Run rabbit, run.
It’s dinner time
and fox wants you
for his.
(Sally Murphy, 2014)
It’s been a long while since I tried my hand at a fifteen word or less poem, a weekly challenge from children’s poet and author Laurie Purdie Salas. You can see this week’s photo prompt here, and in the comments section see the wonderfully varied responses.
Earlier this week I posted a zeno about my sore back. (If you don’t know what a zeno is, read this post over at Today’s Little Ditty, but the chief characteristics are the syllable count (8,4,2,1,4,2,1,4,2,1 and the way the one syllable lines must all rhyme).
I said at the time that once I’d written one I would probably write more, and I was right. Here’s another.
We have a new pup, Theodore.
He’s a little
Murphpup, who is NOT the dog in the poem.
ball of
fluff.
We all love his
tiny
wuff
but not the way
he chews
stuff.
(Sally Murphy, 2014)
When was the last time you tried your hand at writing a poem? Why not try a zeno, for Michelle’s challenge, or just for yourself?
Still thinking about poems that have really resonated with me and made me come alive.
This is another one where I can remember the first time I heard it.
I was quite young – perhaps five or six – and at the end of year concert for our school, held in the Miner’s Institute in Collie. As with every concert, there were probably songs and dances and skits, but I don’t remember those. I don’t even remember what my own class did. But when my older sister’s class took the stage, I was entranced.
There they were, all those big girls (they were four years older than me!), on a darkened stage, each clutching a torch which, when they turned them on, illuminated their faces – because they were aimed upwards. Oooooh, clever. And then they recited their poem:
Hist!….Hark
The night is very dark,
And we’ve to go a mile or so
Across the Possum Park.
Ooooh. Spooky. The poem proceeded, and I was hooked. This was a poem that had everything. Suspense, humour, word play, and some lovely rhyme and rhythm. As a five year old I didn’t analyse all of that, and of course didn’t remember much more of it except for the opening Hist!….Hark, but I loved it, completely. I even hoped – prayed – that one day I could stand up on that stage like those big girls and recite a poem like that one – actually, I wanted to do THAT ONE.
I loved (and still do) many more C. J. Dennis poems, and even got to memorise another which I loved almo
st as much, The Ant Explorer, but it was Hist! that continued to give that special thrill of a perfect poem every time I saw it or heard it. And when it was produced as a picture book, with amazing illustrations by Peter Gouldthorpe, I had to have it.
You can read the whole poem here.
What poems make you tingle?
I’m sitting in my chair, with a heat pack on my shoulder, ruing the fact that something as simple as send my back into a spasm. But all is not lost! See, not only did I already have a physio appointment for today, meaning the shoulder will get worked on nice and quickly, but the yawn injury also, magically, gave me an idea for a poem.
Ever since I read an interview with J. Patrick Lewis on a blog called Today’s Little Ditty, I’ve been wanting to try my hand at writing a Zeno, a deceptively simple poetic from, the rules of which are also explained in that post.
So, while my heat pack warmed, I picked up my notebook, and when I sat down with the pack on my back, waiting for it to work, I decided it was time to draft that poem. What came out what this:
I put my back out when I yawned
Now I’m feeling
Really
Sore.
I wish I knew
Some way
For
Never yawning
Any
More.
Okay, it’s not the world’s best poem (or, more specifically, Zeno), but it’s a start. And my back is feeling better already. And I suspect that now that I’ve written one. I’ll be writing more.
Have a great day.
A couple of days ago, inspired by this article by Andrew M. Brown I blogged in part about poems which I remember loving – which made me tingle. So I thought I might share a little more about some of those poems, in the hopes they might speak to you, too.
The first of these poems, then, is This is Just to Say, by William Carlos Williams. You can read it here.
This poem was read in my year 8 English class with Mrs Brickwood. I can even picture where I was sitting in the classroom when we read the poem, and can certainly feel the amazement of discovering that a poem could be so simple, without rhyme, without artifice, and yet so very complete. I loved it. I also loved that one of the things we then did was to try to replicate the form by writing our own ‘This is Just to Say’ poems. I think it was my first experience of writing free verse poetry, a love affair which will never end.
Years later, when I worked on my first verse novel, my character Pearl also loved free verse novel, and in a nod to Williams, I had her mention ‘a poem about a plum’. When the book was published, no one asked me if that was a real poem, or mentioned that they’d made the connection – until the book was made into a play by Jigsaw Theatre in Canberra. When I went to see the play, a highlight for me was seeing the poem revealed as a very clever part of the set.
Long after this first of his poems, it occurred to me to read more of Williams’ work, and I loved it, but This is Just to Say will always be my personal favourite, for the way it opened up the world of poetry to me.
One of the luxuries of my doctoral studies is the time it gives me to focus on something I’m passionate about: children’s poetry. Every day I write poetry, read poetry and read about poetry – and have to remind myself that this is work. And, of course, because I’m writing and reading so much, I also spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. What I’ve been thinking about this week is the mismatch between the way most children love poetry and the way most adults don’t. Two articles I’ve read have particularly illuminated this.
Firstly, Andrew M. Brown talked in the Telegraph about the ‘tell-tale tingle’ that memorable poetry gives you, a phrase coined by Nabokov, and a state referred to by other poets including John Larkin. His article was inspired by the Cambridge Poetry and Memory Project, a study looking at the effects of memorising poetry.
The second article, by Michael Perry in the Wisconsin State Journal reminds readers that poetry doesn’t have to be “gotten” – just experienced.
And there you have it: the problem I think many people who drift – or run – away from poetry have, is that they don’t ‘get’ it, or perhaps that they’re scared of not getting it.
I grew up loving poetry. My early poetry memories include my mum reading me the poetry of A. A. Milne, R. L. Stevenson. C. J. Dennis and Dr Seuss, among others. I remember the thrill of those tiddly-poms, the sugar-ant roaming, the land of counterpane, and the perfection of Horton being sent home “happy, one-hundred percent”. I relished the word play, the narrative twists, the rhythm, and the social aspect of sharing this joy with my mother and siblings. When I started school, poetry was offered by teachers, in reading and English text books, and was recited for school assemblies. I lapped it up. I think I was in high school when I discovered poetry didn’t have to rhyme, and remember the very physical shiver of delight when I first read William Carlos Williams’ plum poem (yes, I do know its title, but it will forever be the plum poem to me), a poem which later had the same effect on my character Pearl.
But something terrible happened. While I never lost my love of poetry completely, I came to fear it, starting when I studied Literature as a year 11 and 12 subject. I was still able to enjoy the reading of some of the poets and poems we studied – I especially adored T. S. Elliot – but being asked to write analyses of poems – especially in exam situations – terrified me. What if I got it wrong? What if I missed the meaning? Overlooked the clever allusion ot some historical event I’d never heard of? Overlooked a simile/metaphor/personification? Throughout my final years of school, and through my Arts degree, I really dreaded poetry analysis. (One issue was that no one ever explained what it was I needed to DO in a practical criticism half so well as my supervising teacher on my first teaching prac did, a year after a wrote my last one! I sat and listened to him explain to his year eleven students amazed that it was actually so easy.)
Fortunately for me these experiences didn’t turn me right away from poetry – perhaps because that love was so deep ingrained, or perhaps because I didn’t ever stop writing poetry of my own, or perhaps because I’m just stubborn. Still, I suspect that for those who don’t study literature, or education, or writing – in short, people who don’t need to engage with poetry beyond childhood – that fear of not understanding poetry, of not being smart enough, is a deterrent to reading poetry. And that’s sad, because that tingle, that sheer delight of experiencing a well crafted poem is a magic everyone deserves to have.
My point? Don’t be scared of poetry. As Michael Perry says, you don’t have to ‘get’ it. Just read it, listen to it and share it. Find a poem that gives you that frisson of joy that the poetry of your childhood did. Perhaps you could start with revisiting those same poems. And remember, there won’t be an exam, so if you don’t get it, nobody will know.