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On Facebook last week, Aimee Jackson asked what were our favorite things about winter, and it reminded me of this poem I originally wrote to promote a Lauren Stringer snowflake in the fundraiser Robert's Snowflakes. I barely recognize it, but 3-1/2 years later, it does still share my favorite warm things of winter. 



And now, I'm off to a WW meeting and then some cross-country skiing, where my warm breath will fog up my glasses, and hand warmers will keep at least my palms, if not my fingers, toasty. Hey, sometimes it requires a little artificial help to stay warm in winter. 

Elaine at Wild Rose Reader has today's Poetry Friday Roundup!

Here’s book 9 of the 10 Capstone poetry books I wrote in 2007. If you haven’t already heard about the overall process, and if you’re interested, you can read about it here.   After I finished Chatter, Sing, Roar, Buzz: Poems About the Rain Forest, I moved on to the food poetry collection. I wasn’t really looking forward to this one a whole lot. You’d think I’d love it—food and poetry are two of my favorite things! But it seems to me that most successful food poems tend to be rhyming, clever, and funny.

I was afraid the whole book would end up with such a narrow range of mood/voice that it would get boring. I mean, I could write a heartfelt ode to macaroni and cheese, but would it work for a kids’ book?

Anyway, I got the images, and I did my usual step of just going through them and jotting notes about what kinds of poems popped into my head. And I wrote my editor, Jenny Marks, with a question:

One more question: Do the poems need to be about the item *as* food, or could the food pic be an illustration of the poem in general.

In other words, could I write about a visit to an apple orchard for the apple poem, even though the pic doesn't show the orchard? Or could I write about a kid's birthday, but not necessarily the cake, and have the cake illustrate it?

The answer? Nope, I couldn’t. The product planning team wanted the great majority of poems to be “poems about food as food.”

Shoot.

OK, so I got to work writing first drafts of poems. I wrote poems about pancakes and pizza, donuts and sushi, picnics and the food pyramid.

I wrote haiku, limericks, and even a sijo, inspired by Linda Sue Park’s Tap-Dancing on the Roof. Most of the poems are fun, but it didn’t feel quite as one-note as I had feared.

I got feedback from Jenny and worked on a revision. There were of course plenty of changes and suggestions to consider, but most of them were minor. So all in all, the process was smooth as French silk pie.

Here are a few of the poems from the collection. These are not the images from the book—they’re just to give you an idea of it.

Summer Rain   I bite into sweet summer—it drips down my chin             Watermelon days                                                                               [haiku]

Can't Spaghetti-nough! noodles slippery, white sliding, twirling, dangling parmesan, butter, garlic, meatballs rolling, splashing, staining messy, red sauce   [diamante]

Making Pancakes   pour the batter             Plip             Plop   brown both sides             Flip             Flop   spread the butter             Tip             Top   let the syrup             Drip             Drop   eat them all up             Don’t             Stop!

I submitted a bunch of possible titles:

Saved by Blueberries

Slurped or Burped or Sipped

Skyscraper Sandwich

Watermelon Days

Pour the Batter

The Incredible, Edible…Root?

What a Birthday Candle Stands For

No Green Beans Until You Finish Your Cupcake

Slurped or Burped or Sipped (the title of a poem about milk) was my favorite, but Capstone decided on Lettuce Introduce You: Poems About Food. Once I finished this book, I had just one more project on the horizon: transportation poems. I’ll post about that one soon.

Thanks for letting me share about my poetry books here:>) Because I have a bad memory and my work-for-hire books turn into a blur looking back at a bunch I wrote all close together, it's so nice for me to have a little record of the process here.

Miss Rumphius' Poetry Stretch this week was to come up with a summer poem. I confess I don't like summer, which is heresy here in Minnesota. But on one of my many chauffeuring trips yesterday, I came up with part of this, so here goes:



Summer Souvenirs

sunshine
vinyl seats
back of legs
sticking

swimming pool
curly slides
popsicle
licking

state park
camping trip
mosquito bite
itches

skateboard
concrete
row of tiny
stitches

red legs
purple tongue
bites on both my knees

souvenirs of summer:
gashes
rashes
fleas

--Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved




I started with the stitches, since my younger daughter Maddie started off her summer by getting tangled up in Jack's (that adorable, enthusiastic beagle we adopted) leash, having the fence gate hit her in the back, and falling down against the wooden fence. Apparently, a big sliver of wood came down with her, because she had a hole in her back! I got a phone call while I was at some job training on Dreamweaver and went racing home and to urgent care. An hour later, she had five stitches in her lower back. No trampoline or swimming for a week, and she's completely bummed.

Yep. Summer's here.



There's still time to play. Visit Miss Rumphius for all the details!

How are we going to pay writers ten years from now?

Nobody knows--there's no standard industry price to pay a writer for a blog post, a web video, or a podcast. As these forms multiply, it's becoming harder and harder for writers to get a fair wage for these new products.

That's one of the big reasons why the Writers Guild of America is striking in Hollywood right now. This video from the Guild explains, complete with cast members from the brilliantly written (and now halted by the strike) show, The Office. (Thanks to TV Decoder for the link)

If you want more funny and dark context on the strike, Steve Bryant passes along the mysterious videos of Alex Perez: Scab Writer. Finally, think about this quote from the story, "Penny-A-Worder" by Cornell Woolrich--a reflection on the self-destructive joy of writing for the vicious pulp fiction industry in the 1930's.

Is this how we will be living in ten years, chained to metaphorical typewriters?

"The story flowed like a torrent.  The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet.  The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower.  The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thing gray ghosts, in good cause; the mortality rate was terrible."