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...

We Got the Beat: Fibonacci Poems Part 2

Happy Poetry Friday!

I am in residence at Northfield Elementary this month. We started the visit with Fibonacci poems. Today, I am sharing Part 2 of the lesson. You will find Part 1 here, with some student poems.

Fibs were invented, as a poetic form, by Poetry Friday blogger Gregory K. Pincus (GottaBook). The blogosphere went kind of crazy for them, enough so that the New York Times featured Gregory and the Fib trend.

Even though the form is only four years old, there are e-zines devoted to Fibonacci poems: Fibetry,  The Fib Review. Here are some Fibs I liked at The Science Creative Quarterly.

Yesterday, I shared Robert Bly's poem "Conversation with a Mouse" with the students. This helped me introduce the idea that a poem can move from very small (a mouse's nest) to extremely large (the Milky Way galaxy) in just a few lines.

From Atlas of the Universe. The Milky Way's shape
follows the Fibonacci pattern.

Next, we read some of  Sarah C. Campbell's book Growing Patterns as I introduced the math concept behind the Fibonacci sequence. We also looked at examples of the pattern in nature.

We're almost ready to write. I adapted Gregory's blog post on Fibonacci poems to create a handout.

We read a few sample Fibs. Since I am asking the students to write about something science-related, I used the fib "Moon." This was written at Patrick Henry Elementary school with my friend, Karren Alenier as the resident poet.

…….....................MOON

 …….....................Bright
 ……...................And shiny
…….................Seen at night
……...............Different phases
............The many whitish gray craters
Looking like a sweet old man smiling happily down

Thanks to Karren for permission to post the poem. You'll find more Fibonacci info at poet Karren Alenier's blog.

Next, we wrote a Fib as a whole class. I created a form for this step. It looks something like:

Give it a try -- grow a Fib poem.

A Fib is 6 lines long (longer, if you wish) and only has 20 syllables.

1:

1:

2:

3:

5:

8:

Keep going?

13:

21:

34:

As we worked, I reviewed the math with the class. (0 = blank line, line 1 has 1 beat, add 0+1=1 so line 2 has 1 beat, add 1+2=3, 2=3=5, and so on -- always adding the syllables in the two previous lines to figure out the number of beats in the next line.)

A lot of us were counting on fingers and tapping on desks while we did this.

Ms. Pruitt's class has been studying pendulums. I like the rocking feeling in their class Fib.

a

pen-

dulum

makes round trips

gravity pulling

swinging back and forth, on and on

From wikipedia

Ms. Hoge's class was ambitious, taking their scientific poem to eight lines.

Space

Stars

Shining

Everywhere

Millions and millions

The sun is a very big star

The Earth is lone little spot in the Solar System

The same matter form the stars helps make up part of human beings, like Mrs. Hoge's class!

The class soon figured out that the initial five lines of the poem have a minimal feel -- the economy of language we talk so much about in poetry. From there, the lines become expansive. The poem begins to feel like a jigsaw puzzle, fitting all the pieces together and squeezing in extra syllables to get the right number of beats.

Last, the children wrote their own Fibs.

Amaiya B's Fib

Seed

ground

growing

now little

going to grow big

growing big and pretty petals

now a big, pretty flower with a long, leafy stem

My seeds blow away now through the air. I wonder where they go, far or right next to me.

Gavin F's Fib

rain

is

a type

of weather,

it's all wet outside

walking in mud getting shoes dirty

Ellis K's Fib

Trees

leaves

branches

falling leaves

roots drinking water

animals live inside of trees

I am swinging on a rope swing from its long branches

green, yellow, red and brown leaves falling down and people jumping into piles of leaves

Shelby K's Fib

trees

grow

blowing

fruit blossoms

redwood, maple

calms my nerves and fun to climb up

From apartmenttherapy.com
Have you ever tried growing an avocado by
placing the seed in water?

Thank you to the families of these students for allowing me to share their wonderful poems.

You'll find links to more Poetry Friday posts at Elaine's blog, Wild Rose Reader.

30 Habits of Highly Effective Poets #16: Michael Tims on the Scientific Method

Michael Tims is a Maryland-based poet, active in the wonderful Hyattstown Mill Arts project. You can find the project's blog here, where Michael's "30 Habits" contribution is also posted.

My husband says if I hadn't become a poet, I would  have been a biologist. Insects, in particular, have my heart because they are so fascinating. (My children still remember me as the only mom, during the 17-year-cicada invasion, running to -- not away from -- the bugs.)

Lately, I have been reading molecular biologist Katherine Larson, who makes use of her scientific background in her poems.

Michael reading at a local writers' conference.

Here is Michael, on making scientific knowledge a poetic habit:

There’s a Science Geek Inside – You Just Don’t See It

Recently I started using science articles to generate the substructure or scaffolding of poems. Much like ekphrasis, which uses visual art as a jump off point, science reporting offers both unique phenomena and vocabulary to plumb.

A series of recent articles about atmospheric activity, everything from Earth’s magnetic field, to what occurs when lightning forms, to the microbial presence on water droplets provided me a unique point of view to consider my relationship with Gaia.

Generally, I lack awareness of atmospheric activity, unless the weather compels me to pay attention. These ideas gave me the context for my own existence in the larger scheme of Earth cycles and allowed my subconscious the space to work its magic under the surface. Like any good story, I wondered how it was going to turn out, until it did.

A Theory of Air

by Michael Tims

Gaia’s magnetic field snaps back

displeased at being rubbed

the wrong way.

An aurora borealis pungent

and teeming spills over

the invisible edge

we are all creatures of air.

Hurricane speed tide plumes plunge

ice crystals down to the surface

as electrostatic discharge

organized in previously unexplored

directions, seeding nimbus dust

slurries of reproducing

bacteria on troposphere mist.

Our cellular progenitors, we carry

their helical imprint of sky, engulf

each other in symbiont desperation

a reverse sublimation to terrestrial

bodies of water, Gaia

intending our existence to be

a lighter resurfacing

less of the organized, arrogant

tissue we now drag through air.

Michael Tims received his BA in English/Writing from George Mason University and a PhD from the University of Maryland studying the chemical ecologically of medicinal plants. He has worked in the herbal supplement industry as a health food store owner, a clinical herbalist and an academic researcher/teacher. He created and writes a science blog, Bardo's Calculus, as well as an artist and writers blog, Hyattstown Millstone.   

 During my poetry residencies this month, I'll be sharing John Scieszka's book Science Verse with fifth graders at Swansfield ES. Each piece in the book is a song or famous poem parody that explores something scientific (e.g. "Food Chain" a reenvisioning of "I'll Be Working on the Railroad.")

Third graders at Northfield E.S. will be writing science-based Fibonacci poems with me, using the beautiful book Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature by Sarah C. Campbell. I can't wait to see what the crossover between science and poetry inspires in my students.