What it Is

Has it really been seven years since I first met my poet friend and annual classroom visitor? Wow. Tempus fugit.

As always, he was very engaging to my students and they produced some great writing that they were quite proud of.

As always, the same goes for me:

What it IS

It is impossible.
It is possible.
It is snake eyes, double sixes, a one-eyed jack.
You are a lucky duck.
You are a tragic hero.
You are a lucky duck.
It is a goldfish, a ping pong ball, a carnival prize.
It is wood, shadow, a hawk flying.
It is lunch time, children, trains, and trumpets.
It is the devil in the day lilies,
a sunflower looking down.
It is cabbage and potatoes today,
lobster and caviar tomorrow.
It is you.
It is them.
It is us--
in the mountains,
on the farm,
by the sea,
on vacation,
at work until we sleep,
and it is so much more.

And I Know It

We had our annual visit from my favorite guest poet today and the kids really enjoyed the activities. Just as gratifying, he was impressed with their imagination and creativity, too, and attributed it to my teaching. Aw shucks!

As always, I grabbed the chance to participate with my students as a fellow writer. Here's my poem for the day:

Poems are useless-- 

unless they are fresh like tomatoes off the vine,

or pickled like Brussels sprouts,

or black like t-shirts,

soft like number 2 pencils,

cellos and ukuleles.

I want poetry that climbs Sargent Mountain,

changes my sheets every day,

brings me puppies and kittens,

takes me to Paris.

Words like sweet potato empanadas,

Grandma's fried chicken,

down pillows on Sunday morning.

I'm a quiet poet,

quiet in the chaos of a sixth grade classroom,

watching my students,

sipping inspiration like air.

Poems are useless--

unless they are black crows on white snow,

a scarecrow in an empty field,

four leaf clovers or wild blueberries.

I want poetry hot out of the oven,

poetry that pedals madly down Superman Hill,

o bushwhacks to the top of the mountain

collapsing on the warm granite ledge.

I am not a poet,

but I am a bowl of plums

cold from the ice box;

I am Emily Dickinson's night gown:

my words smart, insurgent, 
goliath, crusading.

Poems are useless--

unless they wear tie-dye,

rise like the moon over Lake Lugano,

or brew a potion of dragon spit and candy corn.

I want poetry that teaches me to play the drums

in a cafe in Montreal,

rocks me like a hammock in the shade,

snorkels into a lost cave filled with pirate treasure.

I am a poet like the midnight wind

that blows open the french doors,

like the gold finches flitting in the river birches.

Words will knock you down

like an old farm house in a tornado,

and when you get back up,

say, "Good."

Pick a Poet

My guest poet friend made his annual visit to my classes today. After six years, one of the things I enjoy most about his visits is how unfettered he is by the pedestrian practicalities of running a classroom. For example, he is free to change the activities for each class, and he always does. "I get soooooo bored doing the same thing over and over," he points out every year. Tell me about it.

His tolerance for "creative" chaos is also much higher than mine, but that's okay, because watching from the sidelines and seeing how my students react in a less structured environment is usually either a revelation or a validation for me. 

I like the surprises best, though, and he can often turn a kid from silly or surly to successful by the end of the session. And some kids surprise me every year with their wit, their whimsy, their originality, and their invention. True story-- just yesterday, I struggled to think of a strength for a boy who knocked it out of the park today. 

I also get a chance to improvise and write along, not as the leader, or even the coach, but as a fellow player on his stage. Here's my favorite composition from the day:

Saying Good-Bye in Five Acts:

I. Her suitcase closed with a snap.

II. A bright light streaked across the sky.

III. Splash!

IV. Thanks for all the fish.

V. "As I was remarking the other day to Heywood..."

We Run

I had my poet friend in for his 5th annual visit with my classes today. The activity he led us through was a fitting end to the National Poetry month challenge we just finished on Tuesday. He had the kids up and moving around, finding and re-finding their "tribes," and then did a fun writing exercise based on Tim Seible's poem Renegade. The poem repeats the words we run, we run like... and is a very accessible model for writers to experiment with. The lesson was good enough to repeat with writing club this afternoon.

Here is a collaborative poem composed of some of the images we came up with through out the day:

we run
we run like the moon escaping the sun
like a bloody nose
like deserts to water
we run like a murderer escaping the police
like dust into the vacuum
we run like this poem goes on
like echoes in a cave
like a home-run ball over the wall
we run like yesterday is tomorrow
like the words you didn't mean to say
like rain on water
we run
we run like cleats on the turf
like cockroaches in the kitchen light
like a cat chasing a laser pointer
we run
we run like we are both chasing and escaping something
we run like the caboose after the train
we run like ghost crabs in the moonlight
we run
we run like we are late for the bus
run like it's the last day of school
we hear the bell and we run

Ode to the Ode

I had a guest poet scheduled to visit my class yesterday. The timing was perfect-- poetry and Valentine's Day?-- and this particular poet and I have worked together for the last 4 years. Even so, I still had a nagging feeling that something was going to go wrong.

Later when I told the story, a colleague of mine said, "I'm going to start asking you for lottery numbers! You were right about this; you're usually right about the snow..." and she continued with a list of other accurate predictions I've made over the years. I liked that. I like thinking I have a little bit of a sixth sense, but as far as the lottery goes? I predict I'm not going to win it anytime soon.

At any rate, prescience is of no value unless you act upon it, and in this particular case, I did not. 8:15 AM found me desperately texting my poet buddy while making small talk with my first period class about how great our visiting artist was going to be. At 8:20 I kicked into emergency mode and began improvising a lesson about odes. Who knows where that came from? It certainly helped that I own a copy of Neruda's Odes to Common Things, and the Valentine's Day angle made things easier, too, but I truly believe that the key ingredient to what turned out to be a very successful activity was our collective focus on the positive.

For me this has been a tough year with a challenging group of kids, so the opportunity for each of us to express our appreciation for those things, both large and small, that make us happy, that make our lives a little easier, was priceless. Yesterday was a very good day.

Post Script: The poet overslept. He called at 9:30 to apologize profusely, and we rescheduled for tomorrow. I do have a back-up plan, but I don't think I'll need it.

Last Words on the Slam

This week I gave my students the opportunity to post their competition slam poem and a reflection about the experience for their classmates to read and respond to. I asked them to think about their writing process, their performance, and what it was like to be in the audience. By far, the comments were positive, and here's one that expresses some of what I hoped the students would get out of it all:

Personally I'm not a huge fan of writing poetry at all, but I like slam poetry a little better then regular poetry. The reason I like writing slam poetry better is because I know that I will be performing it for people, so if it can mean more then one thing then my actions will explain it. Performing was kind of fun when it was in the classroom, because I knew that it was only a practice round and that everyone there would be fine with what I do because they were just as scared as I am. That gave me more confidence so I could go on. But when I was performing in the auditorium I did not have that confidence because I knew that not everyone was performing like I was, but still I got up there and did what I needed to do. When I was in the audience I loved watching other people get up there and read some of the most funny poems ever. 

Not everyone was quite so affirmative about the slam, though. Here is what the most discontented of my students had to say:

I didn't like writing all the poems.  It just wasn't fun and we wrote about nonsense.  It also sucked even more because it was boring to listen to all the poems for a couple hours. Not only was there only one good poem, the other ones just plain sucked.  I would have rather done school work.  Plus I wasn't near anyone cool to talk to in the audience.  I think that it was a waste of time.

I don't take what he says personally, but I do take it seriously. I hate to shrug off any student criticism, because I haven't given up on the notion that it's possible to engage all of my students most, if not all, of the time. Obviously, I didn't quite reach him, and I'll keep his perspective in mind next time as I plan.

My Money's on the Slam

My favorite part of the day today was when we gathered the twelve finalists who would be performing their poetry for 200 sixth graders and other invited guests, not to mention the judges. Several of them had written new material on their own, and our resident slam poet had brought three young poets to perform with the students, but also to coach them. The energy in the room was exactly what I wish for every day I come to school: the kids sat in groups with their writing out; they showed each other; they asked for advice from the visiting poets; they even took the "stage" in the front of the room and rehearsed their pieces. They listened intently to all the feedback they got, scribbling notes in the margins, changing words, adding phrases and stage directions to themselves. In short, they were a hundred percent engaged in the writing process. It was mostly because they wanted to do their best for the assembly, but those are the kind of high stakes that I can get behind.

A Lune at Last

Today Slam Poet did a competition with my students featuring lunes, eleven word poems. Kind of the American version of haiku, they are arranged in lines of three-five-three words. "If you can write a good lune, you can write anything," he told the kids. "A lune should be a tiny three act play or an entire story in eleven words." Of course they rose to the challenge.

Here's one of mine:

How come my
dad was nothing like Kurt's
dad on Glee?

Slammin

Slam Poet will be back tomorrow and Friday to prepare the kids for the big slam next Wednesday. It's been challenging to get them to  finish and polish their writing for his return... in some ways I feel like the bad guy who's all about drudgery and deadlines, and then he gets to come in and sweep them off their feet with all that drama and charm. It's not about me, though, so I let it go.

Like any lesson or unit, once I've actually taught it, it's easy to see ways to improve the experience for next time. For example, today I showed the students some short clips of slam performances, and frankly, it seems a little late in the process to be doing that, even though they do have time to incorporate what we talked about into their writing. The video probably should have come before most of their revision, so that they could rework their poems with performance in mind. Some kids were a little scared off by the prospect of slamming, too. What if we don't have our poems that day? they asked me a little too hopefully.

It was also a bit of a challenge to find slam performances that were appropriate for middle school, but I have to say, I'm really happy with the ones I chose. Anyone who's interested in including this form of poetry in your class might like to check them out. I showed them in the following order and asked the students what they could deduce about slam poetry after each one. It turned out to be a well-rounded introduction to the art form.

What is Poetry Slam? This one minute animation introduces the basic rules of competition.

Timothy Medel slams about video games in the 2007 Knick's Poetry Slam. The topic and performance were super accessible to my sixth graders.

What I Will by Suheir Hammad. This is a defiant look by an Arab-American woman at violence in the Middle East. My students applauded at the end, and it gave me goosebumps every time I showed it.

I Want to Hear a Poem by Steve Coleman. This is a poem about poems and a slam about slamming; the kids appreciated the complexity of the concept.

Finally, this last clip showed several examples of student performances to give them a yardstick for what their peers have done.

In the end it was an engaging lesson, and I didn't feel quite so much like the mean one in my poetry partnership.

Poet-in-Residence: Part III

When we met to plan our sessions early last week, the slam poet pointed to May 18 on the calendar. "I can definitely come that day," he told me. "It's my birthday."

"Really?" I asked. "Are you sure you want to?" I was surprised, because it was hard to get a firm commitment from him for any days. I like to think I'm pretty flexible, but that was a challenging meeting.

Later, when he was on his way out, and his confirmed teaching days were as solid as a rope of sand, he asked me to guess how old he would be. "It's a big one," he said.

"Forty?" I shrugged. He looked a little crestfallen, and I knew I was right. Impulsively I offered to make him a birthday cake.

He had a few questions before he accepted. "Are you a good cook? Do you bake from a box or scratch? What's your specialty?" My answers must have been acceptable, because he allowed that a red velvet cake would be his wish. "But I really like coconut," he added. "Will that work?" It would.

The next day his examples to the kids were filled with cupcakes. "Do you want cupcakes next week instead?" I asked him later.

"How many would there be?" he inquired in return.

"The usual 24," I replied. Then we talked about trendy cakes, versus retro cakes (I bake bundts for the students in my homeroom), versus classic cakes. Like many conversations with him, this issue, too, was left unresolved. Later it occurred to me that perhaps he wanted to share his birthday with all the students, and in my mind that meant one thing: mini-cupcakes. Fortunately I've acquired the tins I need for such an undertaking, and so on Monday Night, I baked seven dozen little red velvet cupcakes, piped some cream cheese frosting on each, and topped them with toasted coconut. It took me back to my catering days, and I was pretty pleased with the way they turned out.

Next morning, I checked my facebook account on a whim before school. (I had accepted slam poet's friend request a few days earlier... even though there was something unappealing to me about being friend number 1771.) There I read the following which had been posted four hours before: ...is intoxicated with saki lychee martinis sushi and savory pies thanks to ..., and he still has to teach 6th grade slam poetry in a few hours.

Despite the lovely assonance and alliteration, I rolled my eyes and sighed. Artists!

P.S. He rolled in 20 minutes late for first period, which was really no later than usual. Artists...

Poet-in-Residence: Part II

To be honest, my second day of intensive poetry workshop was kind of exhausting-- I've done a lot of writing over the last two days. The good news is that my students have, too. In fact, so has the principal and so has the counselor who each spent an entire class period with us today, and who both fully participated in all the activities.

What a powerful message it sent to my students to sit around a huge table elbow to elbow with their teacher and principal, all of us scribbling furiously away, playing with words and experimenting with ideas, reading what we'd written loud and proud, and applauding the efforts of our fellow writers.


when i got here the world smelled 
like blond bombers and cuban missiles,
but two years later, when my brother 
was born, blue beatlemania 
and baby aspirin were in the air.
From five my sister was surrounded by the scent 
of a dusty gray tabby cat.
back then, my father smelled like cold pennies and neckties 
and my mother like birthday cake and bridge,
and our street had the distinct aroma of pink cookie cutters.

these days my house smells like river rocks
and bicycle tires on smooth pavement,
a suggestion of  wood smoke floating beneath it all.

Poet-in-Residence: Part I

I'm still not exactly sure how this happened, but I have a poet-in-residence for the next few weeks. Somebody in the county humanities office wrote a grant and back in September they approached me with a yet-to-be-defined idea about a couple of poets, a couple of middle school English classes, and some kind of slam event in May or June. Of course I accepted, and along the way the other poet and school dropped out, leaving me and my students the beneficiaries of the entire grant.

It's supposed to be a pilot program, so the poet, the grant writer, and I are defining it as we go along. He's a performance poet and therefore composing poems to present is his focus. He wants the students to have 5-7 original pieces to choose from and then to prepare their favorites for competition. Too ambitious? Maybe, but not if today was any indication.

I think we all appreciated a new energy in our class: Today we did list poems and the kids loved the activities; every class left chattering happily. For me it was like being in a poetry workshop all day. I wrote with the students and shared my writing in turn. It was awesome. Turns out that Slam Man is unable to do the same lesson twice, so it really was a full day of new lesson ideas and personal writing for me, and...

He'll be back tomorrow.

SOLSC Day 11

I was lucky enough to have a guest poet in my room today. Our school district has a partnership with our county humanities project, and they sponsored his visit. It was awesome! He had some fresh poetry activities that the students found really engaging. In a couple of my classes, we had a Lune (11 word poem) competition, which he mc-ed. Other classes composed rant poems based on lists of fifty things that drive them crazy, and some classes did simile poems modeled on Renegades by Tim Seibles. He introduced the basic elements of poetry slam performance, too.

Yesterday was the deadline for the school newsletter, and I was trying to write a quick blurb about this poet's upcoming visit, but I couldn't put my hands on the materials that came from the humanities office, so I figured I'd give him a quick google. The first item was a link to a site with three of his poems, each containing some pretty sexually explicit details. A couple of links down was a youtube video-- turns out my guy has been on HBO Def Poetry Jam. I watched the clip, and it was funny, but pretty raunchy. It was also apparent that this poet was an openly gay man.

Our community is pretty liberal, and I like to think that I am, too, but I confess that I thought carefully about this turn of events. What if my students or their parents performed the same easy search that I had? Would they be offended? And what if they were? Would it matter? Should publishing or performing a certain kind of material preclude someone from being a visiting artist in schools?

Of course, as it turned out, in addition to being awesome, his presentation was strictly age-appropriate. Over the course of the day, we had the gifted teacher, the counselor, the special ed teacher on my team, and the humanities coordinator in the room with us, and they all agreed that he was wonderful. I honestly don't anticipate any complaints, but I wouldn't have any trouble defending his presence in my classroom, should anyone raise a concern.

I'm still wrestling with the question of moral standards for those who teach. It seems like there are some unwritten rules and expectations out there; I felt them yesterday. Maybe it's time for them to be out in the open.