Monday Poetry Stretch - Things To Do

In honor of Elaine Magliaro, who has a new book coming out on February 7th, I thought it might be fun to write "Things To Do" poems.

Elaine wrote a terrific post way back in 2010 describing how she got started writing things to do poems. Inspired by the poems of Bobbi Katz, Elaine took to writing list poems in this format with her second graders. The post, The Super Duper "Things to Do" Poems Post, includes example poems written by/with her students, as well as links to original poems Elaine wrote in this form.

Elaine's book, Things to Do, is filled with poem that describe "things to do" if you are dawn, a bird, honeybee, an acorn, the sky, and more.

Here's an excerpt from a poem that didn't make it into this collection.

Things To Do If You Are a Castle

Stand on a stony cliff
overlooking the sea.
Wear a thick wall of armor.
Sprout tall turrets.
Be a haven.
Drop your drawbridge
for damsels in distress.

Read the poem in its entirety.

I hope you'll join me in writing a "Things To Do" poem this week. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

This Week's Poetry Stretch - Zeno

I'm teaching Monday and Tuesday evenings this semester, and I'm a bit overwhelmed. It was on my run this morning that I realized I hadn't posted a stretch yet. My apologies for sharing this so far into the week. I've picked a short, challenging form for us.

The Zeno is a poetic form that was invented by J. Patrick Lewis. Here's Pat's explanation of the form.

I've invented what I had called a “hailstone," after the mathematical "hailstone sequence." It has nothing to do with Mary O'Neill's Hailstones and Halibut Bones, but it would no doubt instantly be confused with it. Hence, "hailstone" is problematic. So I call the form a "zeno," so named for Zeno, the philosopher of paradoxes, especially the dichotomy paradox, according to which getting anywhere involves first getting half way there and then again halfway there, and so on ad infinitum. I'm dividing each line in half of the previous one. Here's my description of a zeno:

A 10-line verse form with a repeating syllable count of 8,4,2,1,4,2,1,4,2,1.
The rhyme scheme is abcdefdghd.

Here are two examples.

Sea Song
A song streaming a thousand miles
may sound like a
fairy
tale,
but it’s only
love’s bulk-
mail
coming out of
the blue...
whale. 

Why Wolves Howl
Gray wolves do not howl at the moon.
Across a vast
timber
zone,
they oboe in
mono-
tone,
Fur-face, I am
all a-
lone.

Poems ©J. Patrick Lewis. All rights reserved.

I hope you'll join me in writing a zeno this week. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Poetry Friday - Pied Beauty

I need this today ...

Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

Read the poem in its entirety. (You can listen to it too!)

I do hope you'll take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Violet Nesdoly. Happy poetry Friday friends!

Monday Poetry Stretch - Décima

The following description comes from my April 2015 interview with Margarita Engle.

The décima is a rhymed, metered poem that most commonly has ten eight-syllable lines in a rhyme pattern abba aa abba.

Here's an example.

BIRD PEOPLE
by Margarita Engle

In a time when people were stars
in deep, hidden caves of the sea,
a fisherman ventured so far
that a hole in the cave set him free.

He burst from the cave up to sky
and reached the bold shimmer of light.
No longer a man who could cry,
he was silent until darkest night.

Then the song that flew from his heart
was the sweetest song ever heard,
a melody about the start
of life as a winged, singing bird!

Poem ©Margarita Engle, 2015. All rights reserved.

In this poem, Margarita used twelve lines with a rhyme pattern abab  cdcd  efef. As she said, "Changing a décima is perfectly acceptable!  When they’re used as the lyrics of rumba songs, they are often improvised."

You can learn more about the décima at NBCLatino.

I hope you'll join me this week in writing a décima. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Poetry Sisters Write Somonka

And so, another year of writing poetry with my fabulous sisters begins! I can't tell you how excited I am that we are continuing to write together. We've mapped out our plan for the year and at Liz's choosing, we are beginning with the somonka and the theme of love.

The somonka is a Japanese form that consists of two tanka written in tandem. Tanka is a form of Japanese poetry that has been practiced for more than 1000 years. Tanka are composed of 31 syllables in a 5/7/5/7/7 format. Most tanka focus on nature, seasons, the discussion of strong emotions, or a single event of some significance. In a somonka, the first tanka is usually a declaration of love, with the second a response to that declaration. 

This is the point where I confess that I don't like love poems. I don't like to read them and don't often write them. In fact, the first love poem I ever wrote was just last month during our ekphrastic writing challenge. The image took me unexpectedly in the love direction, and so I went with it. Sitting down this time to write a love poem was a difficult challenge. I'm not sure I've followed the guidelines exactly, but I've got a poem or two I'm happy to share.


I'm a lucky boy
snuggled in my favorite chair,
so warm, belly full.
Could there be a better life
for me, than to be so loved?

He's easy to love,
all lean lines and handsome face,
a classic beauty.
It's easy to ignore his
flaws. Who doesn't love a dog?

 

How do I love thee you?
With poetry (not Browning),
with words unspoken,
with lasagna, chocolate cake,
in numerous mundane ways.

I married for food.
She captured my heart through my
stomach. Heaven knows
there are other reasons, but
I'm too full to think. That's love.

Poems ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2017. All rights reserved.

You can read the poems written by my poetry sisters at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Kelly Fineman
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

I do hope you'll take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Linda at Teacher Dance. Happy poetry Friday friends!

Monday Poetry Stretch - Things to Do

In honor of Elaine Magliaro, who has a new book coming out on February 7th, I thought it might be fun to write "Things To Do" poems.

Elaine wrote a terrific post way back in 2010 describing how she got started writing things to do poems. Inspired by the poems of Bobbi Katz, Elaine took to writing list poems in this format with her second graders. The post, The Super Duper "Things to Do" Poems Post, includes example poems written by/with her students, as well as links to original poems Elaine wrote in this form.

Elaine's book, Things to Do, is filled with poem that describe "things to do" if you are dawn, a bird, honeybee, an acorn, the sky, and more.

Here's an excerpt from a poem that didn't make it into this collection.

Things To Do If You Are a Castle

Stand on a stony cliff
overlooking the sea.
Wear a thick wall of armor.
Sprout tall turrets.
Be a haven.
Drop your drawbridge
for damsels in distress.

Read the poem in its entirety.

I hope you'll join me in writing a "Things To Do" poem this week. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Monday Poetry Stretch - Ya Du

Ya Du is a Burmese poetic form that uses climbing-rhyme. Each poem contains anywhere from 1-3 stanzas (but no more than 3). Each stanza contains 5 lines. The climbing rhymes occur in syllables four, three, and two of both the first three lines and the last three lines of a stanza. The first four lines have 4 syllables each, and the last one can have 5, 7, 9, or 11 syllables. The last two lines have an end-word rhyme. 

Here's an example of what the climbing rhyme pattern looks like.

x x x a

x x a x

x a x b

x x b c

x b x x x x c

Since ya du means "the seasons," the poem should contain a reference to the seasons.

I hope you'll join me this week in writing a ya du. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Cybils Finalists!

I'm so thrilled to have served as a Cybils first round judge in the poetry category this fall. I'm very excited to share the list we are sending forward to the round 2 judges.

Booked

by Kwame Alexander

To Stay Alive: Mary Ann Graves and the Tragic Journey of the Donner Party

by Skila Brown

Guess Who, Haiku

by Deanna Caswell

When Green Becomes Tomatoes: Poems for All Seasons

by Julie Fogliano

Garvey’s Choice

by Nikki Grimes

Fresh Delicious

by Irene Latham

The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary

by Laura Shovan

You can view all the Cybils finalists here. Happy New Year and happy reading.

Monday Poetry Stretch - Somonka

Christmas is over, but Hanukkah is still going strong. The new year is just around the corner. I'd like to write about endings and beginnings, so a form written from two perspectives sounds like a good idea.

The somonka is a Japanese form that consists of two tanka written in tandem. The first tanka is usually a declaration of love, with the second a response to that declaration. While this form usually requires two authors, it is possible for one poet to write from both perspectives.

Writing somonka requires that we revisit the guidelines for tanka. Tanka is a form of Japanese poetry that has been practiced for more than 1000 years. Tanka are composed of 31 syllables in a 5/7/5/7/7 format. Most tanka focus on nature, seasons, the discussion of strong emotions, or a single event of some significance.

In her article Tanka as Diary, Amelia Fielden writes:

Tanka, meaning ‘short song’, is a 1300 year old Japanese form of lyric poetry. Non-rhyming, it is composed in Japanese in five phrases of 5/7/5/7/7 syllables.

In English, tanka are normally written in five lines, also without (contrived) rhyme, but in a flexible short/long/short/long/long rhythm. Due to dissimilarities between the two languages, it is preferable not to apply the thirty-one syllable standard of the Japanese poems, to tanka in English. Around twenty-one plus/minus syllables in English produces an approximate equivalent of the essentially fragmentary tanka form, and its lightness. To achieve a “perfect twenty-one”, one could write five lines in 3/5/3/5/5 syllables. If the resulting tanka sounds natural, then that’s fine. However, the syllable counting does not need to be so rigid. Though no line should be longer than seven syllables, and one should try to maintain the short/long/short/long/long rhythm, variations such as 2/4/3/5/5 or 4/6/3/6/7 or 3/6/4/5/6 syllable patterns can all make good tanka.

Here is an example, translated by one of my former colleagues at the University of Richmond. These tanka were sent back and forth between a nobleman named Mikata No Sami (Active C. 700) and his young wife, the daughter of Omi Ikuha (N.D.)

Tied up, it loosens,
untied, it's too long
my love's hair --
nowadays I can't see it --
has she combed it together?

Everyone now says
my hair is too long
and I should tie it up --
but the hair you gazed upon
I'll leave in tangles

Translated by Stephen Addiss in The Art of Haiku: Its History through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters (pp. 19-20)

I hope you'll join me this week in writing a somonka. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Monday Poetry Stretch - Bite-Sized Sonnet

Since we wrote a sonnet variation last week, I thought I continue with this theme. In Avis Harley's book Fly With Poetry: An ABC of Poetry, she include the bite-sized sonnet. This form follows the rhyme scheme of a "traditional sonnet," but it's not written in iambic pentameter. Instead, each line contains only ONE syllable. Here's Avis' poem.

A Bite-Sized Sonnet

House
sleeps.
Mouse
creeps
in
through
thin
flue.

Spots
cheese;
stops.
Sees
cat.
SCAT!

Poem ©Avis Harley. All rights reserved.

I hope you'll join me this week in writing a bite-sized sonnet. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Monday Poetry Stretch - Curtal/Curtailed Sonnet

Sorry I missed you all last week. I got caught up in the end of the semester and it was Friday before I realized I hadn't scheduled a post for writing. Mea culpa. I am back and have a number of stretches ready to go to see us into the New Year.

The curtal sonnet (or curtailed sonnet) was invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poem Pied Beauty is a fine example of this form.

Pied Beauty

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

Read the poem in its entirety.

The curtal sonnet is composed of a sestet and a quintet. It is written in iambic pentameter, with the exception of the final line, which is a spondee (a foot consisting of two long (or stressed) syllables). The rhyme scheme is:

• sestet: a/b/c/a/b/c
• quintet: d/c/b/d/c or d/b/c/d/c 

You can read more about this form at The Curtal Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I hope you'll join me this week in writing a curtal sonnet. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Poetry Seven Write Ekphrastic Poems (One Last Time for 2016)

And so, another year of writing poetry with my fabulous sisters comes to an end. This year we alternated poetic forms with ekphrastic poems. This time around Andi shared photos taken at the Glencairn Museum Cloister. This is the photo I chose.

Photograph © Andi Sibley

I've never written a love poem before, as I'm not really the romantic type, but I am sentimental. Here's where this image took me.

22 Years and Counting ...

You sit in the ram
I’ll sit in the ewe
together in quiet
we’ll relish the view

The peace of the valley
buried in snow
the twinkling lights
of the houses below

Up here on the hill
with the now setting sun
we sit in our chairs
as the day is undone

Communing together
we don’t say a word
but we don’t need to speak
for our hearts to be heard

With fingertips touching
we speak with our eyes
the fact that you love me
is still a surprise

You are my comfort
my home and my song
in the map of my heart
it's with you I belong

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2016. All rights reserved.

You can read the poems written by my Poetry Seven compatriots at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Kelly Fineman
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon
• Andi Sibley

I do hope you'll take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Bridget Magee at wee words for wee ones. Happy poetry Friday friends!

Monday Poetry Stretch - Six Words

Don't fret, this isn't a sestina! Today I have a different six-word poetry challenge.

In the book I Am Writing a Poem About . . . A Game of Poetry, Myra Cohn Livingston writes about three of the assignments she gave to students in her master class in poetry at UCLA. The third assignment Livingston gave was to write a poem that included six assigned words. Here is a description from the book's introduction.

About the last assignment--a six-word-based poem--there was some debate. Everyone agreed that hole, friend, candle, ocean, bucket, and snake presented possibilities, but a few preferred the word scarecrow to bucket, so a choice was given. Hole, friend, candle, ocean, and snake were mandatory, but one could choose either bucket or scarecrow as the sixth word.

Now, that is a challenge! Let's follow Livingston's directions and write a poem that contains the five words hole, friend, candle, ocean, and snake, as well as either bucket or scarecrow as the sixth word. I hope you'll join me in writing this week. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Monday Poetry Stretch - Terzanelle

I'm a day late this holiday week, but I'm here and glad you are as well.

So, what do you get when you cross a terza rima and a villanelle? The answer is a poetic form called a terzanelle. A terzanelle uses the villanelle’s form of five triplets and a quatrain with the interlocking rhyme scheme of the terza rima.

Here is the line pattern and rhyme scheme.

1 a1
2 b1
3 a2

4 b2
5 c1
6 repeat line 2

7 c2
8 d1
9 repeat line 5

10 d2
11 e1
12 repeat line 8

13 e2
14 f1
15 repeat line 11

16 f2
17 repeat line 1
18 repeat line 14
19 repeat line 3


You can read more about the terzanelle at Form and Formlessness.

I hope you'll join me this week in writing a terzanelle. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Monday Poetry Stretch - Diminishing Rhyme

The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach, contains a number of prompts and writing exercises, including this one entitled Emotion/Motion/Ocean/Shun. Here's what Susan Mitchell writes:

If you read the title of this exercise aloud, you will hear a quadruple rhyme. But if you examine the words themselves, you will notice that there is something special about this rhyme scheme. The sound shun is contained in ocean, the sounds of both shun and ocean in motion, and shun, ocean and motion can all be folded into emotion. Such a rhyme scheme, which incidentally was favored by the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert, is called diminishing rhyme because the rhyme words get smaller as you move from emotion to shun. But I prefer the term nesting rhymes because the words nest one inside the other like Russian wooden dolls.

Here is an example of this form from the George Herbert poem "Paradise".

I bless Thee, Lord, because I grow
Among the trees, which in a row
To Thee both fruit and order ow 

Read the poem in its entirety. 

So, that's it. Your challenge is to write a poem that uses diminishing rhyme. Won't you join us? Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Monday Poetry Stretch - Macaronic Verse

In celebrating my blogiversary yesterday (10 years!), I went back and looked at all the poetry stretches we've done since I started posting them in August of 2007. It's been more than two years we wrote poems in the form of macaronic verse, so it seems like a good time to revisit the form. The Handbook of Poetic Forms defines macaronic verse in this fashion.

Macaronic verse is a peculiar, rare and often comic form of poetry that sometimes borders on nonsense. It is a mixture of two (or more) languages in a poem, in which the poet usually subjects one language to the grammatical laws of another to make people laugh.

Poetry Base describes macaronic verse this way.

The definition is a poem in a mixture of two languages, one of them preferably Latin. Usually the mixture of languages is a bit absurd. The word of one language may be terminated with common endings in the other.

So, your challenge for this week is to write a poem that uses more than one language. I hope you will join me this week in writing macaronic verse. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Ten Years Old! A Blogiversary Retrospective

Today I am celebrating 10 years in the blogosphere, and more specifically, the Kidlitosphere. It's been an amazing ride. I've found a community here that humbles, inspires, educates, and supports me in ways I never would have imagined when I started this journey. 

To celebrate the big day, I've decided to share some of my favorite posts, memories, and personal experiences that have grown out the real, live human connections I've made in this digital world. So, here we go!

*****

When I started this blog, my son had just started kindergarten. He's now a sophomore in high school.

 

I'll admit to being a bit embarrassed about my early posts. I'm not really sure what I wanted the blog to be. I knew I wanted it to be about teaching and books and math and science and .... probably too many things in the beginning. What's interesting about reading those early posts is that some of the ideas and issues that I grappled with then, I continue to grapple with. For example, in an early post I wrote this after my first parent-teacher conference sitting on the parent side of the desk.

My biggest concern was in fact, his teacher's concern. I have a kid who hates to make mistakes, puts too much pressure on himself to get everything right, and just wants to be downright perfect.
...
I was thrilled with the fantastic report I received from William's teacher, but found myself wondering on the drive home, how do I fix this? How do I teach him it's okay to make mistakes, that everyone does, and that this is really what learning is all about? I'm not sure, but when I find out, I'll let you know.

Fast forward ten years. This week in class we focused on math talks and the "productive struggle" that's so important in math. And we talked about mistakes ... how we need to value them and how we can't fear them as kids do the hard work of learning something new.

In those first few posts I wrote about teaching, planning, historical fiction, "busy" children's books, and more. What led me down the rabbit hole, and opened up a new world on the blog was my post on January 1, 2007 highlighting the Cybils shortlist. That year, 482 books were nominated to produce a list of 45 finalists. This one post led me to the kidlitosphere, and it ultimately helped me find my tribe. My "tribe" consists of authors, teachers, librarians, poets, and a whole host of folks I never would have met were it not for this blog. My blogroll would be hundreds of links today if I actually listed every one on this blog. Now I can follow many of these folks on Twitter.

If I'd been thinking ahead, or much more creative, I would have turned this into a lengthy celebration and started weeks in advance, sharing some of the more interesting bits and bobs along the way. Ten years is a long time to do one thing. Heck, people today often don't hold a job that long! The blog has definitely morphed a bit, but it's still a place I love to hang out. Here are some of the highlights from my first year of blogging.

*****
January 7, 2007
I entered Lisa Yee's Bodacious Book Title Contest. The rules were:
1. Think of a title from a children's/middle grade/young adult book.
2. Change the FIRST LETTER of ONE of the words to make it into a whole new title.
3. Then add a sentence describing the new book.

Here's one of my entries. It seems appropriate to share so close to election day.
Original Title: Duck for President
New Title: Puck for President
Summary: Upon escaping from the pages of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck finds himself in a land ruled by a ridiculous republican leader and, convinced he can do better, decides to run for President.

January 26, 2007
I participated in Poetry Friday for the first time! I didn't know to link up with others at that point, but I was finding a place to share and slowly finding my way into a community that I still participate in.

January 29, 2007
I posted my first thematic book list and Mary Lee Hahn of A Year of Reading stopped by to recommend a book. I'm so glad she did, and I'm so glad we're still talking about books and poetry together.

March 5, 2007
I wrote my first fib and walked through my writing/revising process. And Greg Pincus of GottaBook stopped by! (You're shocked, right?)

April 9, 2007
I wrote my first book review and was thrilled to find the author stopped by. This has happened a lot over the years, and it still makes me giddy. And that book I reviewed then is still in my teaching library and gets regular use.

May 15 - June 4, 2007
I traveled to Taiwan, China, and Tibet with a group of faculty members and blogged about my adventures. Here's a link to my summary post about what I learned.

July 16, 2007
I wrote about the book Ten Little Rabbits and the difficulty in evaluating books about other cultures. Debbie Reese of American Indians in Children's Literature stopped by and my education began. I still read her blog and am inspired by her tireless work.

August 6, 2007
I posted my very first poetry stretch. The form was the bouts-rímes. It's called the Monday Poetry Stretch now. I don't republish the poems in a new post any longer, just hope folks will drop into the comments to read the great things people share.

September 28, 2007
John Green came to campus as part of a lecture series. (This was just one year after An Abundance of Katherines was published.) I'd been following the Vlog Brothers since he was awarded a Printz honor in January, so meeting him was great fun.

October 6, 2007
I attended the very first Kidlit conference in Chicago and met all these amazing people.

October 15, 2007
The kidlit community came together in an event called Blogging for a Cure, spearheaded by Jules and Eisha of Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. More than 60 bloggers worked to highlight an amazing group of illustrators who created snowflakes in support of Robert's Snow 2007. I may have even bid on and won a few ...

And that, my friends, is just a recap of one year of blogging! I've written numerous thematic lists since then, continue to host poetry stretches, participate in Poetry Friday, still speculate on the nature of diversity in children's books, write about poetry in many varied forms, and post original poetry supported by my amazing poetry sisters. I've experienced the highest highs and some of the lowest lows with this community. I'm so very grateful to have you. Thank you for reading, commenting, and stopping in to share my little corner of the internet. I love seeing you here.

Poetry Seven Write Terza Rima

As this year of writing together winds down, the Poetry Seven gang is tackling our final form, the terza rima. The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms (Padgett, 2000) defines terza rima in this fashion.

Terza rima is a tumbling, interlocking rhyme scheme that was invented by the thirteenth-century Italian poet Dante for the creation of his long poem, The Divine Comedy.

Terza rima (an Italian phrase meaning "third rhyme") consists of a series of three-line stanzas (tercets) with the rhyme scheme aba bcb cdc ded and so on. It can go on as long as the poet wishes. At the end of the poem an extra line is often added to complete the structure: yzy z.

You can read more on this form at Poets.org.

So, with a form to guide us, we decided to write about something uplifting, grateful, or hopeful. I'm not sure I managed to meet the theme head on this time, but rather think I've struck a close tangent. It's been hard to feel hope during this protracted election cycle, but I'm trying mightily to stay positive.

Here's the first draft which I wrote last night. Yes, at this point in the semester I'm working on everything at the last minute (much like my students, I imagine). It shows, but I'm glad to be here with my sisters once again.

Untitled Terza Rima
(With apologies to Langston Hughes)

Our world feels broken, bruised beyond repair
such bluster, noise, and chaos fill each day
but hope must be our choice and not despair

As clouds around us swell in black and gray
the news reminds us things could be much worse
so we must persevere, must not delay

to treasure all we have, this earth diverse
to meet each heart with gratitude and trust
to turn this global meltdown in reverse

to show more kindness, fight for what is just
to raise up those who've long been trod upon
to douse hate's sparks before we all combust

Acknowledge this will be a marathon
that change requires strength that’s undeterred
that only faith and love will move us on

to realize at last those dreams deferred

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2016. All rights reserved.

You can read the poems written by my Poetry Seven compatriots at the links below. Sending hugs to Andi who's not sharing a poem today, but always with us in spirit.

• Tanita Davis
• Kelly Fineman
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

I do hope you'll take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by one of my poetry sisters, Laura Purdie Salas. Happy poetry Friday friends!

P.S. - I'm celebrating a BIG blogiversary on Sunday, so I hope you'll stop by to join me for some virtual cake and a few fond memories.

Monday Poetry Stretch - Ekphrastic

Since it's Halloween, it seemed appropriate to suggest we write about this image.

Shapes of Fear by Maynard Dixon (1930-32)

Smithsonian American Art Museum

So, there's your challenge for the week. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.

Monday Poetry Stretch - List Poem for Fall

A list poem is a carefully crafted list, catalog, or inventory of things. Robert Lee Brewer of Poetic Asides writes this in his article List Poem: A Surprisingly American Poem:

The list poem was used by the Greeks and in many books of the Bible. But two of the most popular American poems, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” are list poems. So what is a list poem? 

Basically, a list poem (also known as a catalog poem) is a poem that lists things, whether names, places, actions, thoughts, images, etc. It’s a very flexible and fun form to work with.

What is it about list poems that makes them so accessible? Perhaps it's because the list is so ubiquitous in our lives. Everyone makes lists, so finding them in poetry is not unexpected and makes them seem familiar.

In the book Conversations With a Poet: Inviting Poetry into K-12 Classrooms (2005), written by Betsy Franco, the chapter devoted to the list poem includes this background and helpful information.

The list poem or catalog poem consists of a list or inventory of things. Poets started writing list poems thousands of years ago. They appear in lists of family lineage in the Bible and in the lists of heroes in the Trojan War in Homer's Iliad.  

Characteristics Of A List Poem

• A list poem can be a list or inventory of items, people, places, or ideas.

• It often involves repetition.

• It can include rhyme or not.

• The list poem is usually not a random list. It is well thought out.

• The last entry in the list is usually a strong, funny, or important item or event.

Your challenge for this week is to write a list poem about fall, or Halloween, or something October-y. Please share a link to your poem or the poem itself in the comments.