In Room 166 this week kindergarteners are exploring in depth the question of "What Do Poets Do?" With the help of Langston Hughes, Lilian Moore, Tracie Vaughn Zimmer and e.e. cummings we have learned that:
Poets choose to write about one small thing.
Poets choose juicy words that sound good together.
Poets choose where to put their words.
and
Poets create strong feelings.
I revised my poem selections this year because of a change in our curriculum, and we have a theme of "hands" going on. Here's the poem--which somehow I had missed in my long study of cummings's work--that we read in search of a strong feeling (I selected the bold-type section for kindergarten readers)...and oh, people, I have just made a wild discovery. See below.
Spring is like a perhaps hand || E. E. Cummings, 1894 - 1962
III
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.
**************
Here is the discovery: in my haste to revise my poetry project booklet on Monday morning, I see that I left off the last line, "without breaking anything." I just never even saw this wondrous final finesse of spring's perhaps Hand!
I don't feel bad about selecting the second stanza only for younger kids, but I do feel foolish for missing that last line--and yet for the kids, it was that (entirely plausible) ending of the poem on "and" that created the strong feelings of surprise and amusement and wonder! In fact our response to the poem ended up being adding a word or phrase that seemed to follow this rather tricky abstract metaphor (which we concretized by acting it out. Partner 1 was the window first while Partner 2 was the the hand, and then we swapped roles.)
"Wonder" is one of the Po-Emotions included in Mary Lee's NPM Challenge, too, on April 20. Here was my response to the challenge.
?
Like the beat of your heart
wonder should be reflexive
all of a sudden daily you
should find yourself
pricked by a kind of desire
formless but strong
an itch of the mind
that you just must scratch
but it's not in your head
it wanders all over your body
your feet want to travel
your hands want to unravel
every sense wants in
on the wonder,
while your mind does the molding
stretching & straightening the circling
half-round-stem-and-dot
into a bee-line towards that
exclamatory dot of Got It
!
--HM 2015
all rights reserved
I'll end with Hana's response to "April Rain Song" below, and after tomorrow, when "I am a poet too" concludes our week-long intensive, I'll be able to do my annual sharing of kindergarten poetry.
The roundup is flowing down at No Water River with Renee LaTulippe today--wonder your way over there!
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