Friday, October 7, 2011

Poets Always On The Lookout

Poetry Friday is at Great Kid Books.  Go there to read all!


      Through the years of teaching, it's been delightful to write poetry with my students, sharing beautiful words, the freshness of each poet's voice waiting for readers to delight in a find and thus making it their own at least for a little while.  Sometimes I've asked students to write about the process itself, the challenges and triumphs when they find ideas that satisfy.  And, I have a few poems that I use to show that published poets do that too, write about the process of receiving or finding ideas.  Lawrence Schimel uses weather to show how ideas arrive in

             Cloudy, With A Chance of Poems.

                 The Weatherman predicts
                  a partially sunny day.
                  But the Poet doesn't care
                                         Read the rest of the poem here.

       If you write poetry, do you ever write about how those ideas end up on your pages?

6 comments:

  1. Cute poem! That would be a good one to share with students to help them see how poem ideas arrive. Learning to write is like a revelation. It seems difficult when you start, but the storm is unstoppable when it happens! I love the weather analogy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice! Naturally I'm reminded of "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs" and its sequel "Pickles to Pittsburgh"

    To answer your question about how the ideas end up in the pages - I do discuss it from time to time (I write verse every now and again - it spices up my academic writing) - but I have never written about it. I'm thinking it'd be a good exercise though - and one that most kids would probably value as well.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Fun! I enjoy poems about poetry, but I can't remember if I've written any myself. Amy LV has lots of good thoughts on the subject.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This poem reminds me of the one Amy LV wrote about finding a poem in her notebook -- a tool that increases the chance of poetry!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I do--and I talk to students about how the poetry ended up on my page. The "When I Grow Little Poem" that I posted ended up being a mini lesson on poetry writing and revising when I showed it to them on my smart board. Many of the students liked it and wrote their own poems

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for visiting!