Poetry Made by All
The Wordplay Blog's on Vacation!
Hi, everyone! Thank you so much for a wonderful Spring season on Wordplay. Thanks to our awesome contributors, we had some excellent posts this Spring: Recommended Reading lists, Reading Series in the Classroom posts, Book Reviews, Voca posts, Family Days writing, and so much more.
We'll see you back here in June 2013 for a whole new line-up of exciting posts and contributors.
See you soon!
The Wordplay Blog
Alison Deming Recommends
For this month's Recommended Reading list, Alison Deming--Director of the Creative Writing Program and Creative Writing Professor at the University of Arizona--shares her recommended list of poems for youth. Enjoy!
Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses
Among my favorite poems in this book are “Bed in Summer” and “My Shadow.”
This was my first poetry book as a child. It taught me how musical both language and thoughtfulness can be. Be not afraid of the archaic poeticisms. This book speaks to a child’s inner life.
Family Days writing
This past Saturday, we celebrated our last Family Days of the Spring 2013 season at the Poetry Center! Check out some of the awesome writing, generated by students during our Poetry Joey's writing workshops this past weekend. And be sure to mark your calendars for Saturday, September 29th, the first Family Days of the Fall 2013 season!
Quiet as a flea
Quiet as a flea, quiet quiet as a bug on a tiny rug
A wall on a ball on a rolly-polly tolly
In California, I do warn you about the California scene
It will haunt you in your dreams forever and ever
Sneek the wall of windows or the wall of widows
Dad or mom of windows or dad or mom of widows
P.S. Was it 8 or 9 windows?
Window wall window wall through all your beautiful windows
Every day what do you see?
Through all your windows do you spy lots of cars on the rough road?
Tiny tiny little bug on your little little rug
--Avery
The Reading Series in the Classroom: Carmen Giménez Smith
This week, in continuation with our series, “The Reading Series in the Classroom,” we here at Wordplay will introduce your students to the writing of Carmen Giménez Smith. She will read at the Poetry Center on April 25th at 7 p.m., along with J. Michael Martínez and Roberto Tejada. Giménez Smith’s reading will be best suited for high school students, but her poetry also appeals to a K-8 audience. Please print and read her poem “Photo of a Girl on a Beach,” with your students, and then follow the writing prompts below. Hope to see you all at the Reading!
1. What words or images are most memorable to you in the poem?
2. Are there any lines or images that stick out to you as odd or quizzical?
3. Pick your favorite line and discuss it with a neighbor. Why did you pick the line?
4. At the end of the poem, there’s an interesting twist with narration. For most of the poem, the narrator is “I,” but by the end of the poem, the narrator shifts to “she.” Who, in your mind, is the girl on the beach? Is it the narrator or some other girl? Or do you have a different explanation?
5. Find a family photo when you go home tonight, and write a short imitation poem, based off of Carmen Giménez Smith’s “Photo of a Girl on a Beach.” For example, the title of your poem could be “Photo of a Grandpa at a Birthday Party.”
See you Sunday!
Celebrate the 2013 Bilingual Corrido Contest winners, all from Rio Rico High School: Jocelyne Muñoz, Claudeth Becerra, and Ivan J. Orellana this Sunday at the University of Arizona Poetry Center Sunday, April 21st at 1:00 p.m. The three winners will recite their corridos and receive prizes, followed by a musical performance of each winning corrido by UA graduate student Alfonso Molina Romo. Semi-finalists will also be honored, and university and local organizations will share their resources with the community at a Mini-Resource fair. See you there! For more details click here.
Tucson Youth Poetry Slam Championships
Join us for the 2013 Tucson Youth Poetry Slam All-City Championships at 1:00 pm at the Poetry Center!
The 2013 Tucson Youth Poetry Slam All-City Championship will be held Saturday, April 20th from 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Twenty of Tucson’s most dynamic poets 18-and-under will rock the mic with their original poems in the 3rd annual competition. Judged by the audience, this is poetry that aims to surprise you. The event will feature a performance by nationally recognized performance poet CARLOS CONTRERAS of Albuquerque! The event will also mark the book release of LIBERATION LYRICS written by local students studying pressing social issues through original poetry.
The Tucson Youth Poetry Slam and Liberation Lyrics are programs of Spoken Futures, Inc. This event is made possible in part by the UA Poetry Center, the Tucson Pima Arts Council, the Crossroads Collaborative, Casa Libre en la Solana, Bentley’s House of Coffee and Tea and broad community support.
See you there!
The Reading Series in the Classroom: Ilya Kaminsky
This week, in continuation with our series, “The Reading Series in the Classroom,” we here at Wordplay will introduce your students to the writing of Ilya Kaminsky. Kaminsky will read at the Poetry Center this Thursday, April 11th, at 7:00 p.m. Kaminksy’s reading will be best suited for high school students, but some of his poetry also appeals to a K-8 audience. Read Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “Her Husband Dreams,” which can be found here (scroll down to #5).
1. Kaminsky writes about “glass miniature horses on each street” as being “confusion as sweet as I can bear.” What does that mean to you? Have you ever felt that way?
2. Using Kaminsky’s glass miniature horses as an example, brainstorm some different types of material that evoke that “sweet confusion” feeling in you—for example:
ivory, teakwood, marble, velvet, pencil lead, grass, silk, obsidian, oak
Nicole Walker Recommends
Everyone suggests Shel Silverstein. My daughter, Zoe, 7, got her third copy for Christmas this year. You can’t go wrong with Where the Sidewalk Ends but everyone already knows that. Then, there are the books the kids love and ask me to read over and over like Goodnight Moon, Curious George and Panda Bear Panda Bear What Do You See? But I assume you have all those books memorized too.
The books I want to showcase are the books that I think play with language the best. I want to read books that make me say how did they do that? That make me wish I had written that. That let words linger on my tongue like butter and lemon. I want to read books to my kids in the same way I want to read books to myself. Because, wow. Words are awesome.
I picked up a copy of Owl Moon at Bookman’s for no reason except I like owls. I didn’t know that this book would make me and my daughter go walking in the night in the forest behind our house saying whoo whoo to the trees. But it did. The author, Jane Yolen, writes a poem that doesn’t seem like a poem because there’s adventure and story and owls but the way she uses linebreaks and repetition remind me every time I read it how poems work:
What's in your pocket?
In honor of National Poetry Month, we here at Wordplay want to share with you some of our favorite poems, written by youth and their parents at the Tucson Festival of Books this past March. During the festival, the writers were given a variety of writing prompts. Check out these excerpts from the giant group poem written at the Festival of Books, about what the writers found in their pockets and purses.
Contents of My Pocket or Purse
My pocket has a set of keys in it that can unlock any door
Inside my pocket there is a goofy smile
Inside my pocket is my phone that my Mom gave me to call her if I get lost
Inside my pocket is a camera to take lots of pictures
Inside my pocket is a bean bag from Microsoft
A tattoo of a scorpion that is black and brown
And last of all is a orange lolly pop that says tiger pop
And a wind up bug that is green, blue, red, and grey.
Rocking the Mic: Logan Phillips
In case you missed the Poetry Out Loud Semi-finals at the Poetry Center earlier this month, one of the afternoon's highlights was from guest poet Logan Phillips. Check out his awesome performance here on Voca. During intermission at the Semi-Finals on March 2nd, Logan performed some of his poems, including, "So Many Names Inside This One," "Iced Love in Tucson," and "El Chupacabras Crosses Highway 86 on the Tohono O'odham Nation." From a love connection between Eegees and raspados to a tale of el chupacabras, his bilingual performances were both energizing and poignant, dynamic and daring. Enjoy!
