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 Friday: You're Doing Math in Poetry?

Welcome, Northfield Elementary School poets! It's Poetry Friday!

This week's host is Liz at Growing Wild, and that's no Fib.
Stop by for more poetry links from around the Kidlitosphere.

This week, I began one of my favorite annual poetry residencies at Northfield E.S. I have leading poetry workshops in the third grade for seven years. Maybe eight. The teachers and I lost count.

What's new this year? The Common Core curriculum has come to Maryland and classroom teachers are adjusting to the new standards. I've heard -- and observed with my own 7th grader -- the good, the bad and the ugly of the Common Core.

 

One element that people are shaking their heads about: writing in math. In middle school, it looks like a three paragraph essay explaining how you solved a problem.

In my poetry classes, it looks like this:

A mathematical graph of the Fibonacci sequence PLUS

science (Fibonacci spirals in nature) EQUALS

poetry?

The Northfield third graders are a brainy bunch. They quickly saw that we could take the Fibonacci numbers and use them to count syllables, creating a poem that matches the numerical sequence.

 

To read my full Fibonacci Poetry lesson plan, please visit last year's FIB POST. Also, check out Poetry Friday blogger and Fib inventor Greg Pincus's explanation of the form.

 

Common Core is doable... when you give teachers some flexibility to be creative and teach. The Northfield poets deftly wrote POEMS about SCIENCE using a MATHEMATICAL sequence. Let's give them some snaps. (We don't clap in poetry class. Snaps put us in a rhythmic mood.)

 

Here are two poets from Ms. Pruitt's homeroom, and their super, scientific, sequential Fibonacci poems.

Ally K.

Bees

smell

nectar

flowers

buzzing when they fly

sense of responsibility

www.texasbees.com

I found Ally's last line to be fascinating. Bees are following their instincts when they collect pollen. Yet, their behavior is responsible for the health of the plants they pollinate.

Another Pruitt poet took a favorite subject, orangutans, and went all the way to 34 syllables with his scientific information about the primates.

 

Teddy J.

Look!

Wow!

In the

treetops there

are orangutans

swinging from vine to vine. Then they

jump around to the ground to scoop up durians. They

then climb back up to the tops of the trees to make a leafy nest to sleep in, but the

baby one doesn’t want to go to sleep. The mama orangutan sings her little one a song and

     he goes to sleep. Good night, “forest people!”

www.primates.com

Originally, Teddy wrote "scoop up yummy fruit" in line 7. But he knew so much about orangutans -- I had a feeling he might know the name of this primate's favorite fruit. Sure enough, he did, and "durians" was the perfect number of syllables for the line.

Durian fruit from hungrytravels.com

I'll be blogging about our poetry workshops for the next several weeks. Thanks to the teachers and families at Northfield for inviting me to visit again this year, and for giving me permission to share their talented third graders' amazing poems.

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.