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One-of-a-Kind Soul

April is Poetry Month.  You can receive a poem-a-day from Knopf if you’d like.  It’s well worth it.  Such a wide selection of beautiful words, phrases, and thoughts.  Or you could put a FSG Poetry Ringtone on your phone—a couplet by Susan Wheeler.  [Thanks, Becky, for that!]

Several years ago, I was a guest author in a fourth grade classroom.  The topic was poetry.  I prepared a PowerPoint presentation of a small section of Sharon Creech’s Love that Dog, a short, sweet novel written in free verse, so the class could see the marvelous illustrations done by William Steig.  [If you’ve never seen the book, go out and get it right now. It’s one of my favorites.]  During the presentation, I read the section aloud, and the students giggled when they heard Jack’s disdain for poetry:  “Then any words / can be a poem. / You’ve just got to / make / short / lines.”

But they grew pensive (I could tell) when Jack began having fun with words and asked his teacher to please keep his work anonymous.  Heaven forbid any of his friends should know a boy was doing poetry…and enjoying it!

It’s a darling book, one every teacher and parent should have.  I can’t say enough good about it.

Once I had finished reading about Jack’s increasing writing prowess, I told the class that in the few short minutes we had left of class, I was going to make them true, honest-to-goodness poets.  Just like that.  I think I saw a few jaws hit the floor.  But they listened.

I taught them the basics of a haiku—the beats, the lines, a few examples.  I told them that for every haiku they could come up with, I’d give them a Jolly Rancher.  Boy, you should have seen them.  They were so focused, so brilliant, so happy.  And that made me happy.

Now today, I have another book to recommend to you writers out there, or anyone who wants to play with words (why limit it to writers, right?).  The book has been on my shelf for ages, but I pull it down once in a while to get reenergized.  It’s called Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge.

Her first experiences in a fourth grade classroom didn’t go as well, but she says that over time, she began to see poetry as a technique to help young kids shift the way they saw themselves, “especially if they’re feeling sad, walled-off or different from others.  In poems, being different is an asset; we don’t have to think of ourselves negatively.  Our idiosyncrasies are like prizes.  We can be proud of who we are.  It’s freeing to express our one-of-a-kind soul.”  A couple of her stories:

Small, wiry Frank seemed to be the ringmaster by force of sheer anger and will.  He’d bang chairs together and only write standing up—if he wrote at all.  One day he wrote an acrostic poem about his name.  When he got to the “k” I asked him to include something he liked about himself, opposite from the other words he’d chosen.  He wrote,

FRANK

***

Forceful
Raging
Angry
Nervous
Kind.

Another day Monica began to explore her idea of who she was.

I used to be a nightmare
but now I am a cloud.
When I sit and look at the sky
I find I’m something more
than just a person.

Rather than see herself as friendless, Faustina saw herself first as a forest, a tree, and then a leaf, saying,

Lonely here I ask the wind
if I can ride on his cool, clear coat.

In these first sessions I began my practice of typing a poem of each kid on three or four pages I’d distribute and later read out loud.

What hooked me on poetry workshops and allowed me to continue was the day kind Frank, skinny, angry and sad as ever, got beyond himself to write about the sky, with a host of trumpets from the music room squawking in the background,

Once
I said
Hi
there
stars
and they were gone.

When he wrote just these ten words Frank shifted the way he saw himself—from troublemaker to potential poet—and overnight his behavior changed.  He became a helpful aide, one of the class scribes.  That spring we named our class anthology after his poem, Hi There Stars.

Can you do this?  Free-form writing?  Discovering a new thing by stringing various words together?  Try it.

You’re a one-of-a-kind soul, so yours will be different from everyone else’s.

I’ll leave you with a short bit of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which should encourage you…

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

Psst.  Are you writing yet?

[Post image: Cloudy Sky by somadjinn on stock.xchng]

4 Comments


  1. Lindsey
    Apr 12, 2011

    Oh, I love hearing these stories about how poetry freed even young children to speak about what they think, feel, and experience … beautiful. Now, to give myself the same permission! xoxo


  2. Renae C
    Apr 12, 2011

    I didn’t really know why I feel compelled to write. Now I do.

    Wooldridge captures it. …. shift the way they saw themselves, “especially if they’re feeling sad, walled-off or different from others. In poems, being different is an asset; we don’t have to think of ourselves negatively. Our idiosyncrasies are like prizes. We can be proud of who we are. It’s freeing to express our one-of-a-kind soul.”


  3. Elissa
    Apr 12, 2011

    I know, I liked the “being different is an asset.”

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