Small Reads for Brighters Days
Happy Poetry Friday! Welcome, everyone! (Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Click here.) This month, we needed a last minute change to our plans, and someone (I think Liz? It’s usually Liz who keeps us blessedly on track) suggested a list poem that had to use two of the following words: paper, stars, messages, promises, dirt, […]
Happy Poetry Friday! Welcome, everyone! (Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Click here.) This month, our Poetry Princess challenge was to write a poem with an anaphora–a repeated, open-ended phrase. Recently, Randy and I attended a concert by Lucia Micarelli, a wonderful violinist. (We saw her years ago performing with Jethro Tull.) Although I played violin […]
Happy Poetry Friday! (Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Click here.) Without Lee Bennett Hopkins and his books, I don’t think I’d be writing poetry for children today. When I first got the tiniest of inklings that I might like to dip a toe into the waters of poetry, Lee’s beautiful anthologies were some of the […]
Happy Poetry Friday! Welcome, everyone! (Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Click here.) Well, I seem to be on a real tree kick lately! This month, our theme, chosen by Tricia, was to borrow a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art and use it in a new poem. I chose the line: Lose something every […]
Happy Poetry Friday! (Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Click here.) I hadn’t planned to post today, but this past couple of weeks, death has been touching the lives of Randy and me a lot in various forms. The death of our beloved dog, the death of a drum corps friend, the death of a comedian […]
Apologies for those who visited last Thursday. I had several posts for Thanksgiving Thursday and Poetry Friday and one all about NCTE–and they have completely disappeared. :>( OK, moving on… There’s something about a farm silhouetted against the sky that always feels so nostalgic. As I’ve driven around Minnesota doing school visits, I’ve been treated […]
Happy Poetry Friday! Welcome, everyone! (Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Click here.) The Process FEEL FREE TO SKIP DIRECTLY TO IMAGE POEM BELOW IF YOU LIKE! This month, our Poetry Princess challenge (my choice) was a poem of any kind, mood, or topic to go with the title “Statues in the Park.” I was on […]
Happy Poetry Friday! Usually, when I recommend poetry books–whether it’s to educators, kids, or aspiring poets–I recommend focusing on very current books. But Barbara Juster Esbensen is one of my favorites (see other posts where I’ve shared her work here and here and here), and her poems always feel like they could have been written […]
Here’s a poem by J. Patrick Lewis from the collection Voices from the March on Washington (Wordsong, 2014), which publishes TODAY! The collection contains poems by both Lewis and George Ella Lyon, and it’s a gripping, complex collection that puts you in the minds of numerous different characters/people at the time of the March. Lewis […]
Today’s poem comes courtesy of the lovely Irene Latham, who is just as delightful in person as she is in her books and on her blog. I’m proud that she is a housemate now, as her newest book (out August 1) is with Millbrook Press, my Can Be… home. The book is Dear Wandering Wildebeest […]
