Check It Out

The Monday Poetry Stretch at The Miss Rumphius Effect featured writing a poem about the things you love.  Mine took shape in the form of a pantoum.

Early Morning

 things I love
early dawn, wake before sunrise
slipper shuffle to writing room
coffee in hand

early dawn, wake before sunrise
word play, journal time
coffee in hand
quiet blankets the house

 word play, journal time
old photograph invites a poem
quiet blankets the house
darkness gives way to gray

old photograph invites a poem
rain and wind strike up a chorus
darkness gives way to gray
grasp the pen and begin

rain and wind strike up a chorus
slipper shuffle to writing room
grasp the pen and begin
things I love

 Laurie Purdie Salas is rounding up the poetry today.  Enjoy.

Happy Reading.

MsMac

Tricia (The Miss Rumphius Effect) challenged us to write haiku riddles based on the book If Not for the Cat by Jack Prelutsky.  I shared that book on this blog a while back.

Here are two I wrote this week:

thin spaghetti legs
neck, limber long gathers fish
graceful in flight

grey scarf of dawn
weaves diamond dewdrops in, out
top fir boughs vanish

Do you know what they are?  Did you guess Blue Heron and Fog?  Lots of great poetry can be found at Susan Taylor Brown.

Happy Reading.

MsMac

The Poetry Stretch prompt at The Rumphius Effect was to write a poem about work.  Here is my contribution for the week:

Library Lady

library lady
what have you read lately?
need a book to take me places
library lady
do you have?
need a book to make me soar
library lady
what’s the book with a boy name Jack?
need it to write a report
library lady
why did my dog have to die
need a book to hug
library lady

Wild Rose Reader is hosting Poetry Friday.

I love the beginning of the school year and to me this poem, “Now” by Prince Redcloud says it best about the new year.

This poem can be found in Lasting Impressions by Shelley Harwayne, one of my all time favorites!  She has done so much to instill the love of literature and writing in students.

Now

Close the bar-b-que
Close the sun
Close the home-run-games we won
Close the picnic
Close the pool
Close the summer
Open school

 –Prince Redcloud

Kelly (welcome back) at Crossover is hosting Poetry Friday today.  You might want to stop and read more poetry.

Happy reading.  Welcome to a new school year!

MsMac

This week sitting in meetings has been the order of the day. Next week the students arrive.

I discovered this wonderful poem in Naomi Shihab Nye’s collection, This Same Sky, a Collection of Poems from Around the World:

The Pen
Take a pen in your uncertain fingers.
Trust, and be assured
That the whole world is a sky blue butterfly
And words are the nets to capture it.

–Muhammad al-Ghuzzi
Tunisia

Translated by May Jayusi and John Heath-Snubbs

We should all be fortunate to have students arrive thinking that words are the nets to capture the sky-blue butterflies.

ANNOUNCEMENT:  Do you blog about YA and Children’s books?  The CYBILS Awards are in their fourth year and are looking for judges and panelists for the myriad of categories.  If interested, you can find out more here. 

This yer I am the organizer of the Nonfiction Picture Book (NFPB).  Am excited to serve in this capacity.

Poetry Friday is over at Book Aunt. Thanks, Kate.

Happy Reading.

MsMac

Writing and Enjoying Haikuby Jane Reichhold is a book chock full of goodness for anyone wanting to delve into this poetry form.  The remaining two chapters (only four in the book) are “Enjoying Haiku with Other” and “Using Your Haiku Skills in Related Poetry Forms”.

Chapter three covers attending poetry readings, getting work into magazines, and other ways to publish your work. 

Probably one of the coolest things I read and will share with not only my poetry kids but drama kids is four things you want your audience able to do:
1. hear
2. think
3. react or feel
4. understand
The reading of poems or saying lines in a manner that the audience gets it is one of the biggest challenges at elementary school.

 One great idea about organizing your haiku is to consider organizing by season and then by the categories or attributes of the seasons such as celestial, terrestrial, and livelihood.  Other ways is to do so alphabetically or chronologically.

Reichhold has several suggestions about creating little haiku books to give as gives.  One of my favorites was to recycle envelopes incorporating the envelope writing and stamps in the design of the book.  She suggests that when putting together a book to organize the poetry seasonally beginning with spring.

I found her section on teaching haiku in the schools to be very helpful and am excited to work my young writers:

-encourage students to use their senses and create images from them
-get them to think outside and beyond themselves (a big challenge)
-suggest that the try using 6-8 words to begin.
-provide first ors second lines and have the students come up with the original third line to start.
-display the haiku.

Reichhold writes about getting published and talks about finding on-line publishing.

This is my news.  My poem “Nirvana” was published on-line at Four and Twenty: A Short Form Poetry Journal.  Click on the shirts, p. 22.   Another poem, “Tatted Stories” will be featured on Sept 1.Both poems began as haiku.
I highly recommend Writng and Enjoying Haiku.  In fact, I may buy a second copy to have at school so I don’t have to carry mine back and forth. So glad I took the time with the book this summer.

Am back to school and next week will share a school-related poem.  More poetry goodness can be found at The Boy Reader.  He is featuring a book I adore, The City I Love  by Lee Bennett Hopkins.

Happy Reading.

MsMac

 A ferry headed to Victoria, BC tomorrow, time with my college pals this weekend is the reason I am posting a day early. 

So enjoying Writing and Enjoying Haiku by Jane Reichhold.  A fabulous book on the instruction of haiku.  Today’s reflection is about one of the techniques from the last half of the list.

Techniques thirteen through twenty-four include some of my favorites to write: the “yugen” or the mystery, “sacredness in common things”, the paradox in which the haiku engages the reader and then leaves something to ponder further, and finding the divine in the common which tends to happen unconsciously.

My first blog post three years ago was based on a haiku prompt, the yugen. There is a photo with the haiku of a summer thundercloud.

messenger spirit
waving summertime greetings
twilight clouds gather

Today I read this and wonder if there is enough mystery or sacredness of common things within the haiku?  Are summer thunderclouds common enough? When I revised it for my print on demand book, Solace au Naturel, I revised it this way:

spirit orchestra
sky harp melodies ascend
heavenly bridges
diaphanous souls given
solace, vessel left behind

How could I revise it to make it stronger yet?

spirit orchestra
solace for diaphanous souls
vessels left behind

OR

spirit orchestra
diaphanous souls
vessels left behind

OR

twilight clouds
sky harp melodies bridge
heaven-earth

Reichhold makes me rethink and revise. ( and I am going through all the haiku in Solace au Naturel to revise)  Perhaps revision is never completed. Next week I will share some from her “haiku revision check list”.

Poetry Friday Round-up is at The Miss Rumphius Effect. Thanks, Tricia.

BTW, Pam C. aka Mother Reader has opened up registration for the Third Annual Kidlit Con. It’s the weekend of October 16-18, 2009 in Washington, DC and promises to be a smashing event. More information here.

Happy Reading.

MsMac

I am spending the summer with the book Writing and Enjoying Haiku by Jane Reichhold.   Reichhold’s written about twenty-four techniques to improve your haiku.  This week features the following techniques:

Using a Metaphor
Using a Simile
Using the Sketch or Shiki’s Shasei
Using Double Entendre for Double Meanings
Using Puns
Using Wordplays

Some interesting pieces of information were discovered in these techniques.  I was particularly fascinated by “Shiki’s Shasei.”  Shiki, a Japanese poet made it his mission to “depict a thing just as it is.”  He was not fond of the many common techniques used and he pointed overuse of the techniques by poets.  He loved simplicity, the telling it as he saw it. 

I read this as my husband I were traveling through the Columbia River Gorger early Thursday morning.  I decided to try the “sketch”:

early morning
sun on wide river
glistens

After reading this section, I think the key to writing haiku is to mix the techniques up and do not overuse any particular one.  In the end Shiki was guilty of what he accused others.

Good news:  I was informed today that two of my poems will be published in the August short form poetry journal, Four and Twenty.  One poem will be a “Featured Poem of the Week” and another will be in their monthly journal.

Poetry Friday is at Sylvia Vardell at Poetry For Children.

Happy Reading.

MsMac

In Writing and Enjoying Haiku (my book study for the summer), Jane Reichhold writes about 24 techniques to consider when writing.  I am going look at 6 per week over the next four weeks, applying them to my own haiku.  Two weeks ago, I introduced the book.

The first six:

1. Technique of Comparison: looking for how two different things look similar to create a single event.
2. Technique of Contrast: creating opposites within the three lines creates excitement.
3. Technique of Association: “how different things relate or come together”, a Zen term for it is “oneness”.
4. Technique of the Riddle: probably the oldest of the poetic techniques, the trick is to state as in puzzling terms as possible.
5. Technique of Sense-switching: speak of the sense of one thing and then switch to a different sense organ, also called “synesthesia”.
6. Technique of Narrowing the Focus: !st line, wide angle, 2nd line, normal lens, and 3rd line zoom in close up.

Based on the above techniques, I see ways to revise the following haiku to create a stronger piece.

Original Draft

morning confession
cacophony of crows
clamor in treetops
prayer litany: caw-caw-caw
solitude punctuated

Draft Two using the Technique of Narrowing the Focus:

clamor in treetops
cacophony of crows
confession

Draft Three using the Technique of Sense-switching:

treetop clamor
cacophony of crows
morning tea sipped

Draft Four using the Technique of Contrasts:

treetop clamor
cacophony of crows
solitude

I like these drafts and feel that the haiku packs more punch as a result.  I have to wonder if it also has to do with cutting words.

Maybe you will try some haiku revision. Let me know if you do.  For me, my biggest challenge in haiku revision is to move away form the 5-7-5 pattern. 

A list of participants for Poetry Friday is over at A Year of Reading, hosted my Mary Lee! Thanks for taking some of your summertime relaxation to host us!

Happy Reading.

MsMac

I am doing my own book study. I picked up Jane Reichhold’s book which has sat on my book shelf for the last two years.  I have frequently thumb through it reading snippets. This summer, however, I decided to make it my focus.  My goal is sharing what I have learned and thought about each week until I return to school or finish the book.

In the opening pages of Writing and Enjoying Haiku, the author states, “I want this book to be your book –with sentences underlined, comments written in margins, your poems on fly leaves…” It is such an invitation to make it your personal class with the author.  I love that!  It reminds me of the work I did in Denver last winter, the idea to really be thinking about your reading and make notes as you read.  So along with the book I have my pen, sticky notes and highlighter.

Five favorite phrases, sentences, etc underline in the this weeks’ reading (pages1-52, which cover chapters one and part of two):

“Haiku acts as a door to our past.”  In writing haiku, the focus is on the here and now.  In reading, haiku, you open the door once again to the past.

“For me, the way I live in order to be prepared to receive haiku inspiration is more valuable than the poems I finally do write…(…I do believe they are given as gifts)…”  This affirms my own thinking about writing, that when a poem comes to me so effortlessly, I have received a gift.  And I must work at being aware, nonjudgmental, and living with simplicity. The author expands on these and others.

“Haiku is based on what the author observes.”  In re-reading my haiku, I can see times when I have not observed the outside world but have gone in the direction of the telling others about what they think, feel, believe.  I  strive to put away the personal pronouns and just report what is there.

“Poetry is what happens between the words.”  In haiku those spaces are short, the brevity of the form creates a real need to create visual images rapidly.  Each reader bring their own experience to the experience; what I see as I read maybe totally different from your picture.

“Haiku should not be a run-on sentence or sound like a complete sentence with each line fitting neatly into the next.”  The reading I did this week talked a lot about going beyond the Americanized 5-7-5 form of Haiku.  There is an in-depth explanation about the language differences between Japanese and English which can change a writer’s perspective about haiku.  I have been fighting the need to use the 5-7-5 pattern for years.  It comes naturally most days (partly because it was so ingrained in me). It is not necessary.  What need to have is to have two distinct sections in the haiku.

Just as I enede my reading for the week, Reinhhold listed 6 rules for writing haiku:

1. Write in 3 lines, short, long, short without counting syllables.
2. Have a fragment and a phrase.
3. Have an element of nature.
4. Use present tense verbs.
5. Avoid capitals and punctuation.
6. Avoid rhymes.

The first two are rules that I know but will look closely at my own work.  They are two areas that need improvement.

The next section of the book shares twenty-four valuable techniques. I will divide and share the techniques over the coming weeks.

Poetry Friday is being held at Jama Rattigans’ Alphabet Soup.

Happy Reading.

MsMac