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(Janine Pommy Vega on persona poems)
"I tell my students that the traditional Native Americans believe that everything alive is part of a circle, and in the circle we are all people -- rock people, tree people, coyote people, people people -- and that we talk to each other across the circle. Native Americans believe that everything in nature has a voice and a spirit. I tell my students that today we'll be tapping into the spirit of a particular thing in nature, and speaking with its voice. This does not mean your dog or your hamster. This is bigger, more mysterious and wilder than that...."
"Where is the mystery in it?"
(Jack Collom on the acrostic poem)
"A word is set vertically, and lines of a poem spill out of the letters. Acrostics serve any topic with great structural readiness, since the spine word resonates through the poem."
(Jack Collom on list poems)
"Lists, or catalogues, have been a common element of both poetry and practical life for millennia. They are packed with information and encourage students to use surprise, to play with odd or wide-ranging juxtapositions. List poems tend to be rhythmic and full of energy. I suggested that we make list poems from the idea "Things to Save." To give the word save the right context, I said a little about the looming ecological problems facing the world, but I didn't want to preach to the students. I also let the students know that they didn't have to feel restricted to "nature items" for their things to save; they should feel free to include personal things and favorite things - little sisters, books, or the teddy bear with a missing arm and its eye pulled out on a rusty spring. In this way, we could indicate that nature and civilization are interconnected. I told them that details are better than generalities. (Don't simply save "trees, animals, and water," save the lopsided old sycamore by Salt Creek where the grey-cheeked thrushes sing.) It takes imagination not only to create fantasies, but just to see what's in front of you, to go beyond a "bird' or a "bush." I also tried to show the students that it's both fun and necessary to create variety in their "things to save" writings, variety not only in the items listed but also in the kinds of items ("wild horses, acorns, smiles"). I asked them also to vary syntax in their pieces - not to get into the rut of "Save the blank / save the blink / save the blonk."
I'd like to save the sweet chocolaty chewy candy bars
that melt in your mouth, the warm cozy pillow that you
can't wait to sleep on, I'd like to save green meadows
that you run barefoot across running and running until
you collapse on the wet soft grass, the hot days when
you try to eat ice cream but it melts and plops on your
foot, I'd like to save the amusement parks where you go
on a twisty ride and throw up all over yourself but that's
just what you thought would happen, I'd like to save the
little green bug my big brother viciously killed six
months ago, I'd like to save the world all green and blue
and beautiful, I'd like to save the little things that
everyone enjoys.
--Juli Koski, fifth grade
"Everybody has a water story," exulted poet Sheryl Noethe. Here is an example of the form from Eco-Lit:
Water Autobiography
3 A.M. Longs Peak Trailhead: I strap two liters of water to my pack.
2 P.M. Fredericksted: Hot, very hot. I roll off the raft and into the cooling Caribbean Sea, and bob like a cork
11 A.M. San Juan River, Utah: A wave catches me. I'm pulled under and am embraced by the current.
10 P.M. New York: We took long hot shower together, saving water in the 60s drought.
8 A.M. Lyons: A dead battery on cold winter morning I was late, late for school, late for work - the battery needed water.
4 P.M. Taj Mahal: Two naked children's bodies lie lifeless by the Ganges, their innocence swept away by the lapping holy waters.
11 P.M. Tip of Long Island: With our toes in the icy waters, we sent our spirits to Kohotec to become One with the Universe.
1 P.M. Hesperus: Very pregnant with my own, I break the water sack of a cria (baby llama) and help him emerge, feeling my own child move within me.
5 A.M. Hesperus: The warm soothing bathwater eases the labor pains as I wait for the midwife to arrive.
2 A.M. Lyons: "Maaaaaaaam ¾ Maaaaaaaam, I want some water."
5 P.M. Mediterranean: The sea is calm, eerily calm, not a ripple, just the slightest telling whisper from the north.
9 A.M. Top Longs Peak: The first liter of water was drunk on the way up - now with the second we toast our success.
6 A.M. Outside New Delhi: "Water is running." I slipped from my tent wrapped in a lungi with my towel, soap, and cup in hand to perform our morning ablutions with the women in the irrigation ditch.
8 P.M. Lyons: What it was specifically I don't remember, except perhaps that impish look, but we started to laugh and giggle, the three of us together laughing, laughing so hard that the tears rolled down our cheeks. We embraced with contagious giggles, my girls and I.
6 P.M. Bedminster: Old Tom and I sat on the river bank fishing and drinking beer and talking of life. He was 72 and I was 7 ½.
3 P.M. Fredericksted: It hadn't rained for weeks, the cisterns were empty. A crack of thunder the skies opened and we ran about dancing and shouting and tried to drink the sky.
7 A.M. Wherever: I splash the marvelously cold water on my face - Good Morning!
9 P.M. Far Hills: The rains just didn't stop, the water rose and rose, it was brown and muddy, it took the old cow, the footbridge, and the willow, then it stopped and slowly receded.
12 P.M. Kabul: The fact that he said it was the water gave me little consolation as I lay there bathed in sweat, folded in agony and praying for relief or death.
4 A.M. Mediterranean: The waves buffeted the Eostra about, the skipper yelled orders, the jib was in shreds: Poseidon had definitely lost his cool.
1 A.M. Amsterdam: The subtle movement of the houseboat lulled me into a deep sensuous sleep and dreams of Eros.
7 A.M. Blair's Lake: We scattered his ashes as he had wished - void of emotion.
10 A.M. High Time Farm: Dressed in a long white gown, my tiny bald head sprinkled with water, I received my name.
12 A.M. 12th Street: It was some movie, she said goodbye and I let go like a tropical storm, the tears flowing for every goodbye I ever said or that was said to me.
--Suki Dewey
h consists of variation even more than breadth does.
* * *
ANATOMY POEMS - personifications of body parts (the bones strike up a conversation with the heart, for example).
BUMPERSTICKERS - inventing these (e.g., REMEMBER WATER?) is fun.
"CAPTURED TALK" (students pull language from all around them: signs, books, overheard chat, TV, etc.)
COMPOST-BASED POEMS (after Walt Whitman's "This Compost") - rot, and how life is fed by it.
CONCRETE POETRY - language forming aural or visual patterns, even recapitulating natural shapes.
"I REMEMBERS" - list poems composed of lines each beginning "I remember" can release hundreds of intricate memories, making nature immediate.
METAPHORS - I see exercises in metaphor as objective correlatives of the relational.
ORIGINS (after Jacques Prévert's poems, "Pages from a Notebook") - playful little reverse creation myths ("The music teacher turns back to music," wrote one first grader).
PANTOUMS (Southeast Asian form with a weave of repeated lines) - like the cycles of nature.
QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS - "Where do all the noises go?" The poem is a response (but not closure) to the question posed.
THINGS TO DO IN -- another way to project the mind outward (into the Brain of the Bumblebee, the Bottom of the Sea - or one's own kitchen).
RECIPES - show how elements can be combined to create new elements. They have a distinct vocabulary that is familiar to everyone. Recipe poems encourage wild imaginative leaps - but no food allowed!
Wallace Stevens's great poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" gives us the perfect form for looking into multiple truths:
seven ways of looking at a cloud
1 i, a disappointed child
when told that clouds weren't solid
2 clouds gathering into massive anvil fist
muttering over the silent desert
splitting rain onto cracked red ground
3 the rain-giving clouds are distinctive
with their countless pouchy buttocks
mooning the earth below
4 Lenny the lenticular was a
mean machine, leaning out across the sky
a speeding ellipse against the blue
5 cumulette puffs of white dropped like wads of cookie dough
their cloudbottoms dark and flat against an unseen nonstick pan
6 a cloud is the ultimate philanthropist
poor in his youth, he becomes generous
with age and girth
sharing his water-horde at last
7 in ancient days a man was turned into a cloud
forever banned from the earth
but at night his form loosened into mist
and he touched the face of his love as she slumbered
--Chris Burk
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