To help celebrate the release of this beautiful book, contributor Jackie Hoskings has organized a blog tour! Please join the poets as we share a one-minute poem that didn't quite make it into the book. Dig Me
I open
at the end of your stick--
little dent in the dirt
I open
wider, deeper, darker—
a hole that might
shout out
the round echoes
of a grand canyon
or whisper
the small secrets of
the soil
©Heidi Mordhorst
April is National Poetry month so to spice up my interviews I decided to talk to internationally renowned poet and anthologist, Lee Bennett Hopkins.
In 1989 he received the University of Southern Mississippi Medallion for “outstanding contributions to the field of children’s … Continue reading →
This collection offers 21 short poems on the ever-popular theme of good eats. They're organized by season and are rhymed and metered verse, every one. Titles like "Only Guacamole!", "How a Poet Orders a Shake," "Voyage of the Great Baked Potato Canoes" and "The Word's Biggest Birthday Cake" give a good sense of the spirit of this collection aimed at readers 4-12. Here are two excerpts.
from "Welcome to Watermelon Lake"
That's right, it's PINK! And what is more,
you're sure to like the pale green shore,
and how you feel so fresh and new—
you’ll love it here, we promise you!
But wait, there’s more! This place is sweet!
We even have a little fleet
of small black boats for summer fun—
enough of them for everyone!
and from “Gingerbread House Makeover”
And picture now a healthy house,
admired from coast to coast,
adorned with corn and carrot sticks
and built of whole wheat toast…
The radish roses near the walk,
the grove of broccoli tree,
the teeny-weeny doorknobs made
of bright green peas…”
Just makes you smile, doesn't it, starting the day with those tasty mouthfuls?! Puts me in mind of some foodily nonsense I experimented with years ago....
The Produce Cinquains Kiwi: alien green inside, alien fuzz outside—fruit that will never look dewy.
| Raisin: shrinking darkly, the grape adds its juices to the cloud of vapor on the ho- rizon. |
Oranges: thick skins heavy with Florida sunshine, so round that they resist being arranged.
| Mango: no matter how you slice it, the flesh around its deceptively large stone gets mangled. |
Wax bean: its name alone is unappetizing— not to mention how it looks fake, lacks green.
| Peaches: all of August’s sweet heat accumulates until the fruit dips within our reaches. |
Carrot: how can something that grows in the dark be as bright as the feathers of a parrot?
| Cabbage: once a month I buy one, thinking coleslaw; three weeks later it goes in the garbage.
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| ~Heidi Mordhorst |
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| all rights reserved |
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The Poetry Friday Roundup is with Keri today at Keri Recommends--go get a bite of poetry produce!
It's true--I'm a judgy person. It can hardly be helped when it's a strong quarter of your
personality. This trait can be problematic in everyday life, but I'm diving into 2016 with a new project that positively requires me to be judgy! This year I am serving as a Round 2 Judge for the Cybils Poetry Awards--if you're not familiar with the Cybils, read all about them
here. The process is quite formal, and after a longer period of Round 1 review performed by panelists, I and my fellow Round 2 judges (Linda Baie, Rosemary Marotta, Diane Mayr and Laura Shovan with leadership from Jone MacCulloch) have about 6 weeks to choose a winner from the seven finalists....and here they are!
HOUSE ARREST
by K. A. Holt (Chronicle)
THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC BOOK OF NATURE POETRY
edited by J. Patrick Lewis (National Geographic Children’s Books)
FLUTTER AND HUM/ALETEO Y ZUMBIDO
by Julie Paschkis (Henry Holt)
PAPER HEARTS
by Meg Wiviott (Margaret K. McElderry Books)
THE POPCORN ASTRONAUTS AND OTHER BITEABLE RHYMES
by Barbara Ruddel, illustrated by Joan Rankin ((Margaret K. McElderry Books)
FULL CICADA MOON
by Marilyn Hilton (Dial Books)
WINTER BEES AND OTHER POEMS OF THE COLD
by Joyce Sidman, illustrated by Rick Allen (HMH Books for Young Readers)
Congratulations to all the authors and their publishers! Here is my starting point: I own one of these books already; I know quite a bit about two more, and nothing at all about the other four. Oh what fun it is to look forward to deep reading (for which I have less time than I ought to these days. How is it that parenting teens is so much more time-consuming than parenting toddlers?)
The Poetry Roundup for the first day of the new year is with Mary Lee (and Franki, celebrating TEN years of blogging) at A Year of Reading. All the best to everyone is what we all--I hope we ALL--fervently wish for the world...simple kindness and deep respect. Poetry is always a part of that.
Bonus video: President Obama tells Kid President how kids and adults can work together to change the world. It's a couple of years old now, but it applies just as well today.
To give the Chinese proverb in its entirety, ‘Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come’ – and to extend the metaphor (or revert it … Continue reading ... →
It's Madness indeed--the
March Madness Poetry Tournament hosted by Ed DeCaria! On Monday evening I received my 10-seeded word--HYPOCRISY-- which in 36 hours I had to develop into a poem worthy of competition. The word gave me pause, certainly; I worried that I would, like many with even more challenging, abstract words, have to spend my eight allowed lines defining it. But my 10-year-old easily demonstrated his understanding of "hypocrite," so I forged ahead....
and wrote a rather serious, instructive piece that just didn't seem to be the right thing for the competition:
A Little Light Lying
Your parents teach you social graces:
“Really—you look good in braces!”
We say what we don’t really mean;
The edge of truth’s a touch too keen.
But falseness leaves an ashy trace
A lasting mask tough to erase
Face the mirror, fail to see—
That’s genuine hypocrisy.
~Heidi Mordhorst 2013
(draft)
So I decided to start completely over, with something involving a hippo. Obvious, right? And naturally comical. And then--now that I review my Tuesday night train of thought, I can barely discern how I got there, but it had to do with reading a lot about hippos and watching a lot of amateur YouTube videos of hippos and crocodiles--a line of poetry came into my head: "How doth the little crocodile..." That was all I had at first.
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!
Wikipedia similarly rarely lets me be, so there I discovered something I had forgotten--that Alice's crocodile recitation is her garbled version of a serious, instructive poem of the 18th century poet Isaac Watts. His poem is about a bee and is usually titled
Against Idleness and Mischief
How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
How skilfully she builds her cell!
How neat she spreads the wax!
And labors hard to store it well
With the sweet food she makes.
In works of labor or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
In books, or work, or healthful play,
Let my first years be passed,
That I may give for every day
Some good account at last.
Et voila! A concept. By only a couple of hours past my bedtime, I had borrowed Isaac's form and diction along with Lews's parodic twist and submitted this to the MMPT competition:
Against Falsity and Pretense
How doth the chubby hippo
Improve his shining hide
And bob the waters of the Nile
On every muddy side!
How lazily he opens wide!
How jolly seems to be!
Then crushes skulls of crocodiles
With sweet hippo-crisy.
Is that cheating? I decided not (and it was, after all, AT LEAST a couple of hours past my bedtime). While not wholly original, I reckoned that I had done enough creative reworking to justify calling it mine, and part of the work was a new appreciation for the historical antecedents of our modern poetry for kids.
At this writing the competition is fierce! I'm up against Alvaro Salinas Jr. (aka M.M. Socks) and his funny "LeeAnn's Farm," and after an early lead I find that the the voting is EXACTLY EQUAL! Stay tuned to find out if my hypocritical bee/crocodile/hippo can garner enough votes to get me to Round Two!
And now we must give a bit of Poetry Friday attention to the PF Anthology for Middle Schools, edited by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong. I'm wondering what would have happened if those clever editors had told us what the weekly themes in the book would be, so that all us poets could have written to assignment, as we're doing in the Tournament or may have done for the poetry tag e-books? Would our pieces have been any better? Worse? More risky and edgy as we ventured outside our own comfort zones, as we're doing with these crazy words Ed has given us? Process is soooooo interesting!
The Poetry Friday round-up is with Jone today at Check It Out! See you there!
Speaking from my current abode here in Japan, I’d like to introduce a short bilingual book of haiku I discovered recently at my local picture book library. Haiku no Ehon or A Picture Book of Haiku by Toshio Suzuki (Rin Rin Kikaku, 1993) is a wonderful book of haiku by well known poets Basho, Buson, Issa, Kyoshi and Kyorai. The illustrations of the poems are quite stunning — traditional images done in sumi-e ink with some very colorful embellishments. The book was produced post-humously; Suzuki was suffering with cancer when he worked on the paintings done for this book. Suzuki belonged to a group of painters who are referred to as ‘juvenile painters.’ Juvenile painting is a kind of illustration done for childrens’ stories and songs. Suzuki challenged himself as a juvenile painter by trying to illustrate classically known haiku in a way that he felt would be accessible to children. I think he succeeded admirably!
And speaking of Japanese poets, fellow PT blog contributor Corinne, sent me this link to a post with video by Sylvia Vardell on her blog, Poetry for Children, about a recent poetry book by Tanikawa Shuntaro whose work I wrote about a while back for Poetry Friday for PaperTigers. Check it out!
Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Andromeda at a wrung sponge.
I was asked to write a poem about bullies. I didn't want write something with a sitcom ending where there was a 'happily ever after' finish. It's a tough subject matter and needs to be dealt with in an honest way.
Now, I am NOT a poet. I looked at a Shel Silverstein poem for the 'format'. I never would have come up with this rhyming sequence. I am hoping it's okay. It seems like a great way to have a framework to use as a model.
I started this yesterday afternoon and finished it a few hours later. Again, having a poem to look at for the format was really helpful.
I never would have tackled the subject matter of bulling without having been asked to. Having been able to come up with something so quickly, I'm thinking it's a great exercise. Pick a topic and write something. And, if you need to, look at an existing poem for a structure to follow. Try it! How about, 'bullies'?
The Big Bully Boy
You know the big bully boy
In my class named Roy?
Well, he thinks I am his personal toy
He twists both my wrists
And he calls me a goose
With his garlic-ee breath
Roy smells like a moose
He’s making me nervous
He’s drinking my drink
He’s eating my snack
He says that I stink
When the clock strikes three
I am safe, I am free
I hope and I pray
That he moves far away
You know, the big bully boy
In my class named Roy
© Barney Saltzberg 2011
For our new issue of PaperTigers, whose theme is Music in Children’s Books, Argentinian Mexican poet, Jorge Luján has written a very special Personal View, “Voices on the Air: Writing Poetry and Songs for Children“.
Here is an extract, in which he describes his relationship with poetry:
Poetry is a kind of vertigo for me. A challenge that frequently knocks me down, makes me feel trapped within my limits, and keeps me isolated from grace… but occasionally, drives me to horizons of astonishment, pleasure, and growth. I’m convinced that, if we are open to it, poetry can envelop us in a rare, subtle atmosphere. And poetry is not only to be found in poems, but is also present in the endless forms of nature or in the touching gestures, words and acts of people.
As a songwriter and a singer, I love the experience of the voice taking to the air like wings taking flight. Composing words and music together is a complex experience of joy and sorrow, but one which also implies building bridges between people.
I urge you to read the whole article. I found it very moving - and interesting too, for Jorge has introduced me to the work of some Latin American poets I’m slightly ashamed to admit I didn’t know…
This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect… Head on over!
Tap Dancing on the Roof Sijo (Poems) was written by Linda Sue Park and published by Clarion Books in 2007. Linda Sue Park won the Newberry Medal for her 2001 book A Single Shard.
I saw Linda Sue Park speak at an SCBWI conference and she was very inspiring. To this day, I remember her describing for us her devotion to her writing, coming home from working all day and writing every day for a couple of hours. And I remember her advice that we writers should be reading. She read stacks of MG novels before she wrote one. How can you write an MG novel if you’ve never read one? I think she asked us. If memory serves me well.
Tap Dancing on the Roof is a wonderful book of poetry for children. There are poems about nature, sports, the details of everyday life children enjoy thinking about, and school amongst others. The book also explains what a Korean sijo poem is and the author gives advice on how to write one. If I were a teacher, I’d use this book in my classroom. We’d read the book and then try and write a sijo poem. The poems seem perfect for the 8 to 12 crowd.
Sijo poems are short poems in three to six lines with a set number of stressed syllables. Each line must be composed in a certain manner with the last line containing a twist.
My favorite poem in the book titled Important Announcement is about the loudness and color of spring yet the apple tree’s blossoms are like “one last drift of pale-pink snow.”
I think I will try to write a sijo poem.
Lost in the hubbub about the new words and disappearing hyphens in the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is a more subtle type of editorial revision. The Shorter, as a dictionary built on historical principles, provides information about the age of words and their main senses. The date range of earliest known use is noted in each entry by E (early), M (mid), or L (late) plus a century number: thus “M18″ means a word was first recorded in the mid-18th century. This style of dating is admittedly approximate, but giving the exact year of a word’s first recorded use would lend a false sense of precision. We very rarely can determine the first “baptismal” usage of a word with any confidence. But even with dates given by rough century divisions, the editors of the Shorter have been able to revise the dating of nearly 4,500 words and senses based on discoveries of earlier recorded uses, known as “antedatings” in the dictionary world. Much of this new antedating information is derived from the ongoing work done for the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Since I dabble in what my colleague Erin McKean recently called “the competitive sport of antedating,” I thought I’d share a discovery of mine that made it into the new edition of the Shorter.
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But...but... my daughters really *did* look good in braces.
:)
I posted about my MM daffodil process today, too! So much fun to see how all these poems came to be. I like your first one, but the title of your second is hysterical, as is the poem. But you still changed it a bit, no? The one posted has "from side to muddy side" and simple "hypocrisy" at the end, I think. So methinks you did even MORE tweaking.
Either way, I loved your hippo! It's a nail-biter!
That's a great question about the PFAMS. I would have loved to have an assigned topic rather than shoot in the dark, but then again, I think they might also have let the poems guide the topic breakdowns. Who knows? I personally love writing to a given word or word list, which is what I do in my daily work. It's challenging but freeing at the same time.
Heidi, I absolutely loved your hippo poem (what an astounding way make "hypocrisy" understandable to kids as young as seven years old!) and I voted for it. I know there are only a few minutes left to vote - oh, I can't stand thinking you might not be offering up excellent poems to entertain us all the way through to the March Madness finals! Seeing a favorite go down to defeat is harder than the whole poetry-under-pressure process of coming up with something to submit, in my opinion.
Hi, Heidi. I love all of these writing process posts! You, Renee, Liz and I all shared poems we didn't enter or pieces of poems as they developed.
Your hippo, that hypocrite, is adorable. Just naughty enough to be fun.
I liked the hippo poem you wrote for the competion, but I like the un-entered one even more.
I've also got two un-entered poems on my blog -- and I preferred both of the unentered ones to he one I entered but I picked the most kid-appropriate of the lot.
I love hearing the back story and process that went into the tournament poems. Congrats for your poem entry - I loved it! =)
I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the evolution of your hippo. I also watched you-tube videos (of dung beetles, not hippos) and readi up on wikipedia to find juicy tidbits to include. I loved and voted for your chubby hippo....drat, with your herculean effort and stellar result, I wish you were going on to the next round.
Thanks for another (+Renee's) fascinating process post.
I'm pouting a bit that your hippo didn't move you on...
This MMPoetry tournament is so about Poetry Love and the posts I have read with the back stories makes it all the more interesting. I loved your hippo/hypocrisy poem and was pulling for you, Heidi!! I actually like the one here even better. Congratulations to any winners on this page. I don't know yet who won in R1 Fl2, must go and look. Heidi, I send out big hugs to you often. If it wasn't for you, I don't know when I would have found my poetry people in the Kidlitosphere. I'm even writing again. Glad to have you back. Do you have any reciters yet in your Kdg? I would love to visit when I get to my friend's in Baltimore some day!
Janet F.
PS This is in the "oh ye of little faith" category.....at first I thought the words for MMP were too hard and too obscure. Proved wrong, though I think slightly more usable and known words are better for kids. The authletes ROCKED the first round. All poems amazed for different reasons.
It's so fun to see the process. Thanks!