Leaving Home, Part 2

Thank you for all of the kind, supportive words as we send our son off to college, Poetry Friday friends! I appreciated your comments last week.

Today was the big day. I dropped the kid off at the airport first thing this morning. I was teary, but I did not cry! By noon, he had made his way to CWRU, found his dorm room, and met some fellow early-arrivals. His texts started to get a little cagey after that. When he began to tease me for being nosey, I knew he was fine. Whew.

Sending our guy off into the world got me thinking. Robbie had just finished 5th grade when I began working on the manuscript that became THE LAST FIFTH GRADE OF EMERSON ELEMENTARY. This summer, Advanced Reader's Copies of the book began making their way into the world. The ARC has been traveling around the country, paying reading visits to my fellow 2016 debut authors.

(Where in the heck is THE LAST FIFTH GRADE? Find out on this map.)

It's an odd feeling, knowing that the book (and child) you spent years preparing for this moment is finally *out there.* It's out there having experiences with people you've never met. They are forming opinions about something (someone) that's not you, but is a huge part of you.

I'm grateful for author friends
who have welcomed Ms. Hill's
fifth grade class into their homes.

There's always a comfortable
place to stay during a visit.

Sometimes the book gets to go
on field trips, like this one to Lake Erie.

And there are new friends to meet,
like Abby Cooper's Lou,
and his pal Squishy Giraffe.

I am amazed at the parallels between a child leaving home and a published book. As a parent/author, you've reached the point where you've poured every skill, lecture, ounce of wisdom, and experience that you can into your baby. He's had teachers, mentors, coaches, and relatives to support his growth. Now he has to put everything he's learned and experienced to use and make the best of it.

Thanks to Amy Ludwig VanDerwater for sharing this poem with me when I was feeling anxious about packing our son up this week. Sharon Olds' observations speak to me, both as a mom who is launching a child, and as an author getting ready to launch a book.

The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb

by Sharon Olds

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn't
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have
he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a heavy wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now...

Read the rest at The Writer's Almanac.

My dear friend Heidi Mordhorst is hosting Poetry Friday this week. Get out your fresh fruit and your juicer and join her for a cup full of delicious poetry at My Juicy Little Universe.

Thanks to the Sweet Sixteens debut author group for the photos! You guys are the best. Let's just hope my son is as good about sending pictures home as you are (ha).

Poetry Friday: "Don't Go There" Odes

Happy Poetry Friday, Friends! I've got something for your high schoolers this week. It's not elementary-friendly.

I missed last week, but I have a doctor's note for the teacher.

It turns out that the pain on my lower right side is not a wonky appendix, but an ovarian cyst. I felt so ridiculous being gurney-wheeled past the ER nurse's station that I had to give them my best QEII Royal Wave. The nurses thought I had been given too much morphine. "No," I said, "I'm just naturally funny."

Little known fact: My middle name is Elizabeth, after the Queen.

There has been a trend in Poetryville over the last few years. I call it "Don't Go There" Odes. The trend has its roots in Pablo Neruda's Odes to Common Things -- socks, a tomato for lunch, laziness.

Lately, poets are taking the simple things to mean "things we don't like to talk about." At the last few Dodge Poetry Festivals, I have heard odes to television (Robert Pinsky), pork (Kevin Young), and toilets (Sharon Olds with a nod, I think, to Ferlinghetti's poem "Underwear").

Like an overbooked radiology lab, the Internet would not give up any information about ovarian odes. Nothing about blisters growing on that little jellyfish-head looking thingy on your insides. (Side note: my doc drew a lovely picture of the uterus and ovaries for me. It resembled an elephant wearing ovary earrings.)

The next best thing to an ovarian ode is Sharon Olds' "Ode to a Tampon." I happened to be at the Dodge Festival for this reading. You'll see her toilet ode first. Be prepared for some toilet-appropriate four-letter words. Or you can skip ahead to about 3:02 for "Ode to a Tampon." I've got a prompt after the video, so stay put!



WRITING PROMPT (HS and up):


So, brave educators. Do you dare to go there with your high schoolers? Pablo Neruda used the ode form -- not to write about grand emotions like love, or monuments (isn't there an ode to limestone) or Grecian Urns -- but to draw our attention to everyday things.

The natural next step in the life of this form is to draw our attention to so-called unmentionables and show why they are worth mentioning, even celebrating. (Odes are a great place to practice hyperbole, BTW.)

In these poems, television is a channel (!) to the past and a window to memory, we can talk about where meat comes from and why we love it, toilets and tampons -- where would we be without them?

I challenge you to write a "Don't Go There" Ode today. Maybe my cysty ovary and I will join you.

Myra at Gathering Books is our host today. Do go there, to Gathering Books, for more Poetry Friday.

Poetry Friday: Carole Boston Weatherford

The day I turned ten
Our church was quiet. No meetings, no marches.
Mama left me in Sunday school
With a soft kiss and coins for the offering plate.

from Birmingham, 1963 by Carole Boston Weatherford

Our local SCBWI region is preparing for its annual March conference. The theme is "Creating Diversity in Children's Literature." Poet Carole Boston Weatherford is the keynote author.

I couldn't get Becoming Billie Holliday at the library (too popular!), so I found Weatherford's book, Birmingham, 1963. In the picture book, a 10-year-old girl witnesses the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.


Here's what I absolutely love about this book -- Weatherford's poems are paired with archival photos from the bombing and the 1960s civil rights movement. Using photos as a jumping off point for poetry is a powerful exercise (one of my favorite examples is Sharon Old's "I Go Back to May 1937.")

The narrator of Birmingham, 1963, is waiting to sing a hymn at church. She says,

As I waited, four big girls giggled on their way
To the restroom. I would have tagged along
If I thought they'd include me.

This poem faces the photograph of a hymn book opened to the words, "Jesus loves the little chidlren, All the children of the world; Red and yellow, black and white, They are precious in His sight."

As with any good picture book, it's the connections the reader makes between words and images -- the things that are not spelled out -- that leave an impression.

The last series of poems in the book are vivid portraits of the girls killed in the bombing, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, and Carole Robertson. We get to see the girls not as victims, but as children with friends and interests and dreams.

There's more poetry to enjoy and share at Check It Out, our Poetry Friday host for this week.

It's Poetry Friday

On with the Poetry Sampler from last week’s Dodge Poetry Festival! Friday afternoon. We are about halfway through a 21 poet, 3 hour sampler. I had to agree with Edward Hirsch, who joked with the audience, “I’m very over stimulated.!” Jane Hirshfield is a longtime Dodge headliner. She has a soothing voice. Her poetry (and manner?) is influenced by her study of Zen. Hirshfield’s calm isn’t lulling – it actually calls you to pay attention to the words. Hirshfield shared a beautiful elegy, “Letter to C,” for poet Czeslaw Milosz’s wife. I was struck by these lines from her poem, “Vilnius,” If you lived higher up on the mountain,

I find myself thinking, what you would see is

more of everything else, but not the mountain. Another Dodge veteran, Sharon Olds, was one of several poets who brought up Pablo Neruda’s “Odes to Simple Things.” She read an ode to toilets. Another: “Ode to a Tampon.” In keeping with the form, she elevated these objects with her choice of language and descriptions. But Olds also had us laughing about our own discomfort with bodily functions.

I begin school poetry residencies talking to children about how all subject matter is fair game in poetry. Olds is a poet who explores the “unmentionable” parts of our existence -- our bodies & how they operate. I’d never heard Ted Kooser read before. He completed his term as U.S. Poet Laureate this summer. People cheered before, during, and after his reading. Kooser read a poem about his mother’s death that made me cry (softie!) In "Pearl," he describes visiting an elderly aunt to deliver the news. In the poem, he knocks on the door and says, “It’s Vera’s boy,” realizing that the death has taken him back to childhood. You can hear Kooser read the poem, “Pearl,” here: http://www.poetrypoetry.com/Features/TedKooser/TedKooser.php Linda Pastan is a fellow Marylander. Her subject matter -- marriage, family, parenting – appeals to me. She read a list poem, “Because.” It describes the reasons why she said “yes” when her husband asked her to marry him. It’s a theme she also explores in “I Married You”: I married you for all the wrong reasons, charmed by your dangerous family history, by the innocent muscles, bulging like hidden weapons under your shirt, by your naive ties, the colors of painted scraps of sunset. Read the rest of Pastan’s poem here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19483 Whew! What a marathon. Poets sometimes say that the Dodge Festival elevates them to rock-star status: the lights, thousands of seats filled with cheering fans. But fame is different for great poets than it is for musicians, actors, athletes. Poets aren’t disposable as they age. If the Dodge crowd is any indication, we want our poets to combine wisdom and a sense of humor about the human experience.

More to come…including What poetry books for kids can you find at the Dodge Poetry Festival’s book tent?

Head over to Two Writing Teachers for more Poetry Friday. They're hosting today: http://twowritingteachers.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/were-hosting-poetry-friday-today/#comment-5238