An Open Letter to the Story Idea That is Fast Slipping Away

Dear Story Idea,

Please come back.

I know it has been about 36 hours since you first came to me in my Thursday morning shower. I know you really, really wanted to be written down right after that, when you were fresh and when all the creative connections were still firing in my brain.

I know it's not your fault that you chose to come on one of the busiest days of my week. During a season of huge amounts of work deadlines that I am struggling to meet. During a time of real financial stress. In the midst of ongoing weirdness with my health.

I planned to get back to you later yesterday. And again last night. And again this morning. And after I got some of my work done. And housework. And school time. And helped my daughter through a really hard day. And cried for a while.

I didn't know how my tiredness and discouragement would send you into hiding.

I've been feeling pretty lonely, and having you drop in yesterday in the midst of everything that feels so fragile and tiring felt really great. I'm sorry you couldn't stay longer.

It sure would be nice if you'd come back to visit. I promise I will try to be ready with a pen this time.

Love.

Wordplay! A Creative Exercise for Priming the Poetry Pump

It’s been a delightful poeming month, an unexpected gift to this summer. I’ve been both reading and writing poetry again and loving it.

Part of this is due to my reading “at” a couple of great poetry resources, one old and one new-to-me (more on these in another post). But part of it has just been a wonderful rekindling of a perennial love of words. I find myself wanting to pick them up and marvel over them like gemstones, wherever I happen to encounter them – in good prose or in poetry.

One way I can tell I’m in good poeming season (besides the bouquet of poems blooming in my journal) is because I’m relaxing with some wordplay exercises. While word play can refer to any sort of playing with words, I tend to use it as a heading in my notebook for a particular kind of writing exercise I started doing many years ago and return to whenever I’m feeling particularly playful with language.

I don’t think this is an exercise I picked up anywhere in particular, although I may have patched it together from dribs and drabs of other writing exercises and prompts. Still I’ve honed it over the years, finding new ways to relax into it each time I do it. It doesn’t have an exact set of rules. I basically know what to expect when I go into the exercise, but one of the fun parts is that I never really know what to expect, because it always leads to such creative and varied results. 

Here are some of the parameters for the wordplay exercise as I’ve developed it.

1. Start with culling a list of words from a book or any other bit of writing. This will be your resource list. Your list can come from almost any type of book or article – in fact, it can be fun to experiment with different kinds of resources. I’ve pulled my list from magazines, history books, poetry anthologies, and nature field guides. You could try it with a favorite novel or a science text book. Sticking with one book is usually my favorite way to do the exercise, both because it limits my choices and because it delights me to see what a vast array of words you can find in almost any resource. Poetry anthologies or collections are, of course, some of the best for dipping into, since poets tend to use such concrete and evocative language.

2. Set a limit for how many words you list. This can be any kind of limit – a “page’s worth” (however you decide to write them on the page), a certain number of words, a number of words within a given time frame, or a number of columns of words. I like to write my lists in long columns down the page.

3. Try not to be too conscious of which words you’re choosing. This sounds harder than it is, because once you’re in the groove of choosing words, you’ll see how easy the choices are – it’s like picking fruit from branches. When I say “try not to be too conscious,” I mean don’t go looking for words with common sounds, or a set number of verbs or nouns or adjectives. But don’t worry or be surprised if you find yourself clustering around certain types of sounds or words. Let your pen write down whatever words your eye falls on most naturally. Pick the word up mentally and let it roll around your brain. If it feels good, jot it down; if it doesn’t resonate with you in that moment, skip it and move on. If you find a word that you really like but find yourself wanting to jot it in a different form, that’s OK too. Recently I came upon the word “boisterously” but decided to drop the “ly” and tuck away “boisterous” as an adjective. You can always go back and ad the “ly” later when you’re using it, or change it in some other way.

4. If it helps to prime your creativity, capture your words in colorful felt tip markers or crayons, or alternate different colored ballpoints – one word in blue, another in red, black, or green.

5. Occasionally, a poem may begin to form (chomping at the bit!) as you’re making your list. If that happens, go ahead and run with it first thing.

6. More than likely, however, you will find yourself pausing for breath once you’ve compiled the list, pleased just to sit there and look at it for a minute. Like other things you collect, words can be beautiful in and of themselves, each one as different and unique as shells or wildflowers. Let yourself enjoy the collection.

7. Get ready to play! This is where I have to confess the guidelines break down a bit. I don’t have a single approach to how I play with the list beyond this: I begin to put words in groups (clusters, bevies, strings) on the page. Sometimes I do this on the actual page where I wrote the list, letting the words dance in the margins. Sometimes I do it on a facing page. Sometimes I go for groupings via sight features and sometimes by sound. Although there isn’t any set way to do this, here are a few possibilities you might try to get started:

(a)    Read through the entire list, either silently or out loud, and let yourself notice repeating sounds. Did you gravitate toward a lot of words that all started with the same letter? Put them together. Did you happen to collect a lot of words that major in long “i”s or short “a”s or long “o”s? Let them gather together and see what happens.

(b)   Group words by form. Let your nouns huddle in one place, or divide them into concrete nouns and more abstract ones. Encourage your adjectives to hang out together and marshal your verbs into one force. Notice if you had a tendency to go for certain forms like “ing” endings or plurals. Anything that makes these words kin is game for a grouping strategy.

(c)    Begin to put together adjectives with nouns, even if they don’t seem to make logical sense. Turn adjectives into nouns and vice versa. Silent can become silence and kindness can morph into kind. Yes, you could end up with some trite expressions – in my wordplay session earlier today, I did this and stumbled upon both golden silence and natural kinship (I think our brains are sometimes wired to make the obvious connections) but push yourself and put words together willy-nilly, whether they look like they belong together or not. You will end up with some combinations you would never have come up with except in playful mode: relentless world, secret father, obstinate rain.

(d)   Look for rhymes. Sometimes you won’t actually find any that occur naturally in your list, but you’ll find words that want you to find rhymes for them. My collection of “ing” words netted me the following: living, bleeding, glowing, meeting, which felt like they were begging for a quatrain.

Once you’ve spent a while playing with the words of your list, grouping them and re-grouping them, you will probably find poems or poem lines start to come. The end goal of the exercise, for me at any rate, is not usually a whole poem draft – though sometimes I end up with one. More often than not, I come up with what I call “snippets” – potential lines of poems, stanzas that might be built into something interesting later, or even just a series of images that I can come back to.

Here’s example of a snippet I wrote in today’s wordplay exercise:

the broken wing of

the boisterous bird

left him earthbound

but his music

was heard

in an echoing chant

that spilled

through the bones

and waltzed

through the woods

and scattered

the stones

One of the best parts of this exercise is that it helps me to approach poetry from a different place: not just a playful place, but one in which form takes precedence. Actually it’s not even form taking precedence, but the words themselves. The words lead me into the poem, rather than an idea I want to convey or even an image I feel compelled to describe. Those are fine places to begin with in poetry, but sometimes I need to get back to words themselves. The wordplay exercise shakes me loose from the typical ways I approach the writing of a poem and pulls me into the music of language.

Why All the Best Ideas Come in the Shower (An Original Poem)

Why All the Best Ideas Come in the Shower

Because you can't hear the phone ring,
and if you can,
you still can't answer it.
Because no one can expect you
to solve a problem
or take care of an immediate crisis,
real or imagined.

Because the warm rainfall
descending on your head
mimics the flow of inspiration,
pouring downward
in an abundance
that catches you by surprise.

Because water is a gift
so precious
that on good days
when you remember to stand
in gratitude
you're more receptive
to other gifts too.

Because you can relax
taut muscles
and breathe deep in ways
that you don't think to do
if others might see,
and if tears need to flow --
who will know?

Because the sound of the water
doesn't just soothe,
it quickens
and helps your mind
make liquid connections
that suddenly!
create so much beauty,
so much sense.

Because unclothed
feels vulnerable but also free,
the same way you feel
on the best creative days
even you're bundled
into protective layers.

Because --
(oh, wait, there were more reasons,
I know, but they have
gurgled softly
down
the
drain -- )

oh yes
Because being cleansed
makes you feel alive
and whole
and covered by
refreshing waves of grace.

(~EMP, 7/31/15) 

Words, Words, Words

It's been a wordy week.

Not only have I been surfing the crest of the wave on essay reading/evaluating, but it's been a delightfully wordy week for the sweet girl. In Latin, she's been having fun with derivatives, and in grammar, she's been learning how to find etymologies in dictionary entries...two activities that go together so well, and yet that just "happened" to come together in our curricula this week. Love those moments of serendipity in learning.

In spelling, she's been working with words spelled with "ie" and "ei" -- and you know, some of those words are tricky, especially the ones that simply do NOT follow the "i before e except after c, or when they sound like an a, as in eighty and weigh." A great mnemonic device except that there are still exceptions like neither and either, and today's bonus word...leisure.

I think I've come up with a couple of ways to help her remember how to spell believe and pieces, however. With believe, she has a tendency to drop the second e. I told her to look for the word "lie" inside of believe, and to think "never believe a lie." With pieces, she just tends to...well, go all to pieces. She's spelled it a couple of different ways, but can't seem to get it down. So I suggested she look for the "pie" in pieces, and remember that "we cut a pie into pieces."

Meanwhile, I had another realization today about the power of words...how sometimes, maybe especially when we're tired, they evoke things for us on all sorts of levels. One of her bonus spelling words, an easy one this time, was "eighteen." And no sooner had the word left my lips than I was seeing, in my mind's eye, a beautiful bouquet of pink roses. I don't think I had consciously remembered, for years, that my parents gave me eighteen pink roses for my eighteenth birthday, but suddenly there they were, pale and lustrous, sitting on the shiny wood of the piano on Dustin Drive.

Words can be playful. They also have power!

Between Alrighty and Almighty

I had one of those funny skim reading slips the other day. A friend had posted a prayer on facebook (where I often tend to be in skim read mode) and it began with the words "Almighty God." But my hurrying glance took the phrase in too quickly and I read it as "Alrighty God..." which sounded like the beginning of a much more casual conversation.

The slip made me chuckle, but it's also caused me to reflect on the fact that many of my prayers, depending on their time and place, could probably be characterized either as "almighty" or "alrighty" prayers.

The prayers I read from others, particularly in the prayer book, help me to center in on the powerful reality of who God is. Those prayers carefully name the Triune God, reminding me of who he is -- awesome in power and majesty, full of strength and loving kindness. He is indeed Almighty God, and I need to remember that and to address him, head and heart bowed, as such....and often. Whether I am reading a prayer, joining my voice to other faithful pray-ers now and across the years, or letting my personal prayers and petitions be shaped by that kind of language, I need a lot of time steeped in "almighty" kinds of prayers.

But there is perhaps a time and a place for "alrighty" prayers too...the kinds of prayer I often find myself uttering in the midst of a busy and stressed day, or in the midst of a daily repeated chore that feels like sheer drudgery -- the kind of prayer that begins in a more casual way, as befits one friend just speaking from her heart to a friend who knows and loves her and wants to listen, even if all she has to say is something akin to "Alrighty God, I know I need to get through this next few minutes...please help me!"

Of course the beauty of it all is that it's because the Friend we address is the Almighty King of the universe (able to do all that needed to be done to bridge the chasm and bring us from the far off kingdom of darkness to the near to his heart kingdom of light) we can enter into real and intimately loving conversation with him -- conversation sometimes as casual and simple as any ordinary conversation can be. It is because he is mighty to save that we are rescued, and because we rescued that we are given access -- real and amazing access -- to his presence. Where often we bow, face down to the ground, in humble worship, but where we also sometimes find ourselves drawn to sit right next to the king on his throne, snuggled under his arm, just because we love to have him hold us -- and because he delights to do so.

Collecting Words: Vocabulary Building the Natural Way

There are a lot of vocabulary building ideas and curricula floating around the homeschool world. I've seen some of them, and even picked up a workbook for free now and again, though I don't think I've actually used one.

A couple of years ago I took a deep breath and decided that for our learning environment, it made the most sense to weave vocabulary building into the fabric of what we're already doing. Because we read. A LOT. That doesn't mean that one day I might not yet introduce a more systematic or formal approach. It also doesn't mean that I'm not intentionally fostering a love of words and a richer vocabulary. It just means that I'm trying to find a way to foster that naturally, instead of sitting my child down in front of a workbook where she has to use certain words in sentences or memorize definitions.

A lot of vocabulary is picked up by osmosis. If you read a lot, and come across certain words enough times, you will eventually pick up on their meaning. This is yet another endorsement, by the way, for encouraging re-reading. There are multiple benefits involved in revisiting a story again and again, and enhancing vocabulary is just one of them, but it's a good one.

Kids are natural collectors. They love to collect all sorts of things: cards, coins, stamps, action figures, dolls, rocks, shells. For some people, that love of collecting grows with them into adulthood. Grown-ups collect all sorts of things too, including sometimes the same things they started collecting as children. In my life, I've been particularly passionate (in different seasons) about certain collections: baseball cards, books, and small bits of green glass have been three of the biggies for me.

It dawned one me one day, a number of years ago, that I had always been a word collector. It was one reason I kept a journal. Not just to write down memories, thoughts, and feelings, or to play with bits of poems and stories, but to actually collect words. I kept lists of them. I still do. One day I came across a book called poemcrazy that inspired me to begin collecting words in even more physical ways. I started cutting words I liked from magazines and newspapers. I kept them in small jars and boxes, often along with small scraps of pictures. I still do. I went to an office supply store and bought a big roll of tickets, the "admit one" tickets you might sell at a play or movie. I started pasting words onto tickets. I called these word tickets "tickets to the imagination" and I started using them on those rare but wonderful occasions when someone would ask me to lead a writing workshop.

So you see why I began to realize a couple of years ago why vocabulary building could be a natural thing to build into our learning time. Put together my love of collecting words, our family's love of reading, and a child's natural curiosity and propensity to collect -- and you've got the potential blocks for a towering vocabulary.

This year I made the sweet girl a word book. You could easily create this from any notebook or just from stapling together notebook paper. I decided it would be fun to make it as homemade as possible, so I pulled together a little notebook based on a template I found over at Donna Young's website (my favorite free printables site). The lined pages made a neat little notebook and she even provided a cover with the title "My Word Book" in flowing script. I went hunting and found an alphabet in lovely, fancy scripts. I cut out each letter and pasted them, in order, on the notebook pages, leaving extra room for the letters I thought might get used most often. At the beginning of the school year, I gave it to the sweet girl and showed her that we'd keep it in a purple folder along with her list of independent reading. The word book and reading list stay next to our DK Merriam-Webster Children's Dictionary.

Now that she has a place to "collect" words, the sweet girl is enthusiastic about doing so. (We did this last year too, in third grade, just in a composition book. It worked well and got the idea rolling, but it's snowballed this year and is really taking off now that she has this little word book to tuck her findings inside.) I've encouraged her to ask about words she comes across when she's reading or when we're reading together. If she doesn't know what it means, we look it up and it goes into the word book.

There are weeks when not much goes into the book. We can have days when we both forget it. But then words will pop up all over the place. "What does that mean?" and "Remember when we were reading so and so and we heard that word?" have become more frequent parts of conversation. She's eager to get to the dictionary (even when it sometimes fails us, as I'm discovering even a very good children's dictionary can do with certain complex or old-fashioned words of the type we come across in older literature...thank heavens for online dictionaries!) and she loves to write them down in her homemade-but-kind-of fancy word book. Just this morning three more words went into the word book: visage, sporadically, and aggravated. Visage came from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" which she's been memorizing. (Sometime I want to devote a whole post to the joys and benefits of poetry memorization!) The other two came in a review lesson in our grammar book.

I share these thoughts, not to disparage any of the more formal programs out there that teach/increase vocabulary in more systematic ways, but rather to share that I think it can be done, especially in the early learning years, in ways that are simple, organic, pleasurable, and that ignite a love of both the sounds and meanings of words.

How Words Work

I've got a handful of posts in the pipeline, but life is doing that funny thing it sometimes does...getting in the way of blogging. Imagine!

Words keep being on my mind though. The way we use them wisely, the way we don't. How they can give life and hope and spark creativity and form connections. How they can wound or trivialize. How much I need them in my life, and how much I still have to learn about crafting them and using them well.

The other day I was reading a bit from Leonard Sweet's book Aqua Church as I prepped for a discipleship group with the teen girls at church. He loves to weave quotes and bits of poems into his reflections, and I stumbled upon a stanza I'd never read but which spoke to my heart. I quoted a line from it as my FB status. A friend asked me what it was from. I told her, and she went looking for the whole poem (it was from a book published in 1900!) and posted all several beautiful, hope-filled stanzas. She's been grieving the death of her brother, and the poem touched her heart. I watched as other people commented on the poem, sensing the comfort and beauty in the words, and then I saw one of them say they were passing it on to a grieving friend.

Do you ever marvel at the way words form a web? I often think about poetry and stories as long, ongoing conversations, but sometimes that firms up in front of our eyes in unexpected ways. An author over a century ago pens a prayer poem. An author several years ago excerpts it in his book. I read the words and they touch me so I pass that on. My friend is so touched she goes looking for deeper context and more of the poem. She passes it on to someone who passes it on to someone and...more people are blessed.

This is how words work at their best. They fly like birds and blow about like leaves, like seeds. They're messages in bottles and scrawled notes in balloons (something my elementary school did once, years ago in the pre-green days...we wrote messages and then released them in balloons, waiting to see if we would hear back from those who found them).

As writers and teachers we can choose our words carefully, shape them wisely and beautifully (we hope) but ultimately we send them out there into the world. And they do their thing, connecting hearts and minds and sometimes ending up in surprising places.

"Kaboosh!" The Sounds of Creativity

I spent the afternoon at Arts Camp doing brainstorming/wordplay sessions with three groups of kids. I was there to try to prime the creative pump for the rest of the week's song writing sessions, which Dana will doing with them.

Despite some craziness (not an easy working space, some rambunctious kids in second group, and some VERY rambunctious kids in the third group) it was a lot of fun. I wanted to get them thinking concretely and metaphorically, without telling them that's what we were doing. I used one of my favorite group writing starters, where I have the kids think about a particular season ~ summer, of course, for today ~ but to think about it in terms of what it looks like, sounds like, tastes like, smells like, and feels like. I also threw in color associations and got them to think about what the season would look like and wear if it was a person. For one group, when things were petering out, I tried to get them thinking about how they'd sell summer if they could put it in a bottle. (One little girl said she'd put lots of grass and flowers in the bottle.)

It's always interesting to see where children's minds go. Their creative and imaginative leaps are fascinating. But sometimes equally fascinating is how pedestrian kids can be (and adults too, this is an equal opportunity challenge) when you ask them to try to come up with descriptors, one reason I like to push it back into the realm of the concrete whenever possible. Even after we brainstormed a whole page full of rainbow colored words and images -- most of them highly specific and related to various senses -- when we got to the part where we were putting lines down, there were kids who wanted me to write things down like "summer is fun" or "summer is pretty." How is it fun? I pressed them. What makes it look pretty?

Like I said, this is an equal opportunity challenge. Left to ourselves, we often run straight toward the easy, vague words that mean so much they don't mean much at all. The kinds of words that balloon over you like a tent, covering a lot of ground. I'd rather hear the snap of the tent as it's unfolded and the banging of the hammer as the tent pegs get smacked into the ground. And I use that image purposefully, because one of the kids, when I asked him what summer sounded like, answered "bang! bang! bang!" When I said, "what makes that noise?" he said "the hammer when you hammer tent pegs in when you go camping!"

Sound words were a definite hit with the younger kids. If I'd had more time, I would have played more with onomatopoeia. One of the sounds of summer that kept coming up was fireworks. So with the youngest group, I asked them to make fireworks sounds. They came up with "kaboosh!" which worked its way into their poem. "Summer says 'kaboosh!' like fireworks."

A fun day. Or maybe I should say a day that sizzled like sparklers.

Building Vocabulary the Beverly Cleary Way

I've talked about Beverly Cleary's books on this blog quite a bit. That's because the sweet girl (now eight! gulp!) loves them to pieces. Sometimes literally.

She's particularly a fan of the Ramona books, and we've been reading our way slowly through the series, doling them out like chocolate-covered read-aloud treats in between other books. Just today we finished Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (sweet girl's pick, just in time for her own 8th birthday!) the Newbery honor winning Ramona that was first published in 1981.

I've been thinking for a while about ways to begin to do some natural vocabulary building. Well, I'm a big believer in the fact that vocabulary does get built, quite naturally, the more we read -- and listen and converse. I've just wanted to find some more intentional ways of calling attention to word meanings, beyond the bit we do in spelling each week during the school year (where we often discuss word meanings or look a couple of the spelling words up in the glossary at the back of the spelling book). I'm also wanting to encourage more use of the dictionary, and to that end, we recently purchased a beautiful one: the DK Merriam-Webster Children's Dictionary. We snagged a used copy from my favorite bookstore, Half-Price Books. I must say it's amazing what a couple of dog-eared corners can do to bring the price way, way down on a big hardback book like this.

My bright but obvious idea is to have the sweet girl think about words she comes across, especially in the books we read aloud together, that she's not familiar with. Then we can write them down together, in a lovely little composition book, and look them up. I say "we" not in the royal sense; for now this is a joint activity, but I foresee a time when it will become more independent.

I'm not pushing too hard on this -- not making her tell me every word she doesn't know -- because I don't want to take the joy and spontaneity out of our read-aloud time, and because I do think we learn a lot just by seeing and hearing a word in context. But this seems like a natural extension of that kind of learning. We often discuss what we read, which has led to some fun exploration of various topics (like leaning more about animals mentioned in the Little House books, or finding pictures of old automobiles when we read the Betsy-Tacy books). Reading always opens doors to explore further the things we don't know about, the subjects that intrigue us. Why shouldn't it open doors to learning about words that intrigue us too?

Cleary seemed like a golden opportunity to dive into this activity, both because her work is so beloved around here and because she uses such rich vocabulary. And so it was today that we found ourselves looking up feeble and indignant, inspiration and nag. Aren't those great Ramona words?

And it was fun! I planned for us to look up two words. It turned into four because the sweet girl got very enthusiastic. She asked me to just open the book to any page and read her a paragraph (we'd just finished the whole thing) and she'd stop me when she got to a word she wasn't quite sure she knew the meaning of. I have a feeling this exercise is going to be a keeper, and not just with Cleary books. Though I'm glad that's where we started.

Related post (from 2008): Teaching Nouns with Beverly Cleary

Wordplay: Cento

I've not had much time lately for wordplay, but last evening I found myself just needing to spend some time with language...not organizing anything with it, not planning out my next writing projects (though I did that yesterday too) just enjoying it.

I always enjoy the Monday stretch over at the Miss Rumphius Effect, but I hadn't popped over there in a while. The stretch that intrigued me most last night was one she posted a couple of Mondays ago, a challenge to write a cento.

For those who have never heard of this form (I hadn't) a cento is defined as "a poem made entirely of pieces from poems by other authors. Centos can be rhymed or unrhymed, short or long." (Copying Miss R's attribution, this definition comes from The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms.)

Although I'd never heard the name of the form, I've seen similar ideas played with through "found poetry," and through the book A Stone, A Leaf, A Door (essentially prose by Thomas Wolfe that's been arranged into poems by another author).

Last night, tired as I was, this seemed just the right kind of exercise to get me reading, reflecting on, and writing poetry. I quickly pulled two books from my shelf: The One Year Book of Poetry: 365 Devotional Readings Based on Classic Christian Verse, and The Roar on the Other Side: A Guide for Student Poets. Both good books in different ways, and both crammed with lots of poems I could peruse and borrow words, lines and phrases from.

One of the enjoyable things about this creative stretch was the way it freed me to read poetry, at least the first time through, not so much for meaning as for sound. Sometimes I get caught up from the start in trying to discern what a poet is saying, and I lose the opportunity to simply fall into the poem as an artifact for the eye and ear. Last night I let myself fall, though I found that when a line grabbed me, as one almost inevitably did, I usually wanted to back up and find out why. Where did the line fit in the grander scheme of the whole poem? What would happen if I lifted it out of its context? What would happen if I lifted it out of its context and put it next to something completely different from it, written by someone else in a different time and place altogether?

The result was exhilarating. Not only for the joys of finding similar sounds and images that seemed to run through wildly disparate poems (like recurring wild flowers in amazingly different gardens) but for the ways those sounds and images began to weave together in my mind to create something entirely new.

Here's the result: the poem I assembled, followed by notes that tell you where the various lines came from.

Let this day's air
praise the Lord --
for ne'er saw I,
never felt, a calm
so deep!
Rinsed with gold,
endless, walking the fields,
the beauty of the morning;
silent, bare --
Let this day's air
praise the Lord
for strange treasures
lodged in this
fair world appear.
I cannot drift beyond
his love and care.
Let this day's air
praise the Lord --
his praise shall tune
my voice.

(EMP, 6-30-10)

"Let this day's air praise the Lord," which became my recurring line, is the first line of Robert Siegel's poem "Rinsed with Gold, Endless, Walking the Fields," printed on page 147 of The Roar on the Other Side.

"Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!" comes from William Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge," the poem for July 3 in The One Year Book of Poetry.

It seemed to be that returning to Siegel's poem, with the line he draws from his title, "Rinsed with gold, endless, walking the fields" provided the perfect description for that deep calm.

And then it made sense to return to Wordsworth again for "the beauty of the morning; silent, bare..."

As I kept going back to the Siegel refrain, I kept thinking of reasons why the very air around us praises the Lord (and oh it does). And so I moved to "strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear" from Thomas Traherne's poem "The Salutation," the poem for June 30 in The One Year Book of Poetry.

Both the sound and sense of that line seemed to move naturally to the more individual and personal gratitude of the line "I cannot drift beyond his love and care" from "The Eternal Goodness" by John Greenleaf Whittier (poem for May 25 from the One Year Book).

And as I repeated Siegel's line one more time, I wanted to try to tie it into a different (and again more personal) line involving praise, and so borrowed "his praise shall tune my voice" from William Cowper's poem "Joy and Peace in Believing" (the poem for May 14 in the One Year Book).

*******

This was a fascinating exercise. The poem I ended up stitching together somehow felt greater than the sum of its parts, more like a choir of voices singing to me of similar themes. I found myself grateful to remember that everything that has breath praises the Lord, and that my own breath, my own voice, can be "tuned" by listening to the praise all around me...in the air, in the strange treasures of the world, and in the poems of those who have gone before.

I'll definitely be adding cento poems to my regular repertoire of wordplay. If you're inspired to give it a try, let me know how it works for you!

What Would Your Childhood Memories "B"?

Years ago, my husband and I instituted a late-night word-association game. We tend to play it more during certain seasons of our life together, when one or both of us is having a hard time getting to sleep. (The sacrificial love comes in when one of us is exhausted enough to be dropping off but the other is having a hard time sleeping, so the sleepy one wakes up enough to enter into the game...thus often waking up more fully than the other one!)

It's an "easy-peasy" kind of game, as my seven year old would likely tell you -- we play a version of it with her before she goes to bed sometimes too. We pick a letter of the alphabet and a category, and try to think of things that fit the category that begin with that letter. We've tried all kinds of categories over the years, from food to books to movies to intangibles to adjectives...and on and on. We've instituted a few basic guidelines along the way, especially in the categories we tend to play a lot, like movies. In that case, we always count first names for characters and last names for directors/actors. For example, if we were playing "H" in the movie category, we could say both Hagrid and Harry Potter, but we couldn't say Helena Bonham-Carter: she'd come under "B."

My husband is great at coming up with new, creative categories. The most recent one he suggested was "childhood." We decided it could mean any sort of association with childhood, but as you might expect, it's turned out to be more specific to our own childhoods/youth. Last night we were doing the letter "B" and we ended up laughing a lot over some our associations. Here are just a few:

bubbles; balls; books; banana popsicles; Batman; Barbie; Bazooka bubble gum; Bonanza; Brady Bunch; Bee-Gees; Betsy-Tacy; Benji; bicyles; baseball games

There were lots more (including a lot I don't remember because they came in that hazy, blurred horizon between awake-asleep) but that gives you a flavor of the game. It might even give you a flavor of when we grew up ~ albeit several years apart!

So what would some of your childhood memories/associations "B"?

Homeschool Group Poem: Spring

I've been enjoying sharing poetry wherever I go this month. On Friday, I had a few minutes to share some springtime poems with our homeschool group. Then three of the girls (including the sweet girl) tried their hand at writing a poem together.

I love doing wordplay exercises with kids. These three girls, ages 6-10, had so much fun just playing with words. I liked seeing their eyes spark with creativity as we brainstormed ideas together. I loved catching their energy as they watched their web of words grow as I jotted them down on newsprint. I threw out all sorts of sensory and imagination sparking questions about spring: what does it look like? sound like? what are the colors of spring? if it had a taste, what would it taste like? if it was a girl dressing up for a party, what would she wear?

That last question really got them going. As the answers poured forth, so did the first line of their poem. I recognized it as soon as I heard it. And once that line came together, the rest of it tumbled out from them in excited exclamations. They watched their joint-poem grow on the page, and then all three of them proudly signed it.

Here's what they came up with:

Spring

Spring is a lady
with a leafy hat.
She dances with
the wind.
She sings and whistles
with the birds.
She bows with the trees
and sways with
the flowers.

~by S, A & A, three very creative girls!

Poetry Postcard 3

So many of my favorite poetry moments this month have come through reading the excellent interviews in The Poetry Makers series at the Miss Rumphius Effect. I especially love the quotes on poetry and writing I'm getting to add to my collection. Some of these come in the section where the poet is asked to share their own favorite quotes, but many others just jump off the page in the midst of the conversation. Here are a few I've especially enjoyed chewing on:

“Poems are not meant to be solved; they are meant to be savored.” --Allan Wolf

"I write so that I might become a better reader." --Allan Wolf (isn't that a delicious reversal from how we usually hear it?)

"I have a little notebook in my back pocket and a pen in my front pocket at all times. I actually get a little panicky when I’m without them." -- Allan Wolf (I resonate with this one!)

"...poems are for noticing, for wondering, for describing something so interesting you want to capture it in words, save it forever, share it with the world, make people see what you see, feel what you feel." -- Heidi Mordhorst

"...it’s fun for me to go through three or five or eight drafts of a poem. I like to watch it change and muscle me into where it wants to go instead of where I think I want to take it. Some people like to drive poetry around. I like to be poetry’s passenger." -- Ron Koertge

"My basic approach when I write is to waste no words." -- Charles R. Smith Jr.

"Fingers hover over the keyboard, brain chases down words, lassoing them like stray calves. Thesaurus, rhyming dictionary close at hand. If I get stuck, I push away from the desk – take a nap, eat some chocolate, take a walk. Shake the words loose. Return to the desk. And, to steal Ms. Yolen’s line, keep B.I.C. (Butt In Chair) until I’ve got something." -- Stephen Swinburne, on describing his writing process.

Mother-Daughter Poem: Shell

We've been reading lots of wonderful poetry this month, but on Friday we tried our hand at writing a joint poem. The sweet girl has been playing a lot with her shell collection lately (a number of beautiful shells her Dad picked up on the beach in South Carolina last year) and we spent a while just doing some wordplay exercises with the shells (what do they look like? what do they feel like? what colors are they?) before we wrote this poem together.

Shell

The long silver shell
is swirled.
It looks like it has
a window.
When I look through it
I think I can see
the sea.

~EMP & SBP, April 2010

Poetry Postcard 1

I've been trying to think about how I'd like to post during this poetry month. As promised, I'll be posting links to some favorite places in the blogosphere where I'll be stopping and visiting and reading during April. But I don't just want to post links, many of which you can pick up elsewhere anyway (including some round-ups with lists).

What struck me as a I contemplated how I enjoyed poetry month last year, and how I meandered, enjoyed and ruminated on first of the month poetry posts this morning, is that I often find myself delighting in small snippets. Lines from poems, or lines from poets talking about poetry, often seem to jump out and grab me. Last year I sometimes jotted those lines down in my journal, though more often than not I simply noted them mentally and rushed on. This year I'd like to be more intentional about capturing some of those moments that celebrate language and the love of language.

And I decided it would be fun to share them. So think of these poetry posts as postcards. I may only have time to jot a few lines, but jot I will -- and I will send them off into cyberspace where I hope you will enjoy them too.

Today's postcard comes courtesy of The Miss Rumphius Effect, which is reprising its wonderful "Poetry Makers" interview series this month. This year Tricia kicked off with an interview with Mary Ann Hoberman, current children's poet laureate (or as she calls her "the big kahuna"). Lots of wonderful things in that interview, especially on the importance of sharing poetry with children and the joys of poetry memorization. But I think my favorite line was this:

"...a poem is an object made out of words that carries, like a brimful cup, the mystery of language."

A brimful cup of the mystery of language. Can't you see a chipped, thick handled-mug, heaped up with words, frothy as whipped cream? Or perhaps a crystal clear glass, full of something cool and refreshing, the words clinking around like ice cubes or sliding down the sides in tiny streams of condensation.

Happy Poetry Month!

Constellations and Sequences

"Why is this cup constellating?" the sweet girl asked me tonight at the dinner table.

"Why is it what?" I asked.

"Why is there constellation on the outside of this cup?" she asked again, tracing the wet drops with her finger.

"Oh!" I said. "You mean condensation!"

I do love our daughter's way with words. She uses them so boldly, even when she's not quite sure if she's got the right one on the tip of her tongue.

One of my other favorites, which she used to say quite regularly, is "sequences."

You know, sequences...those bright shiny things you use to decorate clothes and purses.

A Festive Morning To You

I woke up this morning feeling discouraged. That's not an easy thing to admit for someone who tries/wants to greet each new day like the gift from God that it is. But unfortunately today it was true: I felt like I sprang straight into the morning with leftover discouragement from the day before attached to my back in a heavy pack. Maybe I forgot to take the pack off last night before I went to bed!

And then the sweet girl got up. I was cleaning up a bit in the kitchen before I went into her room for morning prayers. I'd already told her good morning and when she came back into the kitchen, I said "good morning again" sort of automatically, my mind somewhere else.

"Good morning!" she exclaimed, her voice bright. And then added, "Festive morning! Great morning! Excellent morning! I love you morning!"

I started laughing. I told her I especially loved "Festive morning" -- one of the most joyful ways I've ever heard to welcome a new day and to share your joy with someone else.

I think I may try this discipline for a while: finding a joyful way to greet God each morning, maybe even before I get out of bed. I know some days I will feel that joy...and other days, like this one perhaps, it will be a conscious stretch. But that's okay. I think the discipline of doing it can matter, to my heart and to God's.

I've been realizing anew lately how important it is that I let God know how much I love him. So often when I pray, I'm stuffed with requests or worries, and yes, that's part of praying too, to present those things at God's feet. But simple words of love mean so much in any relationship, including our relationship with the Lord of heaven and earth.

A festive morning to you!

Numbers and Letters

The sweet girl was drawing on the white board this afternoon. I paused as I was walking by and contemplated this:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
W T T F F S S A N T


The numbers seemed straightforward enough, but I wasn't sure about the letters, so I asked.

"They're the beginning letter sound of each number," she explained simply.

Given the words won/one and ate/eight, I thought this was pretty impressive!