Today’s model poem is Won’t You Celebrate With Me by Lucile Clifton.  You can click the link to read the original poem.

I have a lot of energy wrapped up in this draft and I need to let it set before I rework. This came out in a white, hot heat.

Here’s my first draft of poem modeled in the same style.

won’t you celebrate with me
what I have become
a woman strong and brave
enough to speak her mind,
usually,
a wife, a lover
daughter, mother
a friend to few
I hold dear
a non-friend
to some
for reasons I don’t understand
born into confusion
about how to become
myself
how to trust I had
arrived
in all my glory
before barreling past
my destination
forgetting
not knowing
I was enough
I am enough
I AM ENOUGH
come celebrate
with me that
I have climbed
my mountains
cheered the sunrise
knowing, knowing
yes
I am stronger
at all the broken places.

Susan Taylor Brown

Well we’ve made it though the month with daily poetry exercises that I hope will take some of the intimidation factor out of playing with poetry. For this last day, I’d like to share another poem modeling exercise that never fails to surprise me when I use it with a class. Take a moment to go read this poem IF by Rudyard Kipling. In the classroom we dissect this poem line by line and we don’t go on to the next line until we’ve talked through the one before. I have the kids tell me what they think Kipling meant and then I have them talk about it as it compares to their lives.

Then I ask them to write there own poem modeled on this one.

Here’s my try at one.

If you can learn that your value comes from being yourself,
not who the rest of the world thinks you should be

If you can recognize that no one person
sits in judgement of you

If you can lean into the understanding that difficult people too,
carry their burdens

If you can not cause pain to yourself, to others

If you can freely share your knowledge
knowing it will just increase your wealth
and manage your wealth so that the
seeking of it doesn’t manage you

If you can let go of hate and anger and fear
and all the useless emotions that hold you back
while at the same time filling yourself
and the world with love and laughter and compassion

If you can encourage dream following in everyone you meet
while nurturing dreams of your own

If you can let yourself believe
in yourself

There is nothing you cannot do.

–Susan Taylor Brown

Your turn.

Another great poem to use as a model for a poem of your own it This Is Just To Say  by William Carlos Williams.

It has also inspired a few books including the wonderful, This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness by Joyce Sidman  and the equally fun, Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It: False Apology Poems by Gail Carson Levine.

Here’s one I wrote.
I HAVE TO TELL YOU

I have taken
the blank paper
you kept in your desk

and which
you were probably
saving
for masterpieces
of your own

Forgive me
there were colors
beautiful colors
waiting to escape.

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn.

I usually introduce this form early on in my teaching sessions and I just realized I missed it. It’s called a cinquain, which like haiku, is a counted syllable form of poetry. A cinquain is 5 lines long and the syllable counts are as follows:

Line 1 = 2
Line 2 = 4
Line 3 = 6
Line 4 = 8
Line 5 = 2

Sometimes a cinquain helps me develop an idea further and it turns into a longer poem. Sometimes it stays as it is. As always, the challenge of finding the right words to convey what I want to say in a constrained form often take me places I didn’t expect to go.

Here’s my cinquain.

airdance
ballerina
twist twirl hover dip dive
glidinggreen gracefulness
awestruck

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn

It’s Poetry Friday and I decided this was a good day to introduce the concept of using a more well-known poem as model for a poem of your own. I have a selection of them that I like to use with my students and one of my favorites is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens. I like this because really, it is just another list. Make a list of thirteen different ways to look at something. It can be something as simple as your dog, your car, your bedroom. Or maybe you want to get fancy and try thirteen ways of looking at your job or a friendship. Just pick a topic and give it a try.

I decided to use this poem as an opportunity to say goodbye to Lily, the hummingbird who has built a nest in my yard but who did not get to see her eggs hatch. I’m sure I’ll be dinking with this poem for a while but it felt good to get a draft of this out. (You can click on the photo to see it larger, if you like.)

13 Ways of Looking at a Hummingbird

1
wings whirl
in place
my face
smiles
swivels
tiny dancer
chirps
cheeps
chitters
hello

2
greengold glitters glides
lands atop the waterfalls
shimmy shakes
a water dance

3
spider silk
blades of grass
lichen
moss
one gray hair
two red threads
building blocks
a mini mansion

4
picture pose
turn left
now right
chin up
hold still
I’ll keep my distance

5
in out
out in
tall wall
soft floor
ready wait
wait some more
egg one
egg two
soon
each morning
each evening
I check
just in case

6
the plum tree a
perfect preening place
ruffled nest feathers
bugs picked flicked
feathers smoothed
stretch once
stretch again
bask in the sun
before babies come

7
stormy days
stormy nights
quivery
shivery
forgetting generations
that came before
I worry
flashlight in hand

8
she disappears deep
within the overgrown honeysuckle
seeking bugs
protein power
for motherhood
alone
I measure
one nest
one half a walnut shell
one egg
one jellybean
one miracle
waiting to happen

9
my days equal
part
inspection
observation
research
photographs
my days equal
bliss

10
camera ready
I await her homecoming
hidden only slightly behind the fence
fifteen minutes
two hundred photographs
my mini model
is a star

11
morning comes
empty
no mama snug atop her nest
no tiny eggs safe and sound
no babies waiting
to say hello world
sometime between
the darkness and dawn
disaster

12
overcast and gray
rain soon
but I am stubborn
searching beneath the bushes
until I find evidence
until I find a tiny white shell
until it hits me
miracles don’t always come true

13
crying
crying
crying
camera clicks
shot after shot after shot
most will be out of focus
unable to capture the pain I feel
at all the days that should have been ahead
suddenly suspended beside me
close enough to almost touch
no chirp
no cheep
no chitter
she hovers there
ten seconds maybe more
just long enough
to say goodbye

– Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn.

Tabatha Yeatts has the round-up for all the Poetry Friday posts. Take a look at some of the terrific poetry posts other people are sharing. And if you don’t have time to visit them all today, be sure to bookmark them to go back and visit later.

It’s been a hard day today. If you’ve been following my posts on Facebook or on my garden blog about Lily, the hummingbird who built a nest in our backyard, you know what I mean. If not, here’s today’s installment.

So I’m pulling out an easy card and am suggesting that we do a five senses poem, like we did on Kick the Poetry Can’ts #1

The word I’m choosing for this one is GOODBYE.

As always, I start with a list.

What does goodbye sound like? Taste like? Smell like? Feel like? Look like?

Here’s my brainstorm.

sounds like the closing of a door, silence
the moment of a hold after a note is played

tastes like peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth
something that makes you want to rinse your mouth out
like mud

smells like something burning
something that makes you want to hold your nose
garbage when the bag breaks

feels like you’re riding up in the elevator and the cord breaks
drowning
you can’t catch your breath

looks like gray mist covering anything that was beautiful
ashes
a shut door, a closed gate, the blinds being lowered
an empty place at the table

And here’s my first draft of a  poem.

Goodbye sounds like
the last note of the trumpet frozen
in time
in my mind
silence shuts the door
on what use to be.

It fills my mouth with mud
stuck to the roof of my mouth
grit between my teeth
I can’t floss it away
I can’t rinse it out it
sits
settles
festers

stinky smells slither
up through my nostrils
down to my toes
out of my pores
goodbye explodes like a busted bag of garbage
covering me until I feel like I’m drowning
can’t catch my breath
can’t face that empty place
can’t believe
after all this time
goodbye wins again

ashes, ashes
we all fall down

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn. Try your hand at a five senses poem around the word “goodbye.”

Ancient poets wrote many odes to celebrate great events in their lives and to pay homage to magnificent people. Many of the students I teach have difficulty believing that they are worthy of having an ode sung to them. So we write our own.

While there are traditional forms of writing an ode, with specific patterns and rhyme forms to follow, for this exercise I don’t worry about that. The key here is to write about yourself in a way that celebrates all the ways that you are good. Show the world the very best of you. This is not a time to be shy. This is your time to shine.

Start with a list of things you do well, things people compliment you on, things you know are your strengths. Work that into a poem.

Here’s one I’m working on about me.

Happyhearted
observer of
littlelife moments
bugs on blossom
birds in bushes
dog snoring in the sun

feelingfriend
hurts when you hurt
notices something is slightly
notquiteright
gentle listener of
undertones and overtones
hughanderouter

talented talker
believes in possibilities
yours, mine, ours
spreads sparks
of what could be
wherever she goes

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn.

When I work with incarcerated teens they are always talking about their girlfriends or boyfriends who are usually on the outside and who they usually don’t get to see very often. This inevitably leads to them wanting to write love poems. So this is a fun exercise to do because it makes them think about the various ways we can show our love for people.

I ask the students to give me ways they know someone loves them, or ways they can show someone they love them, without using the word love. (Truly, they never see this exercise coming which is so much fun.)

They are usually really good at coming up with ways to show someone you love them. Here’s a partial brainstorm from one of my classes:

tell them they look hot
buy them candy
do their chores
offer to babysit
clean your room without being asked 100 times
cook their favorite foods
let them pick what you watch on tv
buy them presents

You get the idea. After we have filled the board with this sort of brainstorm I tell them we are going to write love poems but there’s one catch – they can’t use the word LOVE anywhere in the poem but we should be able to feel the love anyway.

I truly thought this would be one of the hardest exercises for my students but time after time, it has proven to be one of the most popular ones.

Here’s a partial draft of one of my poems that fits this exercise.

Normally I get the sheets changed on time
more or less
laundry kept up
more or less
clutter under control
more or less
but this week less wins most of those battles.

Maybe it’s the way
I barely make it to the bathroom in time
but he notices something about me
and asks are you okay?
I shake my head no and he holds my hair
away from my face,
and I lean over the toilet
while my stomach rebels.

I camp on the couch and
he brings me clear liquids
soda crackers
makes sure the bucket
the remote control
and the phone
are close at hand when he has to leave.

He comes home carrying every comfort food
he can remember I’ve ever mentioned,
alternates his day between letting me nap
and bringing me more foods
to tempt my lack of appetite.

He keeps the house running quietly in the background
lets the dog out
the back in again
ten times a day
while I do battle with the flu,
rubs my back,
tucks the comforter up under my chin,
and encourages the dog
to camp nearby, close enough for me to pet.

When he blows me a final kiss goodnight
I look into his eyes
dark starsparks telegraph a message
straight to my heart until it swells with happiness
and I count my blessings
lucky to be married to him.

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn.

Last year, Laura Salas and I worked our way through the book WRITING THE LIFE POETIC by Sage Cohen. We took turns hosting the conversation on our blog and we shared some insights from a chapter we chose to read that week. Then we ended it with doing one of the exercises from the book.  One of them was about using song lyrics as models for poems. This works great because we all know those songs that get caught in our head for one reason or another, the same way we want a poem to be imprinted in our minds. In the classroom this can be a lot of fun to have the students bring in copies of the lyrics of their favorite songs and then watch a video of the song on YouTube before settling in to right.

For the exercise I chose a  favorite song of mine called SECRETS by One Republic. When I first heard the song on Pandora, I burst into tears. When I watched the video, it didn’t mesh for me because in my brain I was hearing a different story, the story of a writer trying to find their way in the world.

You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHm9MG9xw1o

Or here are the lyrics by Ryan Tedder.

I need another story
Something to get off my chest
My life gets kinda boring
Need something that I can confess
‘Til all my sleeves are stained red

From all the truth that I’ve said
Come by it honestly I swear
Thought you saw me wink, no
I’ve been on the brink, so

Tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away

My God, amazing how we got this far
It’s like we’re chasing all those stars
Who’s driving shiny big black cars

And everyday I see the news
All the problems that we could solve
And when a situation rises
Just write it into an album
Singing straight, too cold
I don’t really like my flow, no, so

Tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time, don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away

Oh, got no reason, got no shame
Got no family I can blame
Just don’t let me disappear
I’ma tell you everything

So tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time, don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away

So tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time, don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away
All my secrets away, all my secrets away

After listening to the song two or three or, okay, maybe a dozen times, here is the poem I came up with.

I NEED

I need to know
that getting up in the morning
matters to the world
to someone other than the man
who matters so much to me,
the man who may not understand
why I need to know
that I matter at all.

You can tell me
it shouldn’t matter
but it does.
You can tell me
I matter in ways
I may not understand
in so many ways I can
only hope to believe

But I need to know
the kind of knowing that comes
from some place deep inside
some place I don’t reside
I want to run and hide because
what I fear is the world
discovering
uncovering
pieces of soul
I don’t want the world to see
what I fear
is that what I need
matters too much to me

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved.

Your turn. If there’s a song you feel drawn to, search for the lyrics online and then try to model a poem based on that song. Good luck!

It’s the weekend and I’m going easy on you today. I decided to go a little retro so this might look familiar to a few of you from last year. You already know I love saving phrases and words from magazine and then taping them on index cards to use as prompts. Another thing I do, because I love to doodle, is glue phrase prompts to a card and then create some doodle art around them. For some reason seeing these decorated cards gets the kids excited (sometimes) and I’m all about using any trick in the book. I have a stash of about 50 of these cards and when I teach I always have some in my back pocket to hand out when someone comes in late and needs a quick assignment or even when they are asking for extra credit. I laminated this (with packing tape) so they hold up well to being passed around a bunch.

What I do with the students is let them pick a card and tell them they can write any kind of poem they want, a haiku, a 5 senses poem, free verse, an acrostic, whatever they feel motivated to do once they get the card.

Here’s the card I picked for us today.

And here’s my poem.

You took
my self-esteem
my laughter
my pride in how I dress
my ability to trust
and to see the good in most people

You took
my dog, my cat
my good credit rating and almost,
my car

You took
my trust
my friends
my music

You gave back
a broken heart
a shattered dream
and finally, freedom.

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn.

When I am teaching I often start off with an acrostic poem. We do easy ones that begin with the students names and allow them to tell me things about themselves. It’s a good ice breaker and it gets them familiar with the poetic form right off the bat. An acrostic is a poem that spells one word vertically and then uses the first letter on each line for a line in the poem. So if I were doing an acrostic ice breaker with my name, I might do something like this:

Sometimes a little bit scatterbrained
Usually reading or more books at a time
Stressed out when there is too much noise
Always wishing there were more hours in the day
Never going to stop believing in my dreams

Now that’s not much of a poem but you get the idea.

Here’s a draft of one I did tonight with the word “hummingbird. It’s not a great poem yet but it’s a nice way of getting my brain churning around on some ideas. And here’s another thing about acrostics, sometimes they are a good way to get a rough draft of a poem down and then you can take the phrases and play with them until you come up with a poem in another form that you like even better.

High off the ground(not really)
Under scraggly leaves
Mama knits a nest and
Mends it daily with garden gifts she
Ignores my visits (not really)
Needlenose beak tipped high in the air
Grand dame of the toyon tree with
Babies not yet born her
Iridescent feathers fan a
Rainbow blanket she
Decides I have seen enough for now.

Your turn.

How to poems are a fun way to share your knowledge (if you are writing a “truthful” poem) or have some fun if you are playing with your imagination.

You can write a how-to-do-it poem about making a sandwich, dancing with your great Aunt Agatha, climbing a tremendous mountain, learning how to drive, or anything else you can dream up.

As usual, I start with a brainstorming list. Sometimes these poems stay as list and sometimes they morph into something else.

Here’s a first draft  my “how to” poem.

HOW TO BE A GOOD DOG

Learn how to beg
it is the foundation for all future lessons.
Start with the poor pitiful me face
perfect droopy ears
sad eyes (bonus points if you can sigh)
and the art of balancing your head on your outstretched paws
in a way that makes them go “awwww.”

Race around the house like a maniac
when people you know come to visit.
Bark like a monster dog
when strangers knock on the door.
Teach your humans that you know the difference between the two.
(Note: some humans are harder to train than others.)

Learn how to ride in the car without getting sick.
Continually expand your vocabulary of cute noises.
Be willing to do embarrassing tricks
for stinky treats
to make your humans look good.
Practice being aloof
but remember to let them pet you
sometimes.

Ask to go outside
a lot.
Ask to go on walks
a lot.
Ask for treats
a lot.
They might think you’re being difficult
but really you’re giving them important
breaks in their busy day
helping them to relieve stress
and learn how to be in the moment.

They should thank you for this
but they probably won’t.

Don’t chase the birds.
Really, don’t chase the birds.
It only makes them mad
(the humans and the birds.)
Drink out of all the stinky water places
and then give wet kisses
which will gross them out and make them happy
all at the time time.

Don’t dig.
Ever.
I mean it.
For some reason they really have a problem with that.

At the end of the day
find your place in the room
you share with them
and fall fake asleep
with one eye still open
watching them
until you see their eyes close
until you hear them snore
until you know
for sure,
you’ve done a good day’s work
keeping the family safe.

Good dog.

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn.

I’m going to go backwards with today’s exercise and share the final poem first.

magic

humble
excited
a happy lesson
weathered passion
delicious sun-drenched plants
soaking up the warm light
sunflowers intoxicated with the sun
share the secret
rich clods of organic soil
perfect compost
the neighborhood reaps
meditative joy and a harvest of lessons
relishing the heart and soul
of an unspoiled earth

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Now here’s how I got there.

I started with an article from the newspaper. (click on the photo to see it larger.)

And then I looked for the poem inside the article. I think the official name for this kind of poem is a black-out poem, though there might be other names for it as well. What you do is take a marker and cross out all the words that don’t belong until you find the poem. (Click on photo to see it larger.)

Easy as pie, right? Every article has at least one poem in it, maybe more. Kids like to do this because it feels like graffiti.

Your turn. Even if you don’t post your poem give this a try and let me know what you think.

Writing letters is another great way to find the poem within a certain situation. For today’s Kick in the Poetry Can’ts, write a letter to someone who is dead, it can be someone you knew or a total stranger, and then turn it into a poem. I find this easiest to just write out the long prose version first and then go back and revise it with a poetic eye.

Here’s my letter poem to a girl who died when she was sixteen.

We were never friends
but I knew who you were
that long, black hair you refused to cut
that cigarette you popped in your mouth as soon as the bell rang
that purple backpack you carried everywhere
that boy you glued yourself to,
not caring who saw you swapping spit
and playing touchy feely games under the bleachers

We were never friends
but I followed you once
not on purpose, okay, maybe I meant to
but I didn’t mean to see him hit you
I didn’t mean to see you cry
I didn’t mean to run away
knocking over the garbage can next to the snack shack
making him growl at me the way he growled at you
making me so afraid
that I forgot about him hitting you
and only thought getting away
before he hit me too.

Later
after
much later
after so much
later I wondered
if I could have saved you

Now
even later
I wonder if I can save myself

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

Your turn.

This next exercise is similar to the spine poem we did the other day. It’s easy peasy. It’s a horoscope poem. All you need is a horoscope, for either one day or a few days. Here I have included a picture of two days worth of a horoscope. (Click on the picture to see it larger and be able to choose your words/phrases.) If you don’t get the newspaper with horoscopes in them you can search online for any horoscope of the day.

Here’s the rule. You can only use the words or phrases in the horoscope. If two words or more are next to each other, you have to use them in that order but you can move things around however you like after that. You can’t change the tenses of any of the words. If you cut out a few horoscopes from the newspaper you can go through with a highlighter and mark the words you like and then rearrange them to make your poem.

Here are the two horoscopes I used.

And here’s the poem I came up with:

explosive change
emotional confusion
spend time with an old friend
trust
someone is in your corner
don’t be shy
be true to you
push back
proceed with your eyes open
follow your heart

Now you can stop there or, you can do a second poem using this one as a jumping off point.

Your turn.

I realized today that while I have posted a few haiku of my own I haven’t yet mentioned that haiku is a great kick in the poetry can’ts. They are short which translates to easy for a lot of people. They can be as simple or as complex as you might like, depending on what set of rules you want to follow. For this exercise let’s stick with simple rules that it must be 3 lines of 5-7-5 syllable count. The first line has 5 syllable. The next has 7 syllables. And the last has 5 again.

To make it interesting, before you write your haiku, make your own brainstorm of things that have to do with water. I’ll throw you a few to get you started: ice, pond, puddle. Go ahead and brainstorm as many words as you can that are “water words.” Got that? Okay, so write your haiku that has to do with water.

Ready, set, go!

Here’s mine. I’m not 100% happy with it yet but I’m posting the draft to give you courage to try too!
beneath the redbud
blossoms puddle by design
masterpiece in mud

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

This is another one of my favorite prompts to try. Sometimes it confuses people because there’s no easy answer. As usual, I start with a list but you can brainstorm in whatever way works best for you. If you’re using the list to brainstorm, try starting off each sentence with the same phrase and then go back and revise it to make it more interesting. Or not. Either way works.

Write about what you don’t understand. Or use the line, “I don’t understand . . .” and see where it takes you.

I’m exhausted tonight but here’s my brainstorm:

I don’t understand how my grandmother always made all the food come out of the oven at the same time so everything on the dinner table was hot.
I don’t understand how to cook. It seems too much like math and makes my brain hurt.
I don’t understand how people can taste something, like a sauce and decide what it needs.
I don’t understand how to stir things on the stove evidently because a lot of things get stuck to the bowl.
I don’t understand the concept of heat because I always turn it too low and then when things don’t cook the way I expect I turn it up too high and things burn.
I don’t understand cuts of meat because I once tried to use stew meat as shishkabobs for an important dinner.
I don’t understand rice. It should be so easy but it’s not and my rice maker intimidates me.
I don’t understand cooking.

You might gather from my brainstorm that I’m no wizard in the kitchen. And you’d be right. I don’t like to do things I’m not very good at it and cooking just frustrates me. But husband, who does most of the cooking around the house, really enjoys it. I’ve gotten better over the years but I still don’t get the pure joy from it that he does.

Here’s my rough draft of a poem. It’s not much of a poem yet but I think I like the idea of exploring the two ways cooking happens in this house.
My husband whistles while he cooks
or sings along with the iPod
head bobbing in time
as he chops veggies
pounds the meat
heats the oil
a dash of this, a pinch of that
happy dancing to the fridge
for just one more egg
he studies the recipe
the way I read a book,
with intent
with joy

I don’t understand that at all.

Your turn.

This is so easy and so much fun. It’s called a Spine Poem. And just like Kick the Poetry Can’ts #12 the idea is to use complete phrases and not add in any extra words. For this poem I limited myself to just books I had on my young adult novel shelves but wander around your house and grab some books and make a spine poem of your own. If you don’t have a lot of books to choose from, how about using some food items from your kitchen shelves?

Here’s mine: you can click on the picture to see it full size and read it more easily.

How it’s done
Blind faith
stand tall
trouble
speak
shiver
contents under pressure
send me down a miracle
countdown
smack
crash
girl overboard
too big a storm
the facts speak for themselves
the sky is everywhere
take me there
dreamland

Your turn!

In the classroom we’d do the first part of this next exercise on the board. You’ll have to brainstorm on your own or use my lists that I come up with.

First, make a list of at least 5 things that are yellow.

butter
sun
corn
lemon
school bus
daisy
pepper
pencil
canary
squash

Now make a list of at least 5 things that fly.

plane
butterfly
dragonfly
mosquito
kite
helicopter
bird
bat
hot air balloon
bee

Now the first two lists we could all probably agree on. The last list will be different for each person. Make a list of at least 5 things you find beautiful.

ocean waves
sunrise/sunset
water bubbling in a creek
flowers blooming in my garden
my husband’s smile
my dog
a room full of books
hawks soaring above the hills

Now take at least one word from each list and try to make a poem.

Honey bees buzz blossoms on the lemon tree
zooming fast past me
past my dog
sprawled in shadows of the sun
sipping nectar
like I suck butter from corn-on-the-cob

Your turn.

One of the things I think my students and new poets find most difficult about writing poetry is that they want a set of rules to follow: start each sentence with a capital, use complete sentences, make things rhyme, and make everything make sense. What I try to teach them is that some of the best poems or at least the seed of a good poem, can often be found more easily if you break the rules or throw the idea of rules out the window.

Now I’m not saying I find this easy to do. But when I do it, and when I share, it often cracks something open for the writer. To do this I go back to my giant stash of things cut from magazines. (I keep a stack of magazines and a pair of scissors near where I sit to watch TV. It’s a good thing to do at that time.) I go through a magazine and I cut out phrases that I find interesting. In this stash they are all phrases, no individual words. No punctuation marks. In the classroom I put a pile of phrases in front of each student.

The rules are this:

1. Use as many or as few of the phrases as you want.
2. Do not cut/tear the words apart to make other words. You have to use them just as they are.
3. Do not write new words or punctuation on scraps of paper to add to the poem.

You’d think these would be easy rules to follow but a lot of people get hung up on not having complete sentences or not making perfect sense. You can give this a try using the phrases that I share in the picture or you can grab a magazine of your own and cut out a stash of phrases that speak to you.

Here’s my set I chose to work with for this poem (click on the picture to see it full size):

And here’s the poem I came up with as a result.

Family is what you have
at break of day
listening around corners
like father, like daughter
tell me lies one by one
imagine the possibilities
behind the mask
and still the story
something very sorry
in my home

I like it. I might choose to go back and revise it into something more but I also like it just as it is.

Your turn.