round-up for all the Poetry Friday posts. Take a look at some of the terrific poetry posts other people are sharing. And if you don’t have time to visit them all today, be sure to bookmark them to go back and visit later.

Ancient poets wrote many odes to celebrate great events in their lives and to pay homage to magnificent people. Many of the students I teach have difficulty believing that they are worthy of having an ode sung to them. So we write our own.

While there are traditional forms of writing an ode, with specific patterns and rhyme forms to follow, for this exercise I don’t worry about that. The key here is to write about yourself in a way that celebrates all the ways that you are good. Show the world the very best of you. This is not a time to be shy. This is your time to shine.

Start with a list of things you do well, things people compliment you on, things you know are your strengths. Work that into a poem.

Here’s one I’m working on about me.

Happyhearted
observer of
littlelife moments
bugs on blossom
birds in bushes
dog snoring in the sun

feelingfriend
hurts when you hurt
notices something is slightly
notquiteright
gentle listener of
undertones and overtones
hughanderouter

talented talker
believes in possibilities
yours, mine, ours
spreads sparks
of what could be
wherever she goes

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn.

Last year, Laura Salas and I worked our way through the book WRITING THE LIFE POETIC by Sage Cohen. We took turns hosting the conversation on our blog and we shared some insights from a chapter we chose to read that week. Then we ended it with doing one of the exercises from the book.  One of them was about using song lyrics as models for poems. This works great because we all know those songs that get caught in our head for one reason or another, the same way we want a poem to be imprinted in our minds. In the classroom this can be a lot of fun to have the students bring in copies of the lyrics of their favorite songs and then watch a video of the song on YouTube before settling in to right.

For the exercise I chose a  favorite song of mine called SECRETS by One Republic. When I first heard the song on Pandora, I burst into tears. When I watched the video, it didn’t mesh for me because in my brain I was hearing a different story, the story of a writer trying to find their way in the world.

Here are the lyrics by Ryan Tedder.

I need another story
Something to get off my chest
My life gets kinda boring
Need something that I can confess
‘Til all my sleeves are stained red

From all the truth that I’ve said
Come by it honestly I swear
Thought you saw me wink, no
I’ve been on the brink, so

Tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away

My God, amazing how we got this far
It’s like we’re chasing all those stars
Who’s driving shiny big black cars

And everyday I see the news
All the problems that we could solve
And when a situation rises
Just write it into an album
Singing straight, too cold
I don’t really like my flow, no, so

Tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time, don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away

Oh, got no reason, got no shame
Got no family I can blame
Just don’t let me disappear
I’ma tell you everything

So tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time, don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away

So tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time, don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away
All my secrets away, all my secrets away

After listening to the song two or three or, okay, maybe a dozen times, here is the poem I came up with.

I NEED

I need to know
that getting up in the morning
matters to the world
to someone other than the man
who matters so much to me,
the man who may not understand
why I need to know
that I matter at all.

You can tell me
it shouldn’t matter
but it does.
You can tell me
I matter in ways
I may not understand
in so many ways I can
only hope to believe

But I need to know
the kind of knowing that comes
from some place deep inside
some place I don’t reside
I want to run and hide because
what I fear is the world
discovering
uncovering
pieces of soul
I don’t want the world to see
what I fear
is that what I need
matters too much to me

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved.

Your turn. If there’s a song you feel drawn to, search for the lyrics online and then try to model a poem based on that song. Good luck!

When I am teaching poetry I often start off with an acrostic poem. We do easy ones that begin with the students names and allow them to tell me things about themselves. It’s a good ice breaker and it gets them familiar with the poetic form right off the bat. An acrostic is a poem that spells one word vertically and then uses the first letter on each line for a line in the poem. So if I were doing an acrostic ice breaker with my name, I might do something like this:

Sometimes a little bit scatterbrained
Usually reading or more books at a time
Stressed out when there is too much noise
Always wishing there were more hours in the day
Never going to stop believing in my dreams

Now that’s not much of a poem but you get the idea.

Here’s a draft of one I did tonight with the word hummingbird. It’s not a great poem yet but it’s a nice way of getting my brain churning around on some ideas. And here’s another thing about acrostics, sometimes they are a good way to get a rough draft of a poem down and then you can take the phrases and play with them until you come up with a poem in another form that you like even better.

High off the ground(not really)
Under scraggly leaves
Mama knits a nest and
Mends it daily with garden gifts she
Ignores my visits (not really)
Needlenose beak tipped high in the air
Grand dame of the toyon tree with
Babies not yet born her
Iridescent feathers fan a
Rainbow blanket she
Decides I have seen enough for now.

Your turn.

I started with an article from the newspaper. (click on the photo to see it larger.)

And then I looked for the poem inside the article. I think the official name for this kind of poem is a black-out poem, though there might be other names for it as well. What you do is take a marker and cross out all the words that don’t belong until you find the poem. (Click on photo to see it larger.)

Easy as pie, right? Every article has at least one poem in it, maybe more. Kids like to do this

magic

humble
excited
a happy lesson
weathered passion
delicious sun-drenched plants
soaking up the warm light
sunflowers intoxicated with the sun
share the secret
rich clods of organic soil
perfect compost
the neighborhood reaps
meditative joy and a harvest of lessons
relishing the heart and soul
of an unspoiled earth

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Now here’s how I got there.

because it feels like graffiti.

Your turn. Even if you don’t post your poem give this a try and let me know what you think.

This next exercise is similar to the spine poem we did the other day. It’s easy peasy. It’s a horoscope poem. All you need is a horoscope, for either one day or a few days. Here I have included a picture of two days worth of a horoscope. (Click on the picture to see it larger and be able to choose your words/phrases.) If you don’t get the newspaper with horoscopes in them you can search online for any horoscope of the day.

Here’s the rule. You can only use the words or phrases in the horoscope. If two words or more are next to each other, you have to use them in that order but you can move things around however you like after that. You can’t change the tenses of any of the words. If you cut out a few horoscopes from the newspaper you can go through with a highlighter and mark the words you like and then rearrange them to make your poem.

Here are the two horoscopes I used.

And here’s the poem I came up with:

explosive change
emotional confusion
spend time with an old friend
trust
someone is in your corner
don’t be shy
be true to you
push back
proceed with your eyes open
follow your heart

Now you can stop there or, you can do a second poem using this one as a jumping off point.

Your turn.

This is another one of my favorite prompts to try. Sometimes it confuses people because there’s no easy answer. As usual, I start with a list but you can brainstorm in whatever way works best for you. If you’re using the list to brainstorm, try starting off each sentence with the same phrase and then go back and revise it to make it more interesting. Or not. Either way works.

Write about what you don’t understand. Or use the line, “I don’t understand . . .” and see where it takes you.

I’m exhausted tonight but here’s my brainstorm:

I don’t understand how my grandmother always made all the food come out of the oven at the same time so everything on the dinner table was hot.
I don’t understand how to cook. It seems too much like math and makes my brain hurt.
I don’t understand how people can taste something, like a sauce and decide what it needs.
I don’t understand how to stir things on the stove evidently because a lot of things get stuck to the bowl.
I don’t understand the concept of heat because I always turn it too low and then when things don’t cook the way I expect I turn it up too high and things burn.
I don’t understand cuts of meat because I once tried to use stew meat as shishkabobs for an important dinner.
I don’t understand rice. It should be so easy but it’s not and my rice maker intimidates me.
I don’t understand cooking.

You might gather from my brainstorm that I’m no wizard in the kitchen. And you’d be right. I don’t like to do things I’m not very good at it and cooking just frustrates me. But husband, who does most of the cooking around the house, really enjoys it. I’ve gotten better over the years but I still don’t get the pure joy from it that he does.

Here’s my rough draft of a poem. It’s not much of a poem yet but I think I like the idea of exploring the two ways cooking happens in this house.
My husband whistles while he cooks
or sings along with the iPod
head bobbing in time
as he chops veggies
pounds the meat
heats the oil
a dash of this, a pinch of that
happy dancing to the fridge
for just one more egg
he studies the recipe
the way I read a book,
with intent
with joy

I don’t understand that at all.

Your turn.

In the classroom we’d do the first part of this next exercise on the board. You’ll have to brainstorm on your own or use my lists that I come up with.

First, make a list of at least 5 things that are yellow.

butter
sun
corn
lemon
school bus
daisy
pepper
pencil
canary
squash

Now make a list of at least 5 things that fly.

plane
butterfly
dragonfly
mosquito
kite
helicopter
bird
bat
hot air balloon
bee

Now the first two lists we could all probably agree on. The last list will be different for each person. Make a list of at least 5 things you find beautiful.

ocean waves
sunrise/sunset
water bubbling in a creek
flowers blooming in my garden
my husband’s smile
my dog
a room full of books
hawks soaring above the hills

Now take at least one word from each list and try to make a poem.

Honey bees buzz blossoms on the lemon tree
zooming fast past me
past my dog
sprawled in shadows of the sun
sipping nectar
like I suck butter from corn-on-the-cob

Your turn.

Some of the best poems come from places where we feel things deeply and know well. Often that is a relationship with a member of our family. The feelings might be good or bad but they are almost always there, holding nuggets to make a poem. I ask my students to write a poem about someone in their family but to not tell me how they are related until the very last line. Let me get to know the person through their poem.

Now sometimes it’s hard to get there right away so you know what I’m going to tell you to do right? Yep. Make a list. And if it’s easiest to make the list starting out with the relationship and their name, fine. Do that in your listmaking/brainstorming stage. Then go back and reword it in your revision. By that I mean, brainstorm like this:

My sister Susan wears . . .
My sister Susan keeps . . .
My sister Susan hates . . .
My sister Susan likes . . .

But change it up when you work up your revised poem.

Here’s my first draft of such a poem.

He loved to hunt, that big tall man,
so tall that if I sat on his shoulders, I could touch the ceiling.
He loved to hunt those ducks and pheasant and quail
to keep us fed in the winter months
and when he brought home the ducks
we’d gather in the basement to pluck the feathers,
feathers we’d save to make into pillows later.
Later after the ducks were clean and singed
and the smell of burned flesh branded in my brain
we’d race back up the steep stairs from the basement
pack those ducks in milk cartons filled with water and
tuck them in the freezer for the lean days.

He loved to fish, that man who kept a toothpick wedged between his lips,
hooking the big blue and white boat
behind his ancient green station wagon and heading out to the sloughs
on a summer Saturday, stopping to rake some clams for bait
before heading off to Colusa with his best girl
hoping to snag a sturgeon before they had to come back home.

He loved to sit in that nubby red chair,
reading the paper and watching Red Skelton,
sucking on a peppermint lifesaver
while Red made him laugh a deep true belly laugh
that always felt like a hug

He loved his meat and potatoes for dinner
spam sandwiches for lunch
dessert and coffee with every meal.

He loved being outdoors
working in his garage
puttering in the yard
not being caged in the house
or a church
or a hospital bed

He loved me too,
I think,
that grandfather of mine,
even though I don’t remember
him ever saying the words out loud.

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn.

With the students I usually work with, we do one or two steps forward into touchy territory, and then we go back to something fun and easy. Some kids will continue to go deep and some will take the opportunity for a break and write an easy poem.

I have a collection of ordinary items that I rotate in a basket to bring in for days like these. You can pull something from your junk drawer or start your own treasure chest. On my own desk I have nature items to inspire me, favorite rocks and twigs and dried flowers and leaves. Depending on the group, we either stay serious and write about the item as it really is or sometimes we go off and pretend that it is anything but what we are holding in our hand. I pass the basket and everyone picks one item out that speaks to them. I encourage them to brainstorms the basics of what it looks and feels like and then to just jot down anything that comes to mind. Make a list. So many poems can come out of the lists. Then they can go back and take that list, add some more details, and shape it into a poem.

Because I have been focusing on (obsessing) the hummingbird nesting in my yard, I think for this poem, I’m going to pick up those binoculars.

Here’s my rough poem, a trio of haiku.

snug in high branches
grandfather’s binoculars
bring the magic close

close enough to touch
iridescent feathers wave
while wind rocks the nest

while wind rocks the nest
baby hummingbirds slumber
snug in high branches

—Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

I call this lesson 5 x 7.  Make a list. Don’t think it over very long, just quickly brainstorm 5 each of the following items:

5 nouns, 5 adjectives, 5 verbs, 5 things that are green, 5 emotions, 5 sounds, 5 locations

You can obviously swap these around to 5 of something else. I’ve done different colors, foods, animals, the weather, etc. You can also build your own brainstorming set by jotting these things down on scraps of paper and keeping them in labeled baggies then draw words out of them to build a poem. But for now, let’s just brainstorm. And once you have your brainstorm, the idea is to write a poem using at least 1 word from each of your 7 categories.

Here’s my brainstorm. You can use mine for your poem or brainstorm your own.

5 nouns
dog bird water wind photograph

5 adjectives
tired sweet hot confused excited

5 verbs
race  plunge  pluck  simmer  look

5 things that are green
fern  leaf   pickle   mallard   artichoke

5 emotions
happiness love worry  envy  lonely

5 sounds
birds chirping  bubbling water rock   country music playing in someone’s backyard  snoring dog  bees buzzing

5 locations
under the Japanese maple tree  on the roof  at the park   home    on the couch

And here’s my quickie rough draft of a poem:

Dog races down the garden path
then stops to plunge her head
deep into a nest of ferns
sleeping beneath the Japanese maple tree
to roust a lazy lizard
who dives down and away from chomping jaws

I envy her simple pleasures
slurping water from the bubbling rock
bothering bees as they buzz around the garden
snoring in the sun
important lessons I should let her
teach me

I think I’m likely to come back and play with this draft and either expand the idea or perhaps chop it way back to a haiku.

Your turn.

This exercise started off because I needed another “something extra” to keep in my teaching bad. I’d had a run of bad luck with getting the kids to write and all the warmup exercises kept falling down flat. If I couldn’t get them to warmup, I couldn’t get them to do much of anything else. So I started opening and shutting (okay, maybe slamming) the drawers in my desk and file cabinet thinking I would find an answer in there somewhere. And I did. Sort of.

In my stationary drawer I had a stack of envelopes that didn’t go with any cards or notes. Just a bunch of mismatched extras. And I started to wonder what the kids  might do if they received an envelope that obviously had something in but they wouldn’t know what and they wouldn’t be allowed to open the envelopes. I took a stack of the envelopes and filled them all with something. Sometimes just a single Post-it note. Sometimes several sheets of paper (blank but they didn’t know that.) Then I sealed all the envelopes and proceeded to write on them, decorate them, drop them in the dirt, get them wet, crumple them up like they’ve been in someone’s pocket. All sorts of things to give them character.

In class I let everyone pick an envelope and I tell them that they can either be the person who just got this envelope in the mail or they are getting ready to send it.

I ask them to brainstorm 6 things about the envelope, simple story questions, WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY and HOW.

And then to write a poem using those answers. I ask them to go back and revise with using the 5 senses. And for those that are really digging in about it’s “too hard” or “I don’t know what to write” I tell them they can do an acrostic if they like using the word LETTER or ENVELOPE.

I always tell the writers that they can make it all up. It doesn’t have to be real. But they almost always end up writing about something that actually happened to them.

There’s something that seems to happen when you are holding an envelope you know you can’t open. It usually gets people writing. (By the way, this is a great general creative writing exercise too.) It’s a little hard to do with just a photograph but let’s see what I can come up with. I’m picking that white envelope at the bottom with the phrase “Why won’t you talk to me?” on it. It’s crumpled and has been scuffed in the dirt a bit.

My brainstorm:

I’m thinking I just got the envelope and I’m trying to get up the nerve to open it. None of this is true. I’m just making it up as I go along.

– WHO?  I’m pretty sure it’s from a neighbor who lived across the street from me years ago. She was always leaving little notes in my mailbox
– WHAT?  It’s a yearly plea that comes, oddly enough, not at Christmas, but on my birthday.
– WHERE? I’m sitting in my car because I just picked up the mail at the post office
– WHEN? It’s my birthday. Early morning before the day has really gotten started
– WHY? We had a big fight over something horrible and I just can’t seem to forgive her, no matter how many times she asks.
– HOW? How am I going to get past this big rock in road?

Here’s my 10 minute poem. It’s very rough but I can see some things I like I might want to develop further.

Birthday mail
should make me smile
but a single envelope with
that familiar loopy handwriting
I used to try to mimic
makes my heart jump to a not-so-happy place.

A can near the door of the Post Office beckoned,
your offering would have been
a perfect gift to the garbage gods
but I couldn’t let go
anymore than I could
forget or forgive.

Neighborly notes of love
landed up in my mailbox
near every day
for the seven years
you lived across the street from me
thanking me
for blueberries
babysitting
and listening to you cry
when your mother died
until the day came
when I couldn’t listen
anymore
because everything you said
was a lie.

I hate your lies
but more than that
I hate what you stole
from me
the friend I thought you’d
always be
the smile I thought I’d
always have
every time
I saw your name.

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn, if you care to play along.

Hooray! It’s National Poetry month! Poets and poetry lovers everywhere have been looking forward to this all year. I know I have.

I teach poetry to incarcerated youth. They’re a tough audience. They don’t want to do anything and they REALLY don’t want to write poetry. It takes me a few visits to get them into it and while I don’t convert everyone in loving poetry I do seem to get a lot of them writing it. I’m going to share some of the ways I get these kids to write poetry. They always involve prompts and exercises of some kind so I will do the exercise and I hope you will play along. Not all of the poems and exercises I share will speak to you and that’s okay.

When I go to a poetry residency I usually go for 10-12 visits. This is good because in the detention facilities it usually takes 3 sessions before I have built up any trust with the kids. So I start off easy and set certain things in place that they know will happen every time.  After reading to them from Ruth Gendler’s wonderful book The Book of Qualities, I bring out my purple cards.

I let a student pick a card and from there we do a group poem on the board based on using our five senses to describe the word. It takes a while but pretty soon they get into and are shouting out some great descriptions and I jot them all on the board. We pick our favorites and put together a quick list poem. This is the one thing I do every single visit. In the classroom it helps get them warmed up without writing yet and because they are all doing it together, there is less pressure on them. And they get used to it and look forward to being able to pick a card and get us started. As you can see from the photo, these are just words cut from magazines that I taped onto some index cards.  I use these cards in a lot of different ways and when I am teaching, there are always a stack of them in my back pocket. I keep some on my desk too, if I am looking for a prompt.

So let’s do one of these now. I pick the card ENVY. In the classroom, this is what I would write on the board:

What does envy look like?

What does envy feel like?

What does envy sound like?

What does envy smell like?

What does envy taste like?

Okay, here’s what I came up with:

Envy looks like every person I’ve ever seen who doesn’t have issues with their weight.

Envy feels like a beach bonfire blazing out of control.

Envy sounds like steam hissing from a broken overheated pipe.

Envy smells like candy cooking on the stove, so sweet it makes me feel sick.

Envy tastes nothing like I imagined it would taste like.

Now in a classroom you’d have a lot more sentences for each sense but this will give you the idea. And if you’re doing this on your own, go ahead and freewrite as many as you can come up with. You can use my word, ENVY, or one from the picture or picture a word of your own.

After I have my sentences I like to play with them and see if I can find the poem.  I should add that I do these quickly. They’re great warmups for just that reason. You don’t have to spend hours or days revising it. I might go back and play with it some more but here’s my 10 minute poem.

ENVY

Envy sounds like steam hissing from an overheated pipe

every time I seem someone who doesn’t have issues with their weight

my chest hurts.

Envy feels like a beach bonfire blazing out of control

and smells like candy cooking on the stove, sickening sweet,

it makes my stomach turn

it makes me feel sick

it makes me into someone I don’t want to be.

Envy tastes nothing like I imagined it would taste like,

it sticks in the back of my throat like peanut butter

choking my possibilities.

— Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

And I tell these new poets, this is it. You wrote a poem.

Your turn. Why not give it a try here in the comments or on your own blog. If you post it on your blog please leave a link in the comments so I can come see what you’ve done.

I hope you’ll share your poems in the comments so we can all be inspired.