Chicken Spaghetti

Poetry Friday: Lewis Carroll

Happy 4th of July and happy Poetry Friday! Today's poem is "A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky," by Lewis Carroll. Kinda melancholic for a national holiday, but still enjoyable. It's an acrostic poem, by the way. See what the first letters of each line spell out. You'll recognize the name.

            A boat beneath a sunny sky,

            Lingering onward dreamily

            In an evening of July —

            Children three that nestle near,

            Eager eye and willing ear,

            Pleased a simple tale to hear —

Read the whole poem at the Poetry Foundation.

More poems can be found at the Poetry Friday roundup at the blog In Search of Giants. Don't miss the Bad Poetry poem that the crew of Seven Impossible Things wrote. Truly nutty, and inspired. You'll find it at author Lynn E. Hazen's Imaginary Blog.

Poetry Friday: Wendell Berry

It's not often that Mother Earth News gets mentioned on Poetry Friday, so I'm jumping at the chance to point to its interview with Wendell Berry, Kentucky's best-known farmer/poet/essayist/novelist.

You can read Berry's "How to Be a Poet" at the Poetry Foundation. I like these lines:

                    There are no unsacred places;

                    there are only sacred places
                 and desecrated places.

The Poetry Friday roundup takes place at Biblio File today. You'll find links to many other blog posts on poetry.

Santa Fe Indian School Poets

I'm not even going to wait until Poetry Friday to post a link to "Young American Indians Find Their Voice in Poetry" in the New York Times. Also worth checking out is the correlating reader commentary in answer to the question "What poem has made a difference in your life?"

Poetry Friday the 13th: Superstitious Poems

For today's Poetry Friday entry, I'd like to tell you about a book that Junior and I are enjoying: Janet S. Wong's Knock on Wood: Poems About Superstitions. I have soft spot for books, like this one, that start up a conversation between the people reading it. That's my hope for all children's books, really.

Junior's age, 8, is a fine one for talking about superstitions; he's heard of a few that Wong addresses in the seventeen short poems. With a whiff of mystery and magic, the subjects include four-leaf clovers, horseshoes, broken mirrors, and ladders. Because he didn't know about all of them, Junior was eager to read the glossary where the poet gives a little background on each superstition. For instance, in reference to black cats, Wong notes that they were "revered in ancient Egypt, but feared in medieval Europe." Since we're feline aficionados, we decided we'd rather be like the ancient Egyptians. The poem "Cat" begins "Look out for her, the black cat./Walk backward/when she crosses your path/if you fear the magic she brings/as she travels through your time." Julie Paschkis's typically lush and beautiful illustrations accompany the poems, and provide additional things to discuss.

Many thanks to Wild Rose Reader's Elaine, who gave away Knock on Wood in a blog contest a while back.

You'll find links to more poetry talk in the kidlitosphere at the blog called a wrung sponge. See "Thank Goodness It's (Poetry Friday)," an article at the Poetry Foundation which explains the whole endeavor.

An Original Poem by J. Patrick Lewis!

In honor of all the teachers and students finishing the school year and planning for the next, Chicken Spaghetti is happy to present an original poem—and a villanelle, at that—which J. Patrick Lewis sent along. Thank you! Lewis is the author of the recently published collection The World's Greatest: Poems, among many other books for children. All rights belong to J. Patrick Lewis, and this poem cannot be used without permission.

I’m Learning to Speak English

by J. Patrick Lewis

 

 

                        Be pashunt please, I don’t know how to spell

      Or read or write your language. Por favor,

         I’m learning to speak English—ESL.

 

     And I am getting better, I can tell.

     “The bull is mad. Be carefull, matadoor!”          

     Be payshent please, I don’t know how to spell.

 

     For words like ant and aunt or bell and belle,

     You must know what the extra letter’s for.

     I’m learning to speak English—ESL.

 

                            My teacher said I’m going to excell.

                              Excell. A word worth 50 cents—or more!            

    Be paishunt please, I don’t know how to spell.

 

                            She told me that I’d fall…. I did!  I fell                     

                            Into meaty words like a…carnivore!

    I’m learning to speak English—ESL.

 

                            I want to know my nouns and verbs so well  

                            That someday I will get a perfect score.

    Be patient (!) with me while I learn to spell

    And write and speak in English—ESL.

********

The June 6th Poetry Friday roundup takes place at Sarah Reinhard's blog.

Out in the Country with "On the Farm"

 From the crowing rooster on the cover to the sleeping hound dog to the constantly chewing billy goat, the illustrations (by Holly Meade) in this beautiful book beckon a reader's complete attention. Washes of springtime watercolors complement the bold black woodblock outlines; each two-page spread features a different animal you'd see on a small farm, including a few interlopers, like turtles and rabbits, from the pond and field.

Short poems, by David Elliott, in large print accompany the pictures. Most of them work well. "The Duck Quacks! The Goose Honks! The Hen Squawks!" describes exactly what is going on, and the hound-dog verses are slyly funny. But when reading about the pig, "Her tail? As coy as a ringlet," I scratch my head. Still, Meade's art brings the farm to life, and preschoolers, kindergartners, and beginning readers (with a little help) will have a good time with the book.

On the Farm
written by David Elliot and illustrated by Holly Meade
Candlewick Press, 2008
32 pages
ISBN: 0763633224

Poetry Friday: Seeking Recommendations for the Party People

The Friends group at my local library not only sponsors an enormous sale in July but also maintains book-sale shelves throughout the year. They raise a ton of money. The other day I lucked out, buying The Random House Book of Poetry for Children for only three dollars. I'm glad to have a copy of my own since this book gets recommended repeatedly when I talk to people about children's poetry. My first-grade reading buddies at a nearby city school liked hearing a couple of poems from the book, but two of the girls wanted a poem on 1) princesses, and 2) parties. I couldn't find much that fit the bill at quick notice. Parties have been a huge topic with the first-graders this year. We reminisce about birthdays, look forward to barbecues, and talk excitedly about festivities during their town's Puerto Rican Day parade. The children love to draw pictures of parties on their dry-erase boards after they write out some words from the books we read.

If any readers have suggestions of poems about parties or princesses, I'm all ears. The 811 section in the children's section of the library is vast, so poems from older books are fine, too. I'm not looking for poems at the kids' reading level necessarily but ones I could read to them. Short, funny, and relatively simple are especially welcome.

Read more poetry-related posts by visiting Wild Rose Reader's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: "Teaching Them a Thing or Two"

For Poetry Friday, it's my pleasure to share a poem by my friend Sherry Keller. This one comes from her chapbook "Drawn to Water." The poem's copyright belongs to Sherry, who generously granted permission to reprint it here. All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced without permission.

Teaching Them a Thing or Two

by Sherry Keller

Miss Fannie was my second cousin
though much older—in her fifties.
I was fourteen.
She pounded that piano as if she were trying
to kill it.
Tinny chords in a
mesmerizing miasma of
Roooock of Aaaaages.
Sleep inducing chinking chords so
slow molasses caught up to it.
I jittered.
I tapped.
I wanted it to move.
Church was boring enough
without Miss Fannie's arthritis-wracked fingers
sort of finding the notes in the
slowest progression of one note after the other possible.
It seemed like days,
then church was out.

My piano lessons progressed.
Week after week.
And then a miracle happened.
Miss Fannie was up north
to see her daughter.
Would I play for church today?
Yea!
Here I go.
I won't be slow.
Rkuv Ages
Cleftformeeeeee
at a steady clip.
I was bent
on keeping the beat.
They're straining,
they're sounding surprised.
I am determined not
to give in.
I finished
a whole measure ahead.
Whew.

Sherry Keller lives in Asheville, NC, with her husband of 41 years, Tom. She has two grown children, Eric and Robyn, and an adorable 6-year-old granddaughter, Lily. She helps run the Constant Reader group on GoodReads. Many of her photographs are online here.

I thought of the teenage pianist in "Teaching Them a Thing or Two" as I read Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson, by Tricia Tunstall, a longtime piano teacher. Last week Roger Sutton, editor-in-chief at The Horn Book, recommended this book (for grown-ups) at his blog, Read Roger, and readers chimed in with memories of lessons. Publishers Weekly said of Note by Note, "... for those tempted to dismiss this slim volume because they've never had a music lesson or read a score, this too short memoir offers a rare glimpse into a fascinating world." Note by Note has me thinking of piano lessons again after many, many years.

See Becky's Book Reviews for links to other Poetry Friday blog posts. (I'm posting early, but the roundup ought to be available by Friday morning.)

Poetry Friday, May 23rd

On Fridays a number of the children's literature bloggers write about poetry, post original poems, or link to poems you can read online. Two days ago I recommended Secret Places, a picture-book anthology of poems for children. You can read that entry here.

Over at the blog Two Writing Teachers, you'll find a roundup of links to the other Poetry Friday posts today. At noon, there were already 33 entries.

Photograph: Fuzzy the backyard hen considers the teeter-totter.

"Secret Places"

When I was four or five, I had a hideout in the front yard, behind a shrub and next to the front steps. With enough room for myself and a couple of stuffed animals, this little spot made an ideal retreat. The dirt was powdery and fine and comfortable to sit in; azaleas and other flowers grew nearby if I wanted to jazz up the decor. I could peak around the greenery and be available in a flash if anything interesting happened: my neighbors' arrival home from school, or the appearance of the "fog machine" (a city truck that sprayed insecticide for mosquitoes) on our street.

In the picture book Secret Places (Greenwillow, 1993), Charlotte Huck collected nineteen short poems about such "joyful places that we love intensely, or places of refuge where we run to hide, or places visited in our imaginations." The anthology came highly recommended by my son's third-grade teacher, who uses the poems here—by Aileen Fisher, Karla Kuskin, and David McCord, among others—as writing prompts for her class.  The titles of the works chosen by Huck—"The Maple," "A Path to the Moon," "The Chair House," "If Once You Have Slept on an Island"—indicate some of the irresistible locales that children claim as their own.   

An excerpt from Byrd Baylor's Your Own Best Secret Place captures the spirit of the Huck's book and of the long-ago places that I remember, too.

It was just
a sandy gully
cutting through
the hard
flat
Texas earth,
but that gully
was
a whole world
by itself
and I was
the only
person
there.

I checked out Secret Places from the library, and Junior and I looked at it together recently. Usually sparking with energy, my boy grew more and more still as I read, and kept asking me to continue. Having remembered the book from school, he wanted to hear every poem. I was happy to oblige.