I want to go back
to the mountains with this crew
the photos show why
November 2
November Shadorma
November Shadorma
go ahead
eat the pumpkin pie
before the
turkey comes
out of the oven all browned
is there a main course?
……and just like that, after Halloween candy and football player costumes and all the fun of fall festivals including a hayride around the campus at work, we are thrust unmercifully into the Christmas season. The candy at Dollar General is half price, and the one seasonal row they’d already dedicated to Christmas has expanded to three. It’s the season of eating, and no one is waiting on anything.
Today’s poem is a shadorma, a form similar to Haiku in syllable pattern. This form has six lines, and the syllable count on each line, in order, is 3,5,3,3,7,5. I’m a fan of eating dessert first, so I’m urging all pie lovers to take full advantage of throwing out the rules and questioning whether there is really a main course.
For me, it’s the pie.
from time to time…
from time to time I
see posts that make me stop and
think: could this be me??
then reality
takes ahold of my thinking~
not quite yet….almost….
Book Club Pick: Regretting You
first we read the book~
then, our club met for dinner
before the movie
I never laugh as much as when our book club gets together! The books we read and the times we spend talking about them are a balm for my soul.
People have asked me how we “do” our club, because there are so many ways to structure a book club. First, we decide on a book based on someone’s recommendation. We’ve already picked dates through the end of summer and have marked them on our calendars so we guard our time. We sent out digital invitations so we don’t plan any other meetings by accident. Priorities.
Once we know our book and our next meeting time, we read and try not to talk about it with anyone reading it so we don’t give spoilers. Our regularly scheduled gathering spot is our local coffee shop, where they have all the best coffees, a few food items, and the best downstairs couch circle anywhere in town – the kind of leather couches you slide down deep into and wonder if you’re ever going to be able to get out once you get in. The kind with a big coffee table in the middle so there’s room for mugs and plates and stacks of books. We go there and pull out our general book questions as a discussion guide. Sometimes we use questions designed specifically for a book – – like at our most recent gathering, when I’d forgotten to bring the list of universal book questions. Another group member pulled up a set online that we discussed.
The part so many book clubs don’t “do” that sets our club apart is the action part. Every member of our club has a streak of adventure dwelling in our hearts, so we like to think of something the book inspires us to want to do, and then go do that thing. For example, in The Beautiful and the Wild, one of the characters was always drinking tea. One of our members found a local tea room and went for brunch to try different teas, even trying on all the hats and a pair of gloves, too. In The God of the Woods, the characters ate s’mores, so we met for appetizers at the home of one of our members and made s’mores. Having the adventure part adds to the experience of any book, because we do things we wouldn’t ordinarily do on any normal day of our lives. We stay young.
Our latest book, Colleen Hoover’s Regretting You, was released as a movie this month, so we made it our October selection and met for dinner and a movie. We spent as much time discussing the movie and the differences between the book and screenplay, and we were still talking in the dark theater when the manager came in, turned on the lights, and said he was “surprised” to see us there. He was shutting the place down. We were just glad we didn’t get locked in the movie theater overnight. We imagined the headline with humor and horror: Local School District Employees Earlier Reported Missing Found Locked in Local Theater Overnight.
Our next book is The Housemaid by Freida McFadden. The movie comes out December 19, and of course we all have our Regal apps for movie tickets up and running and have booked the date. We’ve decided to leave after the credits finish rolling – – just in case.
October Candy Sweetsaholic Shadorma
October, the perennial month of Candy, is the kiss of death for a sweetsaholic like me. Things can spiral out of control in a skinny minute in a month like this, and the closer it gets to a day like today, Halloween, the stash set aside for any trick or treaters has dwindled considerably. Today seems a great day for a Shadorma – a poem with six lines in syllables of 3,5,3,3,7,5.
Sweetsaholic Shadorma
confession:
sweets are my struggle
today I
ate three rolls
of Smarties (the giant kind)
and have no regrets
October 28 – X Marks the Spot Poems
X Marks the Spot Poem
I worked with two Humanities teachers last week on writing poetry from prose, using a blog post I’d written last week. I remembered that Mo Daley, a friend from one of my writing groups, shared this technique after attending a conference where she learned more about how to engage students with writing.
To pull poetry from prose, students took their own stream of consciousness writing from the previous week and marked an X on it. They listed the words under the X marks and used those words to create a poem.  To write X Marks the Spot poems, you can add other words and you don’t have to use them all – the idea is to create a word bank from the words you X.  You can use any form of poetry for this – this is merely an idea technique.            Â
My words:
abide daily we Jesus car granddaughter unison play they Silas of patient tempted packaged gathered can to died children how did story because for when boxes the Tennessee toys kitchen remind and of daughter challenging game was since Jesus and together
Belonging
we gathered in the kitchen
with the children
laughed in unison
at the stories
as we ate together
at a table that seated
everyone – past, present, and future
October 27 – Golden Shovel Poems
I worked with two Humanities teachers in our school district to acquaint students in our 9th Grade Academy with way that they can create poetry from prose. Here is one form of writing we used to mark the geography of a place from our writing. I was using my blog post from Tuesday to model how to let prose inspire poetry.
Golden Shovel Poems
A Golden Shovel poem takes a sentence or phrase from prose (or another poem) and writes it vertically, placing those words at the beginning or end of each line. Ask me about double, triple, quadruple and quintuple shovels…..
Singing Off-Key
We spent the week together having fun and
Can’t wait to
Leave on our next family trip, singing
Jesus, Take the Wheel with Carrie
In off-key high notes through the back roads of
Tennessee, Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain
October 26 – Found Poetry
I worked with two Humanities teachers in my school district to design a writing workshop for students in our 9th Grade Academy with ways that they can create poetry from prose. Here is one form of writing we used in two variations: found poetry and blackout poetry. I was using my blog post from Tuesday to model how to let prose inspire poetry.
Found Poetry
Found poetry is poetry that is found in the words of existing poems or prose and created as a new original work. Some poets use pages of discarded books or those from Little Free Libraries as a supply of pages. Blackout poetry is a form of found poetry. In found poetry, you use any existing writing and swipe those words to go in your own poem. In blackout poetry, you draw black lines through the words you did not select for your poem.
A Silly Selfie
I thought it
was a
silly
selfie
this gift ~
one of the grandchildren
posing
playing
the look on his face
priceless
Here is what my blackout poem looked like in print form:
October 25: Zip Odes
I created a writing workshop with two of our Humanities teachers to acquaint students in our 9th Grade Academy with way that they can create poetry from prose. Here is one form of writing we used to mark the geography of a place from our writing. I was using my blog post from Tuesday to model how to let prose inspire poetry. Today’s poem is a Zip Ode.
Zip Ode Poetry
A Zip Ode takes a Zip Code of a place, written vertically, and uses that many words on each line.
Example: Sevierville, Tennessee’s Zip Code is 37764
Zip Ode to Sevierville, Tennessee
3 Jesus came along
7 with us on our family vacation in
7 October, keeping children and adults in check
6 Hiding Him, Finding Him, Remembering Him
4 in thoughts and actions
October 24 – Writing with Students
New Poetry Forms Nonet
today I get to write with students
showing them new poetry forms
#hashtag acrostics await
poems taken from prose
hidden in the lines
existing text
there for the
prompt of
words
When the high school teacher called asking if I would be willing to come write poetry alongside students, I jumped at the offer. As a District Literacy Specialist mostly wrapped up in the operational world of data and school improvement, I miss the opportunities of the classroom. That’s where we make the biggest difference.
She read to me the AP Standard on taking poetry from prose and wanted to feature blackout poetry. As we chatted, I shared with her my blog post that day and gave her a copy of 90 Ways of Community, a book on poetry written by one of my writing groups. Together, we considered the various poetry forms that we could use if we modeled the process ~ blackout and found poetry were already on the list, but we added Haiku, X Marks the Spot, Acrostic, Golden Shovel, and Zip Odes as a geographic timestamp bonus of sorts. The students have already created their own personal writing, and we’ll show them how I used a blog post to extract poetry and urge them to do the same.
We’ll model the process.
We’ll feature an overview of possibilities – – a menu of choices – – and then watch their creativity flow onto their paper like they’re mining for gems that they pull out to polish and sparkle.
I’ll remind them that poetry is a process – – not a product. In fact, I’ll probably open the class with something like, “poets and artists have a mindset of creating a lot of bad poems and a lot of bad art.” They’ll wonder who the crazy lady is, but I’ll explain what I mean: perfection is not the goal. Writing is the goal. Thinking is the goal. Not every race is a marathon, not every photo wins awards, and not every book gets 5 stars – – it’s finding the pieces of what we do well and building on those parts so that the process becomes somewhat of a habit. I’ll explain to them that I think in metaphors and syllables, and I take a lot of random pictures to come back to little things I see that will work their way into poems.
Take this, for example:
These kids are a big part of my life. Here stand five of my seven grandchildren in the very spot at the top of a mountain in Sevierville where their parents were married in May 2012. Their other grandparents own that land, and at the bottom, there is a fishing pond. Let’s take a deeper look.
I see two boys (yes, they’re boys – they just have lots of hair) exploring the trail that leads to the pond, tacklebox in hand, ready to to cast a line and spend time fishing. I’ll explain to them that already, my thoughts are swirling in metaphors of adventure, seeking, a quest, a tackle box of what it takes to find, a hook for the found thing to be caught, and the patience and grit to stick with it – and the treks through the mud and the weeds to get there.
Because fishing isn’t about the fish. You can go to the grocery store and get fish. You can order fish from a restaurant – or better yet, you can Door Dash fish.
No, fishing is no more about the fish than poetry and art are about perfection. It’s about the adventure and the process, and the wait for just the right inspiration.
It’s about engaging in what it takes to do a thing, whether writing a poem or creating art or catching fish. It’s having the stick-to-it-ness to stand still and be quiet for two hours of a morning and be determined when you’d almost always otherwise be doing something else, but you learn to love a thing and know that there is something, something, something that will bite and that you’ll reel it in and be proud of it, whether it’s big or small.
You’ve caught something you’re proud of, and you can’t wait to share it with the world. So you pose for the photo, holding a fish mouth open the way you’ve been taught, holding the fish a little closer to the camera to make it look bigger than it actually is, and you see the great things about your fish.
And then you release it back into the world, knowing that next time you come back, you may catch that same one again – – or something different, like that turtle your sister caught.
Either way, the one thing you cannot buy, like that Door Dashed fish, is the mud on your own shoes from the lived experience.
And that is what poetry is – life, experience, thinking, waiting, casting a line and seeing what comes up on the end of the hook.
So while I may say I’m going to school today, what I’m really doing is going fishing
And I can’t wait to see what all we catch!
Common Threads 