HELLO MY NAME IS - Day 9

 Happy National Poetry Month!

(Feel free to search for poems in the sidebar or watch videos in the tab above.)

Hello, Poetry Friends! This month I am sharing poems written in the voice of Little Red Riding Hood, and I invite you to join me in writing in the voice of someone else too. You might choose a fairy tale character or a book character or a person from history or anyone else real or imagined. These are your poems, so you make the decisions. Each April day, I will share my poem and a little bit about writing poetry. Mostly, we’ll just be writing in short lines with good words and not worrying about rhyming. Meaning first. Our focus this month will be adopting the perspective of another…for 30 days. I invite you to join me in this project! To do so, simply:

1. Choose a character from fiction or history or somewhere else in the world of space and time, and commit to writing a daily poem in this person's voice for the 30 days of April 2025. You might even choose an animal.

2. Write a new poem for each day of April. Feel free to print and find inspiration from this idea sheet that I will be writing from all month long.

Teachers, if you wish to share any HELLO MY NAME IS... subjects or poems, please email them to me at the contact button above. I would love to read what your students write and learn from how they approach their own projects.

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD'S POEMS SO FAR

April 1 - First Poem

April 2 - My Name

April 3 - Red

April 4 - Frank

April 5 - The Big Bad Wolf Had Been a Stray

April 6 - 8am on a Sunday

April 7 - Her Real Name is Orla Lola Bruin

April 8 - My Neighborhood

And now for today!

Students - Today's poem brings us back to Poem 1 in this series, "First Poem," in which Lou describes herself as (more a hiker, mushroom seeker). It felt like a good day for LRRH to go mushroom seeking (Hunting? Seeking? Which word to choose?) with her Nan, to write a poem showcasing this hobby these two share.

Today's is a free verse poem with no real rhyme or meter. The poem part relies on line breaks and white space. Because Lou and Nan are walking through deep forest, the line breaks moving along and indenting from left to write mirror their footsteps and their gathering. The white space creates pauses and slows down reading, quiets the poem down.

One thing you might choose to notice is that I name specific mushrooms: morels, lions mane, hen of the woods. When a person has a hobby, that persons know the specific words around that hobby, so of course Lou and Nan know and use actual specific mushroom names. When you reread your own writing, both poems and stories and nonfiction and opinion too, reread and revise to make any nouns more specific if you can. This will create more vivid and clear pictures in the minds of your readers.

Thank you for joining me on this ninth day of HELLO MY NAME IS...

To learn about more National Poetry Month projects and all kinds of April goodness, visit Jama's Alphabet Soup where Jama has generously gathered this coming month's Kidlitosphere poetry happenings. And if you are interested in learning about or writing from any of my previous 14 National Poetry Month projects, you can find them here. Happy National Poetry Month!

xo,

Amy

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Coaxing Poems 10: Love those Words

Happy  birthday to The Poem Farm!
This blog is 14 years old today!

🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂

Hello, dear Poem Friends! Welcome to the final of ten poetry video visits here at The Poem Farm. In each of these short clips, I have shared a small something about poetry, and you will always be able to find the poem(s) I read below the video. If you wish, you may watch the earlier videos linked below:

COAXING POEMS VISITS:

Visit 1: We Are Libraries

Visit 2: Eat the World

Visit 3: Make & Break a Pattern

Visit 4: Abacadabra!

Visit 5: Tell Us a Story

Visit 6: Give it Space

Visit 7: Choose a View

Visit 8: Tap it Out

Visit 9: Time for Rhyme

And now for our final visit, Visit 10: Love those Words:

Students - Throughout this series of visits, we have talked about many different aspects of poetry, and today we end on the smallest level, the single word. I love thinking about how English has only 26 letters, yet these letters make up all of our English words and thus, all of our English poems and articles and books. I even wrote a poem about this magic in my book WRITE! WRITE! WRITE!, titled "Alphabet."

In the companion book to WRITE! WRITE! WRITE!, READ! READ! READ!, I include a poem about a word collection. This poem grew from the many word collections that I keep in notebooks. Keeping such collections is a way to treasure-hunt and cherish words, to use them for inspiration and to pay attention to sound. Below you may see one of the word collections I have made over the years. I encourage you to try keeping such a collection; it is interesting to see how your most-loved words change and how they also stay the same.

One of Many Word Collections

Photo by Amy LV

Color Spot Seen on a Walk

Photo by Amy LV

This short free verse poem includes a bit of wordfun. I like imagining that I might be the only person to have described an orange punchbuggy as a pudgy orange lollipop car and that perhaps I invented the term zipzoops. Color-happy is a hyphenated word that is usually not hyphenated. But you see, my friends, when you write...you may play!

Writers DECIDE to not write that a car is parked and to instead write that a car naps. We can see with our eyes and too, we can giggle with these very same eyes. Understand how words work, and then, dear writers, make them work in new ways.

So, collect words!

And too, reread your writing word-by-word, paying attention to the ways your words sound and mean in your poems. If you find yourself writing something in a way you have heard it said many times, go ahead and revise it to sound new. Then, give yourself a hug for doing so. Revision isn't always easy, but it often lifts a poem from a mudpuddle into a hot air balloon for a surprising ride!

Words are small, free collectable, sharable friends. Get to know them.

Tricia is hosting this week's Poetry Friday roundup over at The Miss Rumphius Effect with a most loving and ovely pantoum about her late pup. Cooper. Each Friday, all are invited to share poems, poem books, poetry ideas, and friendship in this open and welcoming poetry community.

I thank you for joining me on this journey through 10 visits of Coaxing Poems. It has been a joy to explore a few aspects of poetry with you from my little writing house...Gratitude.

National Poetry Month begins on Monday...April Fool's Day! I welcome you to join me throughout the month as I take on another 30-day writing project. This year's project is titled ONE MORE LINE CROW as throughout April, I will study crows and share a new crow poem each day. The number of lines in each poem will correspond to the date, with a 1-line poem on April 1...and a 30-line poem on April 30. If you'd like to play along, simply choose a topic that you'd like to explore for 30 days. It might be a subject that you already know a lot about or perhaps you'll explore something new.

As for me, I have a stack of crow books here and am excited to dig in!

xo,

Amy

Please share a comment below if you wish.

Know that your comment will only appear after I approve it.

If you are under 13 years old, please only comment 

with a parent or as part of a group with your teacher.

Day 16 - National Poetry Month 2015 - Sing That Poem!

Happy National Poetry Month!

Welcome to Day 16 of this Year's Poem Farm Project!

Find the Complete April 2015 Poem and Song List Here

First, I would like to welcome all old and new friends to The Poem Farm this April. Spring is a busy time on all farms, and this one is no exception.  Each April, many poets and bloggers take on special poetry projects, and I'm doing so too.  You can learn all about Sing That Poem! and how to play on my April 1st post, where you will also find the list of the whole month's poems and tunes as I write and share them.  If you'd like to print out a matching game page for yourself, you can find one here, and during April 2015, you'll be able to see the song list right over there in the left hand sidebar.

Yesterday's poem was You and Me.  Here is the tune that goes along with it, below. Did you figure it out?

And here, below, is today's poem.  Look at the song list in the sidebar or on your matching form to see if you can puzzle out which tune matches this one.

Time

Photo by Amy LV

Students - Today's poem is about something that always strikes me.  Old barns. Whenever I drive here near home or far away in other rural areas, I fall in love with barn after barn.  There are so many stories in old barns, and I wish that I could bewitch each old barn I see...bewitch it into talking for just five minutes...so that I could learn the stories from its past.

Yesterday, I had a long drive home from Vermont, after two delightful days teaching in the Georgia Elementary and Middle School.  On my way, I passed many old barns, and the one you see above simply stole my heart.

Today's poem is a simple verse, full of simple solid noun-words: barn, moon, cow, cats, children.  I wanted my poem to feel sturdy and safe, just like a steady barn.  I wrote it while driving, in my head, once again stopping at gas stations to jot on the paper below.  Because I was driving, most of the revision was invisible...in my old singing head!

You can think about your writing even when you are not writing; just let the ideas and sounds play together in your head.  You can think about writing at any time at all: when you are riding your bike, sitting on a bus seat, looking out of your living room window at the rain.

The wondrous poet Eve Merriam once said, "I've sometimes spent weeks looking for precisely the right word.  It's like having a tiny marble in your pocket, you can just feel it.  Sometimes you find a word and say, 'No, I don't think this is it...' Then you discard it, and take another and another until you get it right."

We can all be like Eve, thinking about our writing during all times of day, carrying words in our pocket, patiently waiting and searching for just the right ones.

Poem Draft (Most Revision Done in Head While Driving)

Photo by Amy LV

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