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By:
Aline Pereira,
on 8/24/2012
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Author and educator Sylvia Vardell has just announced some exciting news on her blog Poetry for Children! She and her friend/author Janet Wong have collaborated on another wonderful project: The Poetry Friday Anthology.
The Poetry Friday Anthology is a new anthology of 218 original poems for children in kindergarten through 
fifth grade by 75 popular poets including J. Patrick Lewis, Jack Prelutsky, Jane Yolen, Margarita Engle, X. J. Kennedy, Kathi Appelt, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, Georgia Heard and Nikki Grimes and many more.
The book includes a poem a week for the whole school year (K-5) with curriculum connections provided for each poem, each week, each grade level. Just five minutes every “Poetry Friday” will reinforce key skills in reading and language arts such as rhyme, repetition, rhythm, alliteration, etc.
Thanks to the lovely blog world of the “kidlitosphere,” I’ve been a fan of “Poetry Friday” since the beginning (in 2006). The idea of pausing for poetry every Friday is so appealing to me, maybe because Friday has always been my favorite day of the week. I think it is a natural fit for busy teachers and librarians who can build on that Poetry Friday tradition by incorporating a weekly poetry break into their regular routines. That’s the first “hook” in our book– the idea of sharing a poem every Friday! (More often is even better, but Friday is the hook!)
The other hook is the call for connecting with the new Common Core standards (and in Texas where the Common Core was not adopted– don’t get me started– connecting with the TEKS, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills). We’ve always had curricular standards of one kind or another, but poetry hasn’t always been an explicit component. It is now! Of course this worries me a bit as poetry may also be abused and butchered in the name of test preparation. But the challenge is to provide guidance in sharing poetry that respects the integrity of the poem, celebrating the pleasures of language, while reinforcing the necessary skills. That’s the second book “hook”– we’ve tied every poem in The Poetry Friday Anthology to the Common Core standards (and TEKS standards in Texas) for poetry.
This book is first and foremost a quality anthology of 218 original poems for children written by 75 of today’s most popular poets. Children in any state (or country) can enjoy, explore, and respond to these poems. However, we have also come to realize that educators, librarians, and parents are looking for guidance in how to share poetry with children and teach the skills within the curriculum as well. Thus, this book offers both. It’s part poetry collection and part professional resource guide– quality poetry plus curriculum-based suggestions for helping children enjoy and understand poetry more deeply.
You’ll find more information about the book at the PoetryFridayAnthology blog here. Our official launch date is Sept. 1 when we hope to offer an e-book version of the book as well– projectable and searchable! But the print version of the book is available NOW to help jumpstart the school year with poetry. I’ll also be posting a few nuggets from the book here in the near future– as well as more about our new joint publishing venture, Pomelo Books.
This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Dori Reads so head on over and see what treasures are in store.
By:
Aline Pereira,
on 12/2/2011
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Continuing our exploration of the world of e-books for children, we’re asking practitioners and people on the ground about some of the challenges and triumphs for them personally, as well as for the children’s publishing industry as a whole.
Today we have with us Janet Wong, former lawyer turned children’s book author of numerous books, including A Suitcase of Seaweed, Me and Rolly Maloo, Twist: Yoga Poems, and Once Upon a Tiger, an illustrated e-book poetry collection about endangered animals, as well as three e-poetry collections, co-designed and edited with Sylvia Vardell: Poetry Tag Time, p*tag and the recently released Gift Tag. Janet’s many awards include the International Reading Association’s “Celebrate Literacy Award”.
We first interviewed Janet in 2008 and it’s great to welcome her back to PaperTigers to talk here about her experiences with e-books.
***
What was your inspiration for writing e-books? Was that your intention from the get-go, or was there an evolution in your creative process?
Sylvia Vardell and I hatched our PoetryTagTime project one year ago at the NCTE convention with one simple goal: to make poetry an impulse buy. Poetry books are too often neglected, left to collect dust on bookshelves. We wanted people to hear about our books, read a sample poem, click “buy” (for no more than the cost of a cup of coffee)–and fall in love with poetry!
Children’s books, particularly picture books, present specific challenges to the e-book industry in terms of faithful reproduction of art and story. They also present exciting opportunities for new forms of interaction. What limitations or challenges, expected or unexpected, have you personally experienced creating e-books for children, and in turn, what benefits have you discovered as compared to printed books?
Designing for the small black-and-white screen of the Kindle isn’t easy, especially since you can’t know what size font a reader will choose. A child who chooses a large font might end up breaking a poem’s lines in places where a line break might be, well, ugly. For our third PoetryTagTime venture, GIFT TAG, Sylvia came up with the name “Kindleku” to describe the form that we “invented” for the Kindle screen. This form allows a maximum of 10 lines and 25 characters per line (including spaces)–the most that will fit on a Kindle screen when it is set at Font Size 6 (though Font Size 4 is, in my opinion, the best size for reading most e-books). Douglas Florian called this form the “Kindlekuku” and we acknowledge in the intro that it was cuckoo to limit our poets to 250 characters per poem–but we think the poems are terrific!
Particularly in English-speaking countries, a common concern is the lack of diversity in children’s books. How do you think e-books might address such concerns, and how has your work engaged with issues of multicultural children’s books?
More and more people are discovering the authors in themselves and soon will be using e-books to make their voices and stories heard. This is such an exciting time to be involved with books. There will be lots of awful books, just as there are lots of awful YouTube videos–but there will also be indie-pub
Poetry Friday people, help spread the word during this gift-giving season by linking, posting, Tweeting and facebooking about the poetry e-books out there. Here's my little commercial...Folks, there could not be an easier, cooler stocking-stuffer for your iGeneration kids than
p*tag, the downloadable poetry anthology for Kindle, Nook or iPad. For a mere $2.99, you can send a collection of fresh, original poems for readers 12 and older straight to their digital devices!
In addition to
p*tag for teens, there's
Poetry Tag Time, perfect for your elementary teacher friends, and
Gift Tag (pictured here), which features poems about presents. All can be enjoyed on iPhones, Kindles, Nooks, computers and interactive whiteboards.
For a taste of p*tag, here's my piece "The Wishing Tree," introduced this way:
People (adults, mostly) say that “money doesn’t grow on trees, you know,” like it’s no work at all to produce a crop of juicy peaches or shiny acorns. Other people (little kids, mostly) think that lots of things grow on trees, like corks and popcorn. This photo came with the title “Wishing,” so it was easy to embrace the intriguing idea that wishes grow on trees. Does that mean there’s a Come-True Tree somewhere?A Wishing Tree
on every star
every puff of birthday breath
every penny down the well
you wish for the same thing
on every four-leaf clover
every loose eyelash
every turkey’s furcula
you wish for the same thing
(can’t tell us, can you?
if you do it won’t come true)
you wish it every day
until one day you’re walking along,
secretly wishing on random things:
cloud shaped like a duck
three green punch-buggies in a row
your own lucky-left blue shoe
and you find—who knew?—a wishing tree
hung with white wishes as light as popcorn:
“I wish I could fly”
“I wish for a slumber party with a rock star”
and of course
“I wish to have three more wishes”
reaching deeper between the leaves
you find riper, heavier wishes:
“I wish my dog was still alive”
“I wish I had stuck up for myself”
and then—no way!—
“My wish is the same as yours”
this one you pluck, fold in half and
tuck into your right shoe,
waltzing away on the soles
of twin wishes
Heidi Mordhorst 2011
from
p*tag
By:
Aline Pereira,
on 10/7/2011
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I’ve just bought my first e-book. I realise that might fill some people with horror at how long it’s taken me to jump on the bandwagon, but it was always going to have to be something special that would propel me into action. Perhaps if I spent more time on public transport, I might have succumbed to an e-reader by now, but as it is… Anyway, I’ve just downloaded the free Kindle for PC and have taken the leap, tempted as I was by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong‘s e-book p*tag. It’s an exciting anthology of 31 poems newly written and published to coincide with National Teen Read Week this month in the US: “the first ever electronic poetry anthology of new poems by top poets for teens” – and wow, what a roll of poets it is: check it out here.
Following on from the success of their PoetryTagTime project of children’s poetry in April during the US’s national poetry month, this game of poetry tag includes some simple rules to connect the poems – each one had to include three words from the previous person’s poems. And an added twist is that the poets chose an image from this selection of photographs taken by Sylvia Vardell, as the inspiration for their poem. Each poet then also provided a short introduction to their choice of photograph. All this makes for a very exciting, energetic mix of poetry that can be read and enjoyed in many ways. I loved the added dimension of the word tag used in the cover photograph and to good effect in Janet Wong’s own poem “p*tag” – it rounds off the collection beautifully.
What’s really great is that the conceit of the tagging in no way defines the quality of the individual poems. From Marilyn Singer’s opening reverso poem “Time and Water”, you know you’re in for a treat. The array of names included several I’ve “met” through Poetry Friday, and others who are new to me – what a wonderful way for teenagers to encounter poetry; and the interactive nature of the e-book invites readers to explore each poet’s work more deeply. I was intrigued by Arnold Adoff’s introduction (as much a poem as his actual poem): in it he invites readers to email him so he can send the “original” in its, well, I’d like to say real format, but I’m not sure he would allow the word “real” to slip by – and it’s already on shaky ground in a discussion of e-books. Hmmm! Let’s quote then:
“this poem is in a format to fit the machine you are using now…
but feel free to be in touch [...]
and i’ll send you the “original” and we can talk about:
style and substance an the poet’s hard(est) head….
I’d like to think there’ll be some young poets getting in touch…
With so many ways to find a route into the collection (photographs, the three linking words, each poet’s introduction), not to mention the variety of viewing possibilities for its e-format, these exciting poems touch on so many emotions. From humor to deep pondering, there’s something here for every teen – even the so-called “Reluctant Reader” (Jaime Adoff), and like the goose (or is it a swan?) in Julie Larios’ “Walking, Waiting”, there’s the possibility of ‘a wild honk or two / or three that might surprise y
Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong, pioneers of spreading kids' poetry via e-books, are at it again. Their last outing was Poetry Tag Time, which I posted about here and shared my poem from here. Their latest Kindle release is p*tag, another poetry anthology, this one aimed at teens.
From Amazon: In this second PoetryTagTime anthology, P*TAG, 31 poets speak to the complicated lives of today's teens, with quirky, reflective, and soulful poems about love and longing, war and worry, tattoos, piercings, watching people, being watched, broken lives, luck, burping up kittens, and more. The list of contributors is a "who's who" of the best poets for young people, including YA poets and verse novelists Naomi Shihab Nye, Margarita Engle, Allan Wolf, Betsy Franco, Paul Janeczko, and Helen Frost, Newbery Honor winner Joyce Sidman, current Children's Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis, and poetry legend Lee Bennett Hopkins. Readers can play P*TAG on their own by writing a poem about a photo from the photo library blog at http://teenpoetrytagtime.blogspot.com and comparing it to the P*TAG poem that was inspired by that same photo. More info at www.PoetryTagTime.com.
Here are two of my favorites.I've been reading the anthology this week, and it's a great one! I love (as you know) poems inspired by images, and the poetry here is top-notch. I don't share full poems from anthologies, but here are just a few brief excerpts that I've loved so far."even if we don't / speak the same language, / I'll sip your dream, / and then, and then, say /"
--from Blue Bucket, by Naomi Shihab Nye
"Rapunzel herself / Has NOTHING on me, / A whip of my hair / Could cover a sea /"
--from Hair, by Charles Waters
"I am pretty sure / the singer makes up the words / as he goes along /"
--from Don't You boys Know Any Nice Songs?, by Michael Salinger
"But some hearts are made of china /"--from Broken, by Jeannine Atkins
"Her energy pours down stairs / in slow motion, / rippling like a golden slinky /"
--from Perfect (for Clara), by Joyce Sidman
What a variety of voices and subjects! And at $2.99 for the Kindle e-book, you really can't beat the price. Poetry is one of the few things small enough for me to read on my phone, and I've read some great poems this week while standing in line at the post office, waiting for my daughter at a doctor's appointment, etc. I hope you'll give p*tag a try! And tell your teacher/librarian friends who are looking for poetry to share with teens.Mary Ann at Great Kid Books has the Poetry Friday Roundup today. Enjoy!
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By:
Lorie Ann Grover,
on 9/30/2011
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Okay. 31 poets, 31 images and you have p*tag, 31 poems linked by tagging and repetition. It went like this: wait until you are tagged, pick an image, and then write a poem, using 3 of the words from the previous poet's poem. Ready, set, go! And we were off, under the guidance of Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong. This ekphrastic approach to poetry, where poems are inspired by art, fueled the poets fully. While the resulting poetry collection is eclectic, the repeated words give a notable continuity to the stream. There's an organic pulse running from beginning to end as readers witness this captured Art Happening on their e-readers.
Personally, David L. Harrison tagged me, so I was able to read his wonderful poem "Family Reunion at the Beach." Then I was off to choose a photo from Sylvia's posted images given to inspire us. The photo of a crowd, blurred by the camera's movement, caught my eye. It seemed as if spirits were leaving bodies despite the people's focus locked on the stage. I then chose three of David's words from his poem: clasping, future, and eyes, for my own haiku "Crowd." Finally, I tagged the lovely poet, Julie Larios. I would later learn she used my words: trapped, eyes, away.
All other poems were hidden from the participants until the release of p*tag. So it was a delight to download and read the stream, read how images and poems and repeated words created a complete work of art. I love how one poet responded to another, and immediately offered another point of view. You can see this particularly between Julie Larios and Michele Krueger. One writes of rising above, the other finding "peace in place." Stephanie Hemphill's' "In Praise of Luck" lifted my spirit, although I'd call it providence. :~) And oh, the delight to see one I esteem so highly, Lee Bennett Hopkins, write with few words just like me.
So here is a poem a day for the month of October while we celebrate YALSA's Teen Read Week. How perfect for the theme "Picture it @ your library." Download p*tag onto your device. Visit the website to learn more, see photos, and try your own hand at the ekphrastic approach to poetry. Thanks, Janet and Sylvia! *standing ovation*
p*tag
compiled by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong
available on e-readers
Over the summer, students in my daughter's humanities and communications program read
All Quiet on the Western Front (which I also read in high school; did you?). Now that the school year is in full swing, these 12-year-olds are writing 2-page essays analyzing the message and tone of World War I poems. I recognized the names of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and some of the poems included in her packet, but I was not familiar with the poem Daisy chose.
Suicide in the Trenches
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
~ Siegfried Sassoon, 1917
Simplicity itself--even nursery-rhymish--but effective, yes?
Daisy had a tough time getting going with her essay, and I guess I'm not surprised. We thank our lucky stars that she has never lived first-hand through a war (a curiously true statement), and that being so full of despair you'd put a bullet through your own brain is foreign to her. (However, when I wondered whether her choice of "frustrated" to describe the soldier boy's feelings was quite strong enough to warrant suicide, she quipped, "
This frustration would be enough for me!")
But it's hard, as a parent, to know that my big little girl is spending time down in the trenches with the demands of a well-constructed five-paragraph essay on a topic she has to stretch hard to reach: the grim reality of war. I take solace in the fact that immersing yourself in a masterful poem is always worthwhile.
Find more poetic war and peace--and above all, connection--at
Read Write Believe with Sara today...BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!
p*tag is here!!! October 1 is the official launch date of the new
p*tag digital poetry anthology for teens, conceived and edited by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong. For only $2.99 (early-bird price $1.99 through today) you can download this anthology in a wink and become a proud part of the publicity machine for new work by the "best poets for young people, including YA poets and verse novelists Naomi Shihab Nye, Margarita Engle, Allan Wolf, Betsy Franco, Paul Janeczko, Helen Frost, Newbery Honor winner Joyce Sidman, current Children's Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis, and poetry legend Lee Bennett Hopkins,".... and li'l ol' me.
Please take time to support this project and share it wherever you go, in body and in spirit. Sylvia's intriguing photos were wonderfully inspiring and Janet's concluding piece is beyond powerful; there are poems for readers of all stripes ages 12 and up, and this approach to publishing is aimed at bringing more poetry to more young people using the media they can most easily access.&
I didn't think a
tag game would ever be quite so exciting again, but I was wrong: I have been invited to participate in the second poetry tag project coordinated by
Sylvia Vardell and
Janet Wong, champions for the dissemination of poetry for young people. Titled
p*tag (
you can play along here), it's the "first electronic-only anthology for teens" and will be illustrated with photos taken by Sylvia herself.
Even as I write I'm in the midst of the challenge: I have just been tagged by Stephanie Hemphill, an accomplished verse novelist. My mission is to a) immerse myself in a photo I selected from Sylvia's
intriguing gallery, b) select three words from Stephanie's fine poem, and c) compose my own poem inspired by the photo using Stephanie's three words and an as-yet-undetermined number of my own. I have 24 hours in which to do this, and to write a piece that describes my process and how the resulting poem is linked to the photo and to Stephanie's.
Then I get to tag another of the 31 poets who are participating (with respect for who's on vacation this weekend and who's working!). The project will all be complete and available for download at an irresistable price by October. How cool IS this? I just hope I can pull off something worthy of the concept and of
the first Poetry Tag Time volume, which was e-published in April.
So, back to Stephanie Hemphill. Her latest book is
Wicked Girls, which I confess I thought might be another girls-telling-lies-and-being-mean-to-each-other-book despite its subtitle: A Novel of the Salem Witch Trials. I took up HarperTeen's offer to "browse inside" and found myself reading way past my bedtime with fascination and admiration. Here's a selection called "Caught."
Caught
Margaret Walcott, 17
Past the crooked evergreen
and the brook what lost its water,
on my way home from playing
games on who'll make me husband,
I cross Ipswich Road.
I rub my eyes. His two blue ones
be looking straight on me.
My pulse starts to gallop
like a steed. But today I trip not.
I track on up to him and say,
"Be you following me?"
His arms be thick enough
to lift the axe of three men.
Isaac's laughter shakes
through him so fierce
it scatters the snow off his boots.
"Yea, Margaret Walcott,
betwixt tending the stables,
staking out the fields
and bringing wares to town,
I be scouting all the time after you."
He raises one brow.
"But where hast thou been?"
The color splashes over me,
drenching me red. I hold up my buckets.
"Fetching water," I say.
"Thou are far from any stream
I know of," Isaac says,
and shakes his head.
His eyes catch on me
like he be holding lightly
my face with his hand.
"I must then be lost," I say,
and I pick up my bucket
and my skirts and trot off.
And do so quite a bit like a lady.
~ Stephanie Hemphill
from Wicked Girls, Harper 2011
Love this poem, Heidi. Especially the way you describe lightness:
every puff of birthday breath
hung with white wishes as light as popcorn:
So great to see you at NCTE, btw!
wishing is hard work, too, sometimes. especially if you want it to be just right.
this photo seems to want to trigger a memory of something one of my classes did a long time ago where we... did we messages of peace? hang paper cranes? the memory flickers so much i can't even be sure it isn't imagined, like roger ebert realizing that a treasured childhood memory is really a scene from a movie he'd forgotten about.
anyway, well done. now off to checl out this p*tag thing...
I wish I were funny.
I wish I could sing.
and I wish, I wish I could write poetry.
Love the poem! I also love the idea of a poetry e-book for kids. I'll check it out later. Have to work now!
Janet over at The Write Sisters
I wonder if students would write beautiful poems if you just offered the prompt, 'wishing tree', then after, read your poem? I love that you used so many 'wishing' pieces. We always wished when seeing the rainbows, but I think my grandmother made that up. Thanks for the books; they will make excellent gifts!
"waltzing away on the soles
of twin wishes"
soles, or souls? could be either, methinks.
Fun snapshot from today's Poetry Friday in my classroom -- new principal was there to witness two girls reading aloud a poem...from our new classroom Kindle! (Gift Tag and Poetry Tag Time are favorites to Kindle-read alone or with a buddy!!)