Poetry Friday: End of Summer

It's the last weekend of summer at our house. My daughter starts school Monday. My son has spent the last two weeks at his school's band camp -- a summer rite of passage for many teens.

Last year's marching band setting up for their show. They were state champs!

I was looking for a marching band poem and came across this piece about another teen summer rite of passage. It's a loose sort of prose poem/haibun about a local summer fair.

The marching band (and pig's feet, rides, tickets) snakes through the poem, but so does something else: a hint of the town's collective racism.

It's important that this theme isn't front and center in the poem, but woven into its fabric more subtly. The poem is anchored in the voice of a child or teen who doesn't quite see beyond the fair's attractions. Instead of stamping the fair with an opinion, the poet allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

Diorama

By Atsuro Riley

  

  The Blue Hole Summer Fair, set up and spread out like a butterfly pinned down on paper. Twin bright-lit wings, identically shaped (and fenced) and sized.

    This side holds the waffled-tin (and oven-hot) huts of the Home Arts Booths and Contests, the hay-sweet display-cages for the 4-H livestock, the streamer-hung display-stages where girl-beauties twirl and try for queen. There's rosette-luster (and -lusting), and the marching band wearing a hole in Sousa. And (pursed) gaggles and clutches of feather-white neighbor-women, eyeballing us like we're pig's feet in a jar. 

                    I wonder does her boy talk Chinese?

                                      You ever seen that kind of black-headed?

                                                        Blue shine all in it like a crow. 

This other wing (the one I'm back-sneaking, side-slipping, turnstiling into) dips and slopes down to low-lying marsh-mire: whiffs of pluff-mud stink and live gnat-pack poison, carnie-cots and -trailers camped on ooze. They've got (rickety) rides, and tent-shows with stains, and rackety bare-bulbed stalls of Hoop-La Game (RING-A-COKE!) and Rebel Yell and Shoot the Gook Down. Stand here, on this smutch-spot: don't these mirrors show you strange? 

www.howardcountyfair.org

Read the rest of "Diorama" at the Poetry Foundation. 

If you are teaching this poem, I'd recommend high school or advanced middle schoolers. There is a lot to dig into in "Diorama," including the meaning of the title. 

It might also be an interesting piece to pair with a novel like Gordon Parks' The Learning Tree or one of Ray Bradbury's pieces set at a small town fair (like Something Wicked this Way Comes.)

When I taught HS, this was one of my favorite novels in our 9th grade curriculum.

We have a great summer fair in Howard County, Maryland, but I haven't gone in many years. There's plenty of color and excitement at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, which happens each May. 

Enjoy your last days of summer! Be sure to stop by Dori's blog, Dori Reads for more end of summer and back to school poetry. 

Before I sign off, today is our 21st anniversary. Sending gratitude and love to my husband, Rob.

Poetry Friday: No-ode

I am a huge fan of "Not" and "No" poems.

They are often lists: things the speaker has never done or tried, remarks unsaid or unspoken, qualities someone doesn't have -- as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. 


My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;


It's a neat trick. By writing what you're not willing to do (eat red meat, ride a roller coaster), you can reveal as much -- more? -- than coming at the subject head-on. That also makes these poems a good lesson for middle and high school writers who want to work on subtlety.

I've been working on a middle-grade novel-in-verse. One of my characters, a fifth grade joker named Jason, thought it would be funny to write an anti-ode. His No-ode lists all the things he hates about indoor recess.

I decided to try the form myself. (Jason says pronounce it like node.) Here is a rough draft. If you're balancing working and parenting at home this summer, I know you feel my pain. 

Summer No-ode


by Laura Shovan

June brought me the end of school.
It handed summer to me on a stick,
as if the season were a burned marshmallow
that I was supposed to cover with chocolate
and call delicious.

Summer, I fight through your ten weeks
like a triathlete who tackles the local lake,
slimy algae on the bottom
and god knows what – goose poo? –
in the thick water.

These are violent days.
My quiet routine gasps.
Your hours are cacti I know carry juice
but I can’t drink for the thorns,
which look an awful lot
like my two un-busy children.

Summer, you are heat
and drought and no one
wanting to play outside.
You are miles in the car
driving the children to camp,
a rushed hour of chores
and picking them up again.

Don’t think you honor me
with all this free time.
I don’t know what to do with it,
so I do nothing. We all do nothing.

My son wants to play video games
and blow things up.
I blame you for his violence.
You’re a poor role model, Summer,
with your lightning gunning for trees,
downpours flooding roads
and booms louder than the cartoon tank
that just exploded on my TV.

You are people thinking they are handsome
in tank tops. You are sunburns and riptides.

I resist the temptation to give in
to your languidity, to dragonfly float
from movies to board games, swims
at the neighbor's and ice cream stand visits.

I keep the crust of burned sugar
on my tongue and speak from it, unkindly
to everyone I live with.
This ode has no moral.
It’s just summertime
and nothing feels easy.

Let me know if you try your own No-ode. You  might like to check out one of Pablo Neruda's simple odes first. I re-read his "Ode to My Socks" while drafting my No-ode.

There's more poetry at wonderful Heidi's blog My Juicy Little Universe -- stop by for a list of all the Poetry Friday posts.