Poetry Friday: Planet Poetry

Hello, Writerly Friends. I'm going all scientific this week.

Last Saturday, Resident Teen #1 spent the day at a robotics competition. 

Hey, all you robots. Roll your wheels
over to Jama's Alphabet Soup for
the Poetry Friday roundup.

I stayed to watch the robot action while my husband took Resident Teen #2 to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. They were performing selections from Holst's "The Planets." It was a geeky kind of day.

Here is "Pluto" from Holst's "The Planets."



This week, the staff of Little Patuxent Review and I have been reading submissions for the journal's upcoming Science issue. As we went over final choices during lunch yesterday, guest editor Lalita Noronha and I couldn't contain our glee. (Read Lalita's poem "The Sea.")

The short stories, essays and poems we received for the issue are an amazing integration of science and literature -- more often than not using science as a way to understand human experience.

Today, I'm sharing two poems from Poetry 180, a project Billy Collins began when he was U.S. Poet Laureate. Both of today's poems use science to explore the way children think, and how that differs from adult logic and adult limitations.

Forgotten Planet

Doug Dorph

I ask my daughter to name the planets.
"Venus ...Mars ...and Plunis!" she says.
When I was six or seven my father
woke me in the middle of the night.
We went down to the playground and lay
on our backs on the concrete looking up
for the meteors the tv said would shower.

I don't remember any meteors. I remember
my back pressed to the planet Earth,
my father's bulk like gravity next to me,
the occasional rumble from his throat,
the apartment buildings dark-windowed,
the sky close enough to poke with my finger.

Now, knowledge erodes wonder.

Read the rest at Poetry 180. 

As you know, poor Pluto has been downgraded from 9th planet to dwarf planet -- a change that happened while  my youngest was in elementary school. How quickly our understanding of the universe can shift!

From NASA

Cartoon Physics, part 1

Nick Flynn

Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down -- earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes.

Read the rest of the poem at Poetry 180.

Studying Calvin & Hobbes in Statistical Mechanics!

Enjoy your Poetry Friday, everyone! Here's a little science and poetry set to music to send you off into your day...

Poetry Postcard 14

I admit, thirteen years later, that my husband had to drag me to Maryland kicking and screaming.

We had a toddler and I was six months pregnant when we moved away from northern New Jersey -- and all of our family -- to the Baltimore suburbs. I was only half joking when I quipped, "There are two police shows on TV. The one in New York is Law & Order and the one set in Baltimore is called Homicide."

Baltimore legend has it that a couple of robbers stumbled
onto the set of Homicide, thought the actors in uniforms
were real cops, and turned themselves in.

Now, you couldn't drag me back to NJ. Even for the great diners. Central Maryland has wonderful schools, a thriving literary scene, and there are lots of transplants, like us.

One of the best things about this area is how close we are to the nation's capitol. So many museums and festivals are free and family-oriented. Two years ago, we went to Goddard Space Flight Center's Explore@ NASA day. It was this giant, free open house. For my science-minded kids: total awesomeness.

My son chats with a high school robotics team
at Explore@ NASA Day. He is now on his
high school robotics team, which will compete at
the VEX world championships this spring!

I wish I had taken notes about all of the cool things we saw and did. We talked about sun flares with scientists from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. (Stop by their website to see the Sun as it is right now.) The most memorable moment: touring the mission control rooms for several of NASA's weather satellites. Amazing. (List of satellite missions here.)

Wall art showing all of the current satellite missions. So cool!

And then I spotted this globe of the Moon:

With scientific wonders all around, I was gob-smacked by the strange names on this Moon map. The Marsh of Decay? The Sea of Serenity? But the Moon does not have water. Intriguing.

I never put the idea away completely, I just didn't have an anchor for it -- something to make a poem and not just a list of evocative lunar place-names.

Until I picked up a postcard. It comes from the planetarium at the Franklin Institute (Philadelphia). I've never been there. I found the card in a local antique store. Somehow, it was the jumping off-point I needed.

Places on the Moon

The Lake of Dreams

is wider than the Lake

of Perseverance,

but come daylight

both dissolve in a Sea

of Vapors. My love,

let us swim diligent laps

in the Lake of Goodness,

and idle together

in the Lake of Sorrow.

Oh, take me

to the Lake of Joy

for the Lake of Winter
is frozen. Float me
in the downy Lake

of Softness and speak not

of the Lake of Death.

Take me back
to the moonlit Lake

of Summer, the paper boats
we filled with candles

until the water blinked

with starlight, or have you

drunk from the Lake

of Forgetfulness,
turned back to the house,

your gaze earthbound?

by Laura Shovan

Postcard Information:

“SCIENCE MUSEUM OF THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE: Philadelphia, Penna. The planetarium will reproduce the night skies as seen from any place in the world.”

“Photo & Pub by Joseph F. Morsello”

In researching this poem, I learned that early
astronomers mistook dark areas on the Moon
for bodies of water.

Draft one of the poem began with the Lake of Summer. When I was revising, I realized that this memory (it was a summer camp tradition) was the beating heart of the poem. "The white hot center of the poem" has become a sort of poetic aphorism, like "show me, don't tell me." But for this poem, that key image did need to move closer to the center.

I can't find information about another Explore@NASA Day, but I can recommend another free, huge and super-cool family science event. The next USA Science and Engineering Festival is scheduled for April, 2014. We went to the inaugural festival last spring. You may not get a tour through NASA mission control, but your mind will still be blown by all the hands-on science activities.

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.