This is now your book!

In honor of my book club discussing Caitlin Horrock’s This Is Not Your City today, I present the sweetest author dedication I’ve encountered yet:

Signed at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor, November 2012.

It’s a good collection. You should check it out!

“Part of my job is to be a book-pusher.”

I’m an admirer of short story writer and novelist Rebecca Makkai, who works as an elementary school teacher, in addition to writing. In a recent Millions interview she said: “I’ve read out loud to children for half an hour every school day for the past eleven years, and that daily engagement with children’s books has kept them very much a part of my literary landscape. And part of my job is to be a book-pusher. At times I feel a bit like some skeezy drug dealer, hanging out at the edge of the playground, going, “If I can get them to try it just this once, I’ll have them hooked!”

Doubt there are few librarians or teachers who can’t relate.

Some more thoughts on erasure poetry

In March I taught a workshop at 826michigan about erasure poetry. That workshop, which I called “The Poetry of Absence,” was inspired by a post I’d published here on Klickitat a few months earlier. I wanted to report back and share some tips with you, in case you’d like to hold a similar workshop or program. As always, please credit me if you do happen to use my ideas, especially in a professional context.

I’m happy to report that the workshop was a success! We had a lot of fun and some fantastic work came out of the session. I was shocked and humbled that complete silence fell over the room when it came time for writing. Pretty awesome.

A Poetry of Absence: Creating Erasure Poems (826michigan)

View more PowerPoint from klickitat

The basic format of my workshop (90 minutes):

• Getting Started (15 minutes):
  • Pages of “raw material” and art supplies were on the tables when students arrived.
  • I explained what erasure poetry is, illustrating points throughout with a few images in a PowerPoint:
    • Definition:
      • Process for creating erasure poetry
      • Duality: artifact/art object and a written document
      • Unique nature of erasure poetry: An editor of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, Off The Shelf, describes the white spaces in erasure poems as being “more loaded” than in regular poetry. The parent text will always be just out of sight, even when we look for it. Maybe the text will bend in ways we didn’t expect.
    • Possible directions for erasure poems:
      • Tree of Codes, Jonathan Safran Foer: die-cut “erasure” story of an entire book (The Street of Crocodiles)
      • Political commentary (Janet Holmes’ The ms of m y kin—poems about the Iraq War cut out of the text of Emily Dickinson’s Civil War poetry)
      • Thematically/experimental interpretation (Yedda Morrison, visual artist and poet, erased all evidence of humans from the text of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, leaving only natural imagery—rivers, rocks, trees)
      • Spur of the moment/gut instinct (Newspaper Blackout, Austin Kleon – adapts newspaper articles to kill time on his morning bus commute)
  • Together, using Wave Books’ on-line erasure poetry website, I led the class through the process, creating an example poem with feedback from the class. (Note: We didn’t actually get to do this because of technical difficulties but, if I taught the class again, I’d plan to do this.)
• First Free Write (15 minutes)
  • Encourage students to create their first poem (or more, if they finish their first one).
• More Things To Try (5 minutes):
  • After most students appear to be done with their first attempt, pause to offer new suggestions (different brushstrokes, trying to connect words in different ways – i.e. with lines or “speech bubbles,” incorporating color), again with examples in PowerPoint or by demonstrating on the whiteboard. (Note: This is the second to the last slide with all the images and no text.)
• Second Free Write (25 minutes):
  • Ask students to create another poem (preferably more, if they have time) with a new technique.
• Wrapping Up (10 minutes):
  • I offered suggestions of what more students can do with their poems: Start a story? Link several poems into a short story? Is it possible to make images or patterns with the words? Etc.
  • Ask students and facilitators if they have ideas. Brainstorm together other materials to experiment with (i.e. textbook or newspaper article with pictures – how do the pictures change the way the poem is read?)
• Presentations (20 minutes):
  • I ended the class with students presenting their poems to one another.

Some general tips:

• Wave Poetry has a fantastic on-line erasure app on their website. I used their public domain readings as the bulk of my source texts. You can do this by viewing the image as a PDF and printing them off. Alternately, if you happen to be teaching in a computer lab, you could always have students use the app on the website (as intended by the creators). A poem I wrote using the app.
• On a whim, I grabbed a stack of the (free) campus newspapers to use along with the Wave Poetry cut-outs. They were a big hit! The students really responded to the chance to cut up the newspapers. (Granted, it got a little messy.) If I teach this workshop again, I’d definitely include newspapers (if they still exist in the future, that is.)
• It’s probably a good idea to hold this workshop in a well ventilated space. The marker fumes get a little thick.
• If you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend this Poetry Foundation podcast, “Writing with an Eraser.”

Happy erasing!

P. S. I’ll be teaching another found object workshop on May 19th at 826. Check the workshop page for details and to sign up.

Press Release: Third Annual Found Poem Student Contest (New York Times)

A while back, I wrote about the practice of erasure poetry. Now you have a chance to put your skills to use! Through April 16th, The New York Times is accepting entries for their third annual Found Poem contest from persons aged 13 – 25. Rules follow.

The rules:

1. Each poem must be 14 or fewer lines long.
2. You may give it your own original title if you like.
3. The poem itself should use no more than two of your own words. The rest of the words and phrases should come from some article or articles published in The New York Times, past or present. (Note: We check. People have been disqualified for not adhering to this rule.)
4. You might choose to write in a traditional poetic form, or not.
5. Remember that in a poem, every word, line break and mark of punctuation carries meaning, so have fun experimenting with repetition of words, alliteration, assonance or anything else that enhances what you’d like to say. (Note: Our commenting system doesn’t recognize fancy spacing, so using words to create interesting shapes is unfortunately not an option.)
6. Please, only one poem per person.
7. You must be between 13 and 25 years of age.
8. Don’t include your last name because our privacy rules still apply, but you must give us your first name, your age and your hometown.
9. At the bottom of your found-poem post, please provide us with the URL(s), or Web address(es), of the article(s) you used. To find a URL for an article, just copy and paste what comes up at the top of the page in your browser. So, for example, this post’s URL is http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/our-third-annual-new-york-times-found-poem-student-contest/, while the URL for the film review of the first “Hunger Games” movie is http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/movies/the-hunger-games-movie-adapts-the-suzanne-collins-novel.html.

I’m teaching a found object workshop on May 19th at 826michigan

Inspiration Sold Separately: Storytelling through Catalogs and Found Artifacts
Ages: 12-15, 15 students
Saturday, May 19, 2-3:30pm (one session)

Catalogs aren’t junk mail! They’re actually on-going sagas in disguise. Just who are the people buying those clothes and furnishing their homes? What are their stories? In this workshop, we’ll explore how the things we collect tell volumes about our inner lives. Taking inspiration from real life auctions and fictional found object narratives, we’ll re-purpose images from catalogs and magazines to tell stories visually and with minimal text. You’ll never flip through J. Crew the same way again!

Visit the 826michigan workshop page to sign up!

One Pause Poetry

Hello all,

 

 

 

 

 

I recently became aware of the Michigan based One Pause Poetry. In honor of National Poetry Month or just for fun, I encourage you to check out their site. There you can stream audio clips, access writing prompts, and view a calendar of Ann Arbor area poetry readings. I suspect the children’s poetry section will be of the most interest to my readers.

Jennifer Holm, Sarah Marwil Lamstein Children’s Literature Lecture, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)

Three time Newbery Honor winner Jennifer Holm is speaking at the University of Michigan Museum of Art a week from today. Admission is free.

Photo by Amy Martin Friedman

Sarah Marwil Lamstein Children’s Literature Lecture (University of Michigan English)
Time: March 29th, 5:10 PM
Location: UMMA Helmut Stern Auditorium

Jennifer Holm received a Newbery Honor for her first novel, Our Only May Amelia, which allowed her to eventually become a full-time writer. She is also the author of the Babymouse series, the Boston Jane series, Turtle in Paradise, Middle School Is Worse than Meatloaf, and The Creek, among other titles.  Her books have been translated into several languages and The Seattle Children’s Theatre staged Our Only May Amelia in 2002.  She now splits her time between writing and taking care of her children, Will and Millie. Her husband, Jonathan Hamel, and she recently collaborated on a series called The Stink Files about a British international cat of mystery. They all live in Northern California with one slightly stinky cat named Princess Leia Organa.