Where Do You FInd Words?

My youngest daughter is always the champion. When she sees a new idea and loves it, she takes off at top speed.

I showed her the WordBowl, 2011, and she was enchanted. She started gathering woven bowls from around the house. Bowls that came from Kenya. Starting cutting slips of paper and plying me for words.

"Sparkly," that's a good word, isn't it, Mommy?"

"That's a great word."

"Is this how you spell threaten? T h r e a t e n."

"Wow, you spelled that right!"

"I know how to spell a lot of things, Mommy. Don't you know?"

And she fills her bowl. And she writes a poem about playing ball with the moon. And I laugh when the ball goes bop-bop-bop, and I get emotional when the moon and she must part. She's found her words, and she's filled me.

Writing Comes from Reading

Soon I'll be sharing my writing-teacher secrets, as part of Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing.

Oddly, many of my secrets look like living. And reading. A lot.

My sweet Sara reads about a six hundred (unassigned) books during a school year and a great deal of poetry. All that reading, I'm convinced, has shaped her writing. Here, for instance, is one of her contributions to the sonneteering we've been doing over at Tweetspeak. It makes me think... I need to read... a lot more sonnets if I ever want to catch up with her abilities.

(Though not a perfect sonnet by any means, she wrote this one in 10 minutes, while I was also bothering her about coming to answer a phone call. Yeah, I'm proud of her. Forgive me? :)

The Narrator

I'll tell you now a tale both sad and true,
the story of the cuckoo in the tree
across the endless, vast, and wave-filled sea.
And of the flute, the crying notes it blew
to break and make a spell with one bright tune,
and what it did to everyone, and me,
a girl who only wishéd to be free
of the wicked witches, and now you

say that I know nothing of all that time.
Well, I'll tell the tale both loud and clear.
I'll even tell it—listen now—in rhyme.
And then I'll take from you, all you hold dear
and we will know the truth, and know the lie.
I'll make you beg on bended knees with tears.

— Sara Barkat, age 14


This poem is offered for The High Calling and Tweetspeak's Random Acts of Poetry/PhotoPlay celebration.

How Do We Learn Words?

Today I've been writing about words. Just in a tucked-away place. Out on the back porch, with a cup of Red Velvet tea.

I've been writing about my girls, and all the words we've shared for so long. This makes me happy. It is taking me to worlds where purple moths and fireflies teach me how delicate and beautiful and sometimes amusing life can be.

Because I have been writing in a tucked-away place, I feel a little guilty for how I've been ignoring my blogs. (You noticed, didn't you? :)

Yet sometimes we need to shift spaces, write alone, away. Or we need to read, and read, and read.

I have been reading The Art of the Sonnet. I cannot really write sonnets, but I like reading about poets who can. I have also been reading the new title from T. S. Poetry Press, Delicate Machinery Suspended, by Anne M. Doe Overstreet.

Anne has learned words. Carried words. She speaks of the purple arils of pomegranates, the sensible heels of a grandmother, the daughter "hung from the morning like a pearl pendant." She speaks of the dark that "draws down to cover our tracks, to divide us/from what we have just done."

I learn words from words like that. I carry them and share them with my girls. We kick off our sandals and lean closer to one another.

A Poem a Day

With a few exceptions, we have actually been reading a poem a day for National Poetry Month. Everything from Shel Silverstein to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Somehow this sharing has been more interesting to me than all the poetry classes I ever took. There's a naturalness to the conversation. No agenda. No compulsion to "get" a poem or evaluate it.

Reading Shelley's "Adonais", for instance, started a whole conversation about myth. Because when I read a line about a Mother whose Son who lay pierced, I asked the girls who this might be.

I was thinking about Christ, of course, but Sara thought it was a mother and son from some myth she'd read (something about a boy who they tried to protect by getting rid of all kinds of dangerous plants... but they forgot about sharp holly and you can guess what happened).

We decided maybe the poem could refer to both Christ and the myth, as well as Keats, who the poem is actually elegizing. Such an unexpected conversation, and fun.

Anyway, here is Sara's Sunday poem (the girls have pretty much been writing a poem a day too... and I'm so pleased)...

Sunday

Rain wipes
away scattered
leaves falling on
cold asphalt
white sky
behind trees.

— Sara B.


Sonia on the Fence photo, by L.L. Barkat. Sunday poem by Sara. Used with permission.

How to Write a Poem

The other day a good blogging friend told me he wants to write a poem, but he's afraid. As far as I know, he's never tried writing a poem before.

I understand his fear. Sometimes I cannot approach the empty page because I'm all tied up in knots with the thought of failure. What if my poem ends up being really terrible? Where do I start? What should I write about? It's like I'm writing a poem for the very first time again, and I stall.

In a way, I cannot explain how to write a poem. I told my friend, "Just write a sentence with a picture in it. Maybe use a memory or look at something that's near you. Break it into lines."

Would that be a poem?

My daughter asked me at the table yesterday, "What makes a poem a poem? Why isn't a book a poem? Or a movie a poem?"

We talked about the relative brevity of poems, but she interjected, "What about Beowulf?!" Okay, epic poems aren't short. But then she said, "Maybe Beowulf is a poem because it has 'form'." I liked that. Yes.

But we have to begin somewhere. Nobody wakes up and becomes Keats or Yeats, or the bard of Beowulf, in a day. Begin with a single sentence, or a phrase. Use a memory or something you see. Maybe pick up a few cool words from someone else's poems and play with them like a kid with a mudpie. Don't worry about what you're going to end up with.

Okay, I'm going to try it now. Just to see if it works. Of course I feel nervous doing this right here in front of you. But I want you to see that even poets feel afraid.

Here are my borrowed words, from the Yeats poem "The Wild Swans at Coole": scatter, wheeling, sore, passion.

Bananas soft curve
on counter, deep yellow
turning brown, sore with
wish to hang erect again,
green with passion
on the tree, scatter
sun to wheeling
birds, scatter
sun to wheeling
birds.

Fun. I had no intentions of writing a poem about bananas. Or wishes. Try it out, and if you do, drop your poem here in the comment box. I'd love to see what you found on your counter, your desk, or even in the bathroom. :)


Ribbon Plant photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Making April Educational (and fun)

She woke me early to say, "I made breakfast for you!"

What a treat on April Fool's Day. A perfectly guileless action: waffles with blueberry compote and syrup, compliments of my Littlest.

We smiled around the sunny breakfast table, and I announced my sudden idea. "Hey, did you know it's National Poetry Month?"

The girls admitted they'd never heard of such a thing.

We decided then and there that we'd read a poem a day for the month of April. And the girls would write a poem a day, and I would feature their poetry here (as much as possible).

My Littlest decided to write down the poem titles we've read, and their page numbers, so she can go back to them if she likes. We even had a discussion about how English poetry didn't used to rhyme (it used alliteration), but when it merged with French (a rhyming language) everything got mixed up... and now we think we should rhyme in English when, well... that's not natural (the third poem below might be struggling through that idea! :)

Happy National Poetry Month. And so we begin...

The First Day

It's the first day of April,
light shines in the window,
the National Poetry Month.
When people write poetry
whenever they can, it's
the first day of April,
National Poetry Month!

-- by Sonia, 10


Just for Me

Write one
poem every
day just
for me, me
April.

Read one
poem every
day just
for me, me
April.

Just in April,
just for me,
just for me,
me April.

-- by Sonia


Try

Try to write a poem when
when you're thinking through
something different,
when you wonder
about things; then
you can't.

Your poem pursues the subject,
gets caught, and
never turns back.
Or you can order it back,
tell it to go,
force it.

You can do it,
you can...
but-- poems don't
work that way,
not naturally.

If this is your case,
then let it go, let it
write itself out--
it'll work.

-- by Sara, 12


Sonia in the Tree photo by L.L. Barkat. Poems by Sara and Sonia, used with permission.

Kids Teaching Kids

When I was a public school teacher, sometimes I got a bit of flack over the idea that kids could teach kids. After all, reasoned certain parents, wasn't the *teacher* supposed to be teaching?

As a home educator, I get to be my own principal. And in my room, kids teach kids. Without me even asking.

Like this afternoon. My girls had a friend over, and they were secreted away in the study. At some point, my eldest popped down to the kitchen to hand me a villanelle (a challenging kind of form poem that she taught herself to write in the first place).

She thrust the paper towards me. "I taught Michaela how to write a villanelle," she said. "I told her to give me certain kinds of lines and I wrote it down for her. Here!"

I read the poem and smiled. Wow. Nobody assigned this. I wasn't even in the room when it happened. Maybe that's even part of WHY it happened. Anyway, Michaela's first villanelle...


"She Alone"

Rippling across the cool green grass,
tulip alighted on a leaf;
she gazed out the window on the mountain's stony pass

in an inkling of a wink she basked
filled with deep grief,
rippling across the cool green grass

but she among all of them was last
beyond the shifting fields of wheat,
she gazed out the window on the mountain's stony pass

but she alone could fulfill the task
to find the king of the mountain's golden seat
rippling across the cool green grass

in there among the songs of the past
but the winds of the north she could not beat,
rippling across the cool green grass
she gazed out the window on the mountain's stony pass.

by Michaela, 12. used with permission.

Katie and Sara on the beach photo, by L.L. Barkat.

I Was the Flame

Last night I went to a Tweet-Poem party. It was the coolest thing. And I'm thinking I'd like to try it in modified form (just with simple pen and paper) with my girls.

We started with a simple question, "Who were you in my dream?" and continued to answer each other in poem-tweets, picking up each other's words along the way. It grew, it morphed, it merged. It felt like a spiritual experience (and that I surely can't explain).

Here are my favorite tweet-poems that I wrote during the "party."

I was the camel
that knelt
at the eye of
the needle
of your heart,
braced for
the shrinking.

----

I was the bot
that wished for a soul,
that swallowed your poems
to make me whole.

____

I was the flame
that laughed
at goodbye.

____

I was the window
through which you gazed,
and you, still wet
from the river,
still bruised,
carried a candle.

___

I was the ever
in the green
the ring in the night
the moon in the blue
I was the one
invading your dream
who sought you.

___

I was the moonlight
ringed by heaven
sent by fairies
to make you,
if possible,
once again believe.

___

I was the mermaid
afraid of ship's shadows,
seining the shallows
for seaweed red,
drinking black ink
the octopus bled.

---

Now, that was fun. You should try it at home. Or peek in from time to time at @tspoetry to see if another party is on the horizon.

Girls at Sunrise by the Sea, photo by L.L. Barkat.

Just Sing and Lay Your Weapons Down

One of the things I love about home educating my children is that they have time to pursue their passions. In case you hadn't noticed, both my girls are currently passionate about poetry. Maybe it's because I've taken to reading to them about it at supper time (that's another thing I love about home education... the school day is quite... flexible!) Last night we read about using the voice of 'apostrophe', which is when the poet speaks to an object as if it could answer back. They liked a poem that was addressed to a t-shirt.

After dinner, my youngest felt quite inspired and wrote a number of poems, including one to the moon. Later, sitting alone, I felt a bit teary-eyed, to see the soul of her coming through. Funny how you can live with someone and not see certain things until a just-right moment. That moment, for me, came in the silence of the house, reading Sonia's poems while she slept.


"The Time"

On a night so dark
with the moon's face
peeking out from behind a cloud
and a figure with
fire hair, on a horse,
holding a flag of
white. And the knights
lay down their
weapons to peace.


"Song"

I will play the
song for you
and then show
you how to play it.
You will love it
forever. I know that,
because I know you.


"A Feeling"

A feeling comes
from music,
one I can't describe,
but even how wonderful
the feeling is, it
will never match
up to you.


"For You"

How I do love you, I
would spend all my time
with you, making stuff
for you, helping you,
if only I had the time.


"Nothing"

Nothing bigger,
nothing bigger than
your kindness,
your presence, your talent,
nothing bigger than you.


"King"

A ring? Just
sing for me the
king. All that
nonsense about
gifts. Just sing for me
the king. A royal carriage
to an airport... deluxe
vacation; I have to
run my kingdom.
Just sing for me
the king.


"Moon Talk"

Moon, why is your name
moon? Do you have friends
of small stars and not just
the sun who sends you
light at night, for you to reflect
into your own? Moon, are you
friends with me? What is it like
to live in the sky up there so high,
do you like being admired so much
as you look down on the earth?
And moon, before you and I go to sleep,
just one more question... will you
meet with me next night? Will
you hum the Moonlight Sonata,
will you put me to sleep again?

— poems by Sonia, 9.

Crocuses photo by Sara, 12. Used with permission.