Chicken Spaghetti

A Poem for Mrs. Teaberry

Together

 

 

Mrs. Teaberry was Mr. Putter’s neighbor.   

She dreamed of snowdrifts—           

something airy,                   

something light—                   

tulips and roses,                   

birds instead of fish.                   

He promised her a nice cup of tea.       

Mrs. Teaberry was delighted.           

They watched the snow fall               

all night long.                   

The two of them                   

sat a long time,                    

very happy,                       

living side by side.                   

 

"Together" is a found poem, a cento, of lines from four books in Cynthia Rylant's Mr. Putter & Tabby series for beginning readers. I didn’t go into the poem thinking that it would focus on Mrs. Teaberry and her relationship with Mr. Putter, but that’s how it turned out. She’s an important secondary character  in these books, and as much as I love Tabby, Mr. Putter’s cat, I also relate to Mrs. T, who likes strange things and makes dresses for her teapots. Paging through our copies, I once again admire Arthur Howard’s illustrations and how much they add to the story. The expressions, both human and animal, are priceless.

Sources

Title: Mr. Putter & Tabby Fly the Plane

Line 1: Mr. Putter & Tabby Feed the Fish 

Lines 2-4: Mr. Putter & Tabby Bake the Cake

Line 5: Mr. Putter & Tabby Fly the Plane

Line 6: Mr. Putter & Tabby Feed the Fish

Line 7: Mr. Putter & Tabby Fly the Plane

Lines 8-10: Mr. Putter & Tabby Bake the Cake

Lines 11-14: Mr. Putter & Tabby Walk the Dog

 

Bibliography

Rylant, Cynthia. Mr. Putter & Tabby Bake the Cake. Illustrated by Arthur Howard, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.

Rylant, Cynthia. Mr. Putter & Tabby Feed the Fish. Illustrated by Arthur Howard, Harcourt Brace & Company, 2001.

Rylant, Cynthia. Mr. Putter & Tabby Fly the Plane. Illustrated by Arthur Howard, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997.

Rylant, Cynthia. Mr. Putter & Tabby Walk the Dog. Illustrated by Arthur Howard, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.

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Elisabeth Norton hosts the Poetry Friday roundup, at Unexpected Intersections on Friday, August 27, 2021.

Photo by ST. I found that teapot and at least a couple of those books at the local Goodwill store some years ago.

Talk the Talk: Poetry

Recently on the VS Podcast I heard a terrific discussion about editing. The hosts Franny Choi and Danez Smith were talking to Carmen Giménez-Smith about Be Recorder, Giménez Smith's most recent collection of poetry, and about Noemi, the small press where she is the publisher.

Together these three poets give us a real gift of a conversation, a free, hourlong seminar about writing, editing, and the importance of community. Speaking of Noemi, Giménez Smith says,

How do you make a book that is the very best book that it could be? So I think what we do at Noemi is we come to a manuscript and we see the vision and the gift of the writer, and we say, “Are you sure you’re—because we see that you’re not quite at, you know, maximum, you’re at seven, and we think you could be at 11.” And so, that conversation of editing is going from seven to 11, right, is like, “You’re so good at this thing in this moment. So how do we, like, amplify it across the book?”

I was nodding along and periodically chiming in "Yes!" as I listened. In the show's outro, Danez Smith told Franny Choi, "The other day after we finished that conversation, I literally felt electric." Whether you're a writer, editor, or reader, I think you'll enjoy the discussion, too. And Be Recorder? It's one of the best books of poetry I've read this year.

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The August 20, 2021, Poetry Friday roundup takes place at the blog The Apples in My Orchard.

Photo by ST. Norwalk, Connecticut, basketball court, 2020. The mural was painted by the artists Jah and Vert.

Blackout Poem: Own Your Tomorrow

Own Your Tomorrow

Faring forced sales

spread the coronavirus.

Workers monitor

$3 billion,

defects,

combustion,

short supply,

200,000 cars.

 

 

Sources

"GM Reports Quarterly Profit Of $2.8 Billion," by Neal E. Boudet, The New York Times, August 5, 2021 (poem)

Charles Schwab advertisement, The New York Times, August 5, 2021 (title)

I looked for an un-literary base text to see if it lent itself to blackout poetry, and turned to the paper's financial section. In his use of strong nouns and verbs, the journalist here actually gave me a lot to work with. We can see that under the weight of the ginormous numbers are ones who keep the machines running: the workers. The events of this summer have really made me wonder what our tomorrow will look like, and so I chose that title, even though it may read ironic. In the end, I'm happy with the way the poem captured a time period that has been TOO MUCH is so many ways.

More poetry at the Poetry Friday roundup on the blog Wondering and Wandering.

An animal alphabet book by Langston Hughes

The Sweet and Sour Animal Book

by Langston Hughes

illustrations by students from the Harlem School of the Arts

Oxford University Press, 1994

This collection of poems by Langston Hughes (1901-1967) is delightful, and, fortunately for us readers, still available for sale at the publisher's website and in quite a few library collections. The alphabet book for children features whimsical three-dimensional illustrations by students from the Harlem School of the Arts—who must be in their thirties by now! I'll definitely be bringing it along to read to my second-grade friends when school starts up again. Sure, it's an ABC book, but it's not for babies: on the L page, the poem begins, "A lion in a zoo,/Shut up in a cage,/Lives a life/Of smothered rage."

Second graders love jokes, and they'll enjoy the humor here, too. Just one example is the bee poem in the lower photo. The kid-created art may even inspire a project or two. The artistic medium for the goose page looks like Sculpey, or maybe Play-Doh; the artists were in the early primary grades.

Hughes wrote a number of works for children, but The Sweet and Sour Animal Book was published some thirty years after he died. The manuscript was in his papers at Yale's Beinecke library. (For a good story about how it came to be published, see Megan Drennan's 1995 article at EdWeek.) 

I photographed the street sign in Harlem at East 127th Street and Fifth Avenue, near where the author spent the last twenty years of his life. He lived in an apartment on the top floor of a brownstone there. The block of 127th between Fifth and Madison is known as Langston Hughes Place.

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The Poetry Friday roundup for August 6th is at A(nother) Year of Reading.

The Sweet and Sour Animal Book is my sixth book for the Sealey Challenge.