Poetry Friday: Rhapsodic for Robotics

This week is a momentous one in the Shovan household. It is the first time that one of our children is in a different time zone from the rest of the family. Many of you mom and dads know how strange that feels.

Our fifteen year old son, Robbie, is with his school robotics team in Omaha, Nebraska. They are competing in the Vex National Championships.

I rose at 3:30 Thursday morning to get him to the airport for a 6:50 AM flight. There was drama, of course (the forgotten wallet, the rest of the team's late arrival at Dulles). But, the team and their two robots arrived in Omaha, on time, on the same plane.

To help cheer on the team, I am rhapsodizing about Robotic poetry today.

First, some robot poems for elementary schoolers:

My Robot's Misbehaving

by Kenn Nesbitt (author of My Hippo Has the Hiccups)

My robot's misbehaving.
It won't do as I say.
It will not dust the furniture
or put my toys away.

My robot never helps me
with homework or my chores.
It doesn't do my laundry
and neglects to clean my floors.

It claims it can't cook dinner.
It never makes my bed.
No matter what I ask of it,
it simply shakes its head. 

Read the rest at Kenn's site, Poetry4Kids.com.  

My Robot

by Gareth Lancaster

My robot must rate as my favorite toy,
A wonderful, whirring, mechanical joy.
My robot can talk, but he'd much rather sing,
Or go to the park and play on the swings!

My robot is silver and very astute.

For instance this week he was learning the flute.

The "sweet" ending is at Fizzy, Funny, Fuzzy: Fun Poetry for Kids.  

For middle schoolers who are into technology, robots, and maybe poetry, here is one to make you think. (It's a bit smaller to preserve the line breaks.)

And here is a robot reciting Ogden Nash poetry. It recommends some additional poetic reading. There's nothing like a robot saying, "Have fun," to make you feel a sense of joy and playfulness 
(kidding).



Robot Poem

by Christine Howey

This poem was written by a robot.
Do not be afraid.
Okay, now you’re reading these words in that funny voice all     humans
use for robot voices, the droning nasal monotone.
This…po...em…was…writ...ten…by…a…ro...bot.
Please stop doing that.
It’s really kind of insulting.
Robots don’t sound like that anymore.
Okay, now you’re noticing that a lot of the lines are short and clipped,
like you expect robot language to be. But in reality, it’s quite easy for a
robot to embroider looping and complex sentences, such as the one
we’re in now, with many subordinate clauses, and never, as you say,
miss a beat.
This is because robots can now sneak in through small cranial
openings, take a sample of human brain tissue, no bigger than half a
postage stamp, and use that neural material to make full-size 3D
replications of the human brain.
Even a poet’s brain.
We use a copying machine.
We Xerox your brains and then write poetry.

You will find the rest at Pudding Magazine.

For high school poets, a book I want to check out:

Robot Haiku: Poems for Humans to Read Until Robots Decide It's Kill Time, by Ray Salemi. (I'm guessing no real haiku were injured by robots in the writing of this book.)

And you can find a long poem/short play, "Death and the Robot

Powers," by Robert Pinsky at the Poetry Foundation.

We are excited that Robbie has this great opportunity to meet and talk robot with other tech-minded kids. He's really enjoying being on the team.

Here's an animation showing what the robots must do to earn points:

 

However, I'd have to be a robot not to miss him. How about cheering myself up with some poetry? Our Poetry Friday host is Gregory K. at GottaBook.

Is the Title Important?

Kids often ask me if the title of a poem is important. Why can't a poem remain untitled? Why can't you just use the first line as a title?


For those students (I'm looking at you, Mr. O'Brien's Advanced Comp class) I thought I'd share this window into title-making and why the right title can play a crucial role in revision.

A very busy John Milton title page.

I started working on a new poem about eight months ago. It's about a bad word. Or, more exactly, about the day, in 7th grade, when the rumor that a certain bad word existed made its way down the halls of Dwight D. Eisenhower Middle School.

It looks exactly like it did 30 years ago.

I'd always known I would write a poem about this word-rumor memory. Just the fact that I remembered that day so vividly, told me it was poem-worthy. But, it wasn't until my daughter started middle school that I felt ready to write.


The offending word does not appear in this post, or in the poem, which I think is a good thing. (In the poem, and in real life, the boys knew the word and would not tell it to the girls, because it was "too bad." What was important was not the word so much as who controlled its telling or not-telling.)


However, in the first few drafts, the title did refer to the word (by its first initial) and a disease. It was one of my worst-ever titles. Because of it, some references to doctors and diagnoses ended up in the poem.


I knew the title was awful. A few readings and drafts later, I tried a new one: "Vocabulary." It was simple and it put the focus on the poem's middle school setting.


Unfortunately, the health-care references stayed, because they felt clever (never a good sign). I did a few more readings, submitted the poem to two or three journals. At readings, it was received well. At journals, no luck.

Finally, this weekend, a brainstorm! How about a new title? "Language Arts." Without posting the whole poem, I'd like to show you how this title change affected two key sections of the poem.


Vocabulary

Stanza 3

Boys pressed against the wall

in threes and fours, opposite

our teachers in their bright doors.

Language Arts

Stanzas 2-3

 

Boys pressed against the wall

in threes and fours, opposite

our Language Arts teacher,

languid in his bright door.

The new title allows me to specify which teacher. I made him languid, so he'd appear James Dean-like in his bright doorway. The symbolism of the back-lit, grown man in a doorway (to adulthood) was only hinted at before. Much stronger in the new version.

Vocabulary

Stanzas 15-17

Robert’s hair is wavy.

He is the arbiter of dirty words.

A doctor who decides

which patients can take

the Latin terms

and whose diagnosis

to dumb down.

Language Arts

Stanzas 13-15

Robert, our instructor in the art

of dirty words, knows

who can handle profane terms

and whose vocab list

to dumb down.

This revision makes me want to jump up and down. Until I changed the title, I didn't see that the doctor/patient imagery was a holdover from the first drafts. It doesn't "go" with the poem. Robert as a teacher of language makes the backbone of the poem stronger, the overall theme tighter -- how we learn language and how words are used to put women "in their place," even in middle school.

I am busy making final selections for the Audacity issue of Little Patuxent Review this week. After that, I hope to send the newly revised poem out. Wish "Language Arts" luck!

Found! Poem on Facebook

Facebook hit up the wrong feminist with this online dating ad: "Guys looking for faithful women to take care of."

I didn't change any words, just moved them around a little.

For Women
Take care
of guys looking.
Faithful?

by Laura Shovan

(BTW -- Celebrated our 20th anniversary last summer. Faithful indeed.)