Yes, I signed up again. I like events and challenges--more than I like competition but also more than I dislike competition. I also rather enjoy being called an "authlete."
I received my word in the Think, Kid, Think March Madness Children's Poetry Tournament on Monday evening (our last and let's hope LAST snow day) and then completely forgot about it all day Tuesday. I had a rough draft in mind by Tuesday night but forgot to send it in by the deadline (that'll cost me some late penalty votes!); I pulled it all together fast on Wednesday night and sent it in, and then realized I used the wrong form of the word. Somehow I am not disqualified....thank goodness.
Now it's up for voting through 4pm on Friday--but it will be tough for you Poetry Friday people, because my "opponent" is fellow PF'er and teacher Linda Baie (who, curiously, also wrote a funny dialogue between mother and son. How does that happen?).
And here is my poem, in its rushed and raggedy glory...
*****************************************
Mother’s Retort to Junior, Age 15
You think I am too old,
too late---
You think I can’t incorporate
new style, new sounds,
new swag, new “apps.” Perhaps.
But even in my frail and failing state,
there must be some way to rejuvenate
my sadly sagging groove and--- WAIT!
How ‘bout I chaperone your date?
--Heidi Mordhorst 2014
Enjoy the hijinks of Poetry Friday with Julie at
The Drift Record.
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!
.
Howdy, Campers!
Be sure to check out the Second Annual March Madness Poetry Tournament (details below!)...and welcome to today's
As I mentioned in
last week's post, my teacher
Barbara Bottner asks writing students to write about our greatest fears as if they were monsters.
So, I asked myself...if my fear of writing mediocre poems and stories were a monster, what would it be like?
It's a blob. A beige blob. With blood-shot eyes. It's as big as a
refrigerator and hunches on the rug blocking the window. It smells.
Like a wet giraffe. It has tuna stuck between its yellowing teeth and a
runny nose, and it's dropping Snickers wrappers on my clean carpet. And
it JUST KNOCKED OVER MY EDGAR ALLEN POE DOLL which was carefully balanced on top
of my stuffed dog!
And since Monkey* and I are both afraid of writing something stupid, I'm bringing back a (revised) poem
from a post about second-rate writing:
GO AWAY, BIG BEIGE MONSTER OF
SECOND-RATE WRITING
by April Halprin Wayland
You smell of ink and blood and
death
and plastics that are burning.
My hands both shake, my
headache’s back
and now my stomach’s churning.
I will not let you in today.
GO HOME!
(Hooray! I’m learning!)
poem © 2013 April Halprin Wayland. All rights reserved.
Now it's your turn.
1) What are you afraid of? Make a list of
at least five things that scare you. Are you afraid of snakes? Of flying? If
you’re a writer (of COURSE you're a writer!), are you afraid of rejection?
2) Circle the one that scares you the most…or the one that you can’t wait to
write about.
3) Make this fear into a creature. Try to include as many of the five
senses as possible--how does it sound? How does it smell? Maybe
your fear of heights is a moldy grey vulture who hides in caves, makes snarky
noises, and wears high tops…or maybe your fear of the dark is a neon green
monster with sticky skin and garlicky breath that whispers evil things in your
ear.
4) Write a story or a poem about this creature. You might want to speak to it
or yell at it. Dialogue is fun to read aloud. Wouldn’t it be neat to YELL at
your fear? Or maybe YOU'RE the creature!
5) Share your writing with someone you want to scare.
ha ha
*In case you haven't met yet, this is Monkey, who will occasionally be writing blog posts for me:
Oh! I did mention Ed DeCaria's marvelous
Second Annual March Madness Poetry Tournament, didn't I?
Ed revealed the 64 "authletes" on Academy Awards night and I'm among them--yay! As
Mary Lee says, "I'm looking forward to the fun (and the stress)!"
.
Howdy Campers--and happy Poetry Friday!
Thanks to wonderful Mary Lee and Franki
This round, each
Teaching Author (so far
Carmela and
Mary Ann) will be sharing one of our favorite posts by blogmate
JoAnn Early Macken, now on our Blog Advisory Board (or BAB). Just kidding. We don't actually have a BAB, although maybe we should. We're saying goodbye to JoAnn who is so busy teaching, writing and running
Wisconsin's SCBWI chapter, she can scarcely breathe.
JoAnn's poetry and photos sing. Though we had hoped to talk about
different posts from JoAnn's tenure, I was so struck by her poetry in the same post Mary Ann chose, I have to share JoAnn's photo and poem, "Landscape with Dog Nose":
Landscape with Dog Nose by JoAnn Early Macken
I wanted to capture the crisp horizon,
gradations of shades,
mountainous clouds,
but she insisted on
stepping into the shot.
Well, why not?
She’s always part of the picture.
photo and poem (c) 2012 JoAnn Early Macken, all rights reserved
I'll miss blogmate JoAnn's unique view of the natural world, her kindness, her beautific smile, her poetry...and so much more.
If you missed her post with this poem, you'll find it here. Because it's an old post, you won't be able to comment on it, so share your thoughts below, or email them to the TeachingAuthors via this link.
.JPG)
.JPG)
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!