Let’s welcome this new season with simple practices that make space for what’s most important.
I’ve written a wee book with a few ideas. Just click on the picture to download the book!
Poetry in the Age of the Internet
One morning years ago, when I should have already been moving my attention toward our school day, a tweet from Sally Thomas flashed on my screen and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
Question that struck me today: if you can have a Latin-centered curriculum, why couldn't you have a poetry-centered one? How wd it look?
— Sally Thomas (@SallyThomasNC) September 18, 2014
The internet can be rather magical like that. You’re happily drinking a second cup of coffee, and then an idea shows up that will captivate you for years.
Lindsay Crandall, a photographer whose light and composition sing, recently posted about her plans for a year long Literary Happiness Project, a way forward in her reading and writing life. I was immediately intrigued.
Then I saw a comment from my sweet friend, Tresta Payne. So I wasn’t the only one who was intrigued! Lindsay replied to Tresta about the similarities between the Literary Happiness Project and Tresta’s Homeschool MFA. Ah, another thread!
Homeschool MFA comes from Patricia Zaballos, one more homeschooling mama mentor whose life is saturated with writing. I’ve started using #homeschoolMFA to document my own learning, and Tresta is writing about her learning journey as well.
One the same day that Lindsay posted, Sally Thomas offered this excellent poetry submission advice:
Get 'em back, send 'em out again. Lather, rinse, repeat. (and if, when you get 'em back, you think, "YOUR LOSS, SUCKERS," well, that's part of the story, too).
Posted by Sally Thomas on Tuesday, January 8, 2019
And wouldn’t you know it, I got a rejection letter that same day. So, I followed her advice. I said the litany of humility and sent another selection of poems out. I’m especially inclined to take Sally’s advice just now. I’m taking her wonderful poetry class through Homeschool Connections. It’s a recorded class for high school students that is rich and thoughtful and a good next step in my own Homeschool MFA.
Picture Books + Poems for the New Year
We started back to school last week, but we waited until Epiphany to fully leave behind our Advent memory work. We’ve still been singing “Joy to the World” and reciting most of Luke 2. But tomorrow we’ll start a new cycle including Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
At the library I found a picture book version of the poem illustrated by Susan Jeffers. The wintery world of the poem is punctuated with small bits of vibrant, almost glowing, color. The man with the wondering horse is out to bring nuts and berries to the forest creatures–very much still the work of the Christmas season! The dust jacket includes a piece of vellum that slips over the scene. It makes it harder to see and more mysterious. I told the kids that if this book was all I showed them all year long, it would be a good year!
We’ll be pairing this with a new biographical picture book called Papa Is a Poet. It tells about Robert Frost’s early poetic career from the point of view of his children. The book includes a large selection of poems, including “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” We learned this by heart during our Fall Co-op. Joseph, the 5 year old, declared it too rhyme-y! I wonder what he’ll think of the rhymes in “Stopping by Woods”? In fact, my own distaste for rhyme is part of the reason I chose these poems. Frost still moves me even though I don’t care for rhyme. I’ve got a Joseph Brodsky essay on Frost at the top of my stack of books, right next to his Nativity Poems.
So, this New Year looks like it might be a good one for poems. If only the weather would turn and we’d get some snow!
Here’s a printable version of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” with illustrations by Gertrud Mueller Nelson in case you need some poems for Monday’s Circle Time!
Way Leads On to Way
Do you follow Sally Thomas on Facebook? She’s a serious poet who posts the most delicious poetic links. Yesterday I followed her suggestion to a piece by C.M. Burroughs called “How to Make a Poem.” For me, the best part of the essay were the poems she linked to–Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Hayden.
When I clicked through to read the Hayden poem, my response was visceral. I was back on the #12 Sandy bus turning south from Burnside on to 5th, reading this poem as a part of the Poetry in Motion series more than 15 years ago. It’s a stunning narrative poem that hits complex emotional notes. There’s longing and regret, gratitude alongside fear.
I wondered if in the vaults of the internet there would be some way to trace that collection of poems on buses. Low and behold, Poetry in Motion has collected the poems that ran in each city. Here’s Portland’s collection. Louise Erdrich. Tess Gallagher. Jane Hirshfield. William Stafford (never cared for this poem, would feel disappointed when I got on a Stafford bus. Spoiled). Makes me want to read the collections from Boston or Fresno or Salt Lake City.
Riding the bus from the Hollywood district downtown to school and later on out to work, spending long hours on the bus reading and writing. This was formative work for me.
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