Poetry Challenge #187-Look Up at the Sky!
Because, with all we do, it seems we need to be reminded, today, April 14th, has been officially declared Look Up at the Sky Day! in honor of Jack Borden a former news reporter and founder of For Spacious Skies.
This crocodile cloud was captured by Rob Millenaar, 30,000 feet above China.
During broadcasts Borden routinely reminded viewers—especially children—to look up and admire the sky and beauty around us. On his 92nd birthday, April 14th, 2020, the Day was officially declared. Jack passed on in December and now the link to the For Spacious Skies websites seem to be broken, but the Facebook page is live, with some glorious snaps. And the sky!
Poetry Challenge #187
Look Up at the Sky Day
Every time you look up at the sky, it’s different. Sometimes there are clouds. Maybe a flock of geese fly overhead. Or you might hear the sound of an airplane and see the trail it leaves behind. Maybe you see the moon or stars or…something else.
Look up! Describe what you see. Use similes (the ____ looks like ___) to create a feeling.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
HEAD’S UP!
Look Up at the Sky Playlist: Charles Kuralt reported on Jack Borden.
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge more than 4 years ago. Now we take turns creating prompts to share with you. Our hope is that creatives—children & adults—will use our prompts as springboards to launch playtime with words. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #186-Books on the Move!
If readers can’t come to the library…
…we’ll bring the library to them! That might not be the official Bookmobile motto, but it should be! Bookmobiles, more correctly, book “wagons” have been making the rounds since 1850’s (at least), first in Cumbira, England. And here in the US, since 1904 when Mary Lemist Titcomb, a librarian in Washington County, Maryland, with the help of a $2500 Carnegie Grant, turned outfitted the country’s first library on wheels.
And later, in 1935 the Pack Horse Library Project providing reading materials to rural portions of Eastern Kentucky.
But communities need not be rural, or remote, poor, or needy to need a bookmobile.
Many schools, communities, children—even now, especially now when so many school libraries are being replaced with Tech Centers ahem—depend on bookmobiles, and mobile librarians to keep them reading!
Poetry Challenge #186
…We’ll Bring the Library to Them!
If the early bookmobiles were pack mules and horse drawn wagons, and today’s bookmobiles are buses and vans, what will bookmobiles of the future look like?
Write a poem about bookmobiles and/or a bookmobile librarian at the helm—past, present, or future.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge more than 4 years ago. Some 186 weeks ago we began creating prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #185-Color Our World
Crayola Crayons! Close your eyes, take a deep breath: Smell them?
My friends and I swore we could smell the difference between colors.* Remember breaking them? And/or trying to color so softly as to not break them? And when we did, which we always did, holding the broken ends together while gingerly easing the paper down to splint the break?
So many uses for broken crayons. Who knew? Thanks Little House Living!
The big boxes—48/64 pack came with built-in crayon sharpeners, but who had one of those? We sharpened ours the tried-and-true way, by angling the dull edge against the paper and shading while rotating until we had a nice point.
Turns out we have a pair of cousins Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith to thank for Crayola Crayons. Their company manufactured that first boxed set of 8, which debuted in 1903. And Alice Stead Binney (Edwin’s wife) who combined the French words for chalk and oily (craie and oleaginous) to create “Crayola.”
“The crayons were sold for a nickel and the colors were black, brown, blue, red, purple, orange, yellow, and green. ”
Here’s more:
Crayon Trivia
Crayola makes over 3 billion crayons a year.
Crayola crayons come in 120 colors plus “specialty colors”
About 50 shades have been retired including Dandelion, Maize, Blizzard Blue, Fuchsia. Want to know all the colors Crayola Makes?
The world's largest crayon was made by Crayola. It was 15'6" and weighed 1,352 pounds.
Since 1903 Crayola has made over 237 billion crayons.
The newest Crayola creation came out in 2020. It’s a skin-tone box set of 32 called “Colors of the World.”
Poetry Challenge #185
Color Your World
Celebrate National Crayon Day by taking a deep breath back into your Crayola Crayon memory box, back to one specific day, place, time in your childhood. With that memory in mind and its specific shades and smells, write a poem about it. It might be a poem about crayons or coloring, but not necessarily.
Choose one color from the poem, or an overarching color for your poem—from a Crayola Crayon box or all your own—to serve as the title.
Open your Crayola Box; Take a Sniff . . .
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
*Crayon smell truly is one of American adult’s most remembered childhood scents—and not only because I said so. Take a poll and see for yourself. Or take Bustle.com’s word for it.
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge more than 1800 days ago! 185 weeks ago we began creating prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #184-Pathya Vat
This wasn’t my idea. Cindy’s foray into form brought up Cambodia. But, as prompt’s do, it set me on a journey. In 2006 as Jill Max (the name Ronnie Davidson and I use for co-authored work) STRANGERS IN BLACK (Royal Fireworks Press) a memoire of a boy’s struggle to survive in Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia was published. We wrote it, with “Mok,” through his eyes and memory, without having visited Cambodia—or ever imagining we could—because then, and well into the 90s, Cambodia was closed off from the rest of the world.
Four years of weekly meetings with the half Vietnamese-half Cambodian man that Mok had become (a man afraid to use his real name for fear of retaliation by Khmer Rouge sympathizers), 4 years of research, reading translations of mostly French texts and pouring over photos—before a draft was written.
And then, 3 years after the type was set, the unimaginable happened: I visited Cambodia, what’s more, Siem Reap! The city, the region, perhaps the very village where our book began, and to the massive temple of Anchor Wat, an architectural, engineering marvel Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime touted as the reason to purge Cambodia ne Kampuchea from all foreign influence—and kill more than 2 million people in the process (read Haing Ngor’s Survival in the Killing Fields; watch The Killing Fields). Here are a few images of the land that inspired this foray into Cambodian poetic form.
Poetry Challenge #184
Pathya Vat
A Pathya Vat is a form of poetry from Cambodia. It is a four-line poem with four syllables on each line. The second and third lines rhyme.
You can string multiple Pathya Vats together to make a longer poem the same way you can connect several haikus. If you have multiple verses, the last word on line 4 becomes the rhyme for lines 2 & 3 in the next verse.
Pathya Vat poems are usually spoken or sung. Originally intended to be memorized, so the short lines and rhyme helped the performer. Usually, Pathya Vat are about nature.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge more than 1800 days ago! We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #182-What Did One Blueberry Say to the Other Blueberry?
…Why don’t you popover later?
Today is National Blueberry Popover Day. Think of those blueberry pastries, steaming hot from the oven. Smell the sweet, blueberry steam. Bite into the flaky, buttery pastry. Is your mouth watering yet?
Poetry Challenge #182
What Did One Blueberry Say to the Other Blueberry?
Say it 3x fast: Blueberry Popover …Blueberry Popover …BLUEBERRY POPOVER …
Now think about the parts of the words: blue, berry, pop, over.
What happens if you change their order or which words go together? Write a poem where you do just that. (You can add other words as well.)
Play with the words.
Play with the rhythm of repeating those words in different orders.
Play with how they look on the page: will you make them BOLD? Big? Colorful?
Read your poem aloud and make it sound as good as blueberry popovers smell and taste. Mmmmmmmm!
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
And now that’s you’re in a blueberry popover state of mind, here’s a recipe courtesy of thefoodiepatootie.com:
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge more than 1781 days ago! We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #181-Anthem in the Key of Life
March 3rd, 2021 marks the 90th birthday of our national anthem. Yep, although written by Frances Scott Key in 1814, and having been sung proudly—if off-key often— for than 100 years in between, it wasn’t until March 3, 1931, Pres. Hoover signed a congressional resolution officially declaring “The Star Spangled Banner” the official anthem of the USA.
And while we’ve been singing the anthem, and hearing it sung zillions of times—for sports enthusiasts I mean that literally, most recently by Lady Gaga at President Biden’s Inauguration: take a listen!—how often do we consider the words?
Poetry Challenge #181
Anthem in the Key of Life
In celebration of National Anthem Day, Let’s pick up where Frances Scott Key left off.
Choose a line of the Star Spangled Banner and use it as the first line of your poem.
Maybe the first:
Oh say can you see_________________
or the last:
…Home of the brave_____________
or any line in between.
…By the dawn’s early light______________
Let it begin a new anthem for yourself, the country, or the world.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
Oh, Say Can You…
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge more than 1777 days ago! We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #180-Revisionist Wednesday-Cutting UP!
Are you a cut up? Did you every get in trouble for “cutting up?” Does anyone even use that term in Merriam-Webster’s Intransitive Verb option #2 anymore?
“to behave in a comic, boisterous, or unruly manner: clown.”
Well get ready cause we are! Perhaps with more physical intent: a poet’s version of the newspaper Jumble (my mom-in-law’s favorite).
For this you’ll need scissors!
Poetry Challenge #180
Cutting Up
Choose a poem you’ve written that you’d like to make better.
Print the poem in a large font or write it out by hand in large letters.
Cut the words into individual pieces.
Organize them—alphabetically or by number of letters or any other way you can think of. Can you see any interesting/exciting combinations of words now?
Work on a sheet of blank paper and rearrange the words into a new poem. Feel free to add more words if needed. Write them on the paper where you want them to be. You don’t have to use all your words. Read the new poem aloud and see how it sounds.
You can do this on any poem. If you want a different challenge, Take two poems and mix their words together. Have fun!
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Scrambling!
Don’t Think About it, do it! Play!
Be a Cut Up!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge more than 1766 days ago! We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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Poetry Challenge #179-KIND Random Acts
One reason I love Valentine’s Day is Conversation Hearts, those chalky pastel hearts imprinted with love notes. When I was a kid, we’d sift through the tiny box searching for those with specific saying to share. (In the process eating the misprinted and broken ones.) In sixth grade, I gave one to Gary Hall which read BE MINE. He popped it into his mouth and held out his hand for another…didn’t even both to read it! If I could have do overs I’d choose one with a different four-letter word after BE: K-I-N-D.
It has been decided that we all need to be reminded to Be Kind and so Valentine’s Week has been officially declared Random Acts of Kindness Week, and smack dab in the middle—in case a whole week of being randomly kind is a hardship—Feb. 17th is Random Acts of Kindness Day.
Poetry Challenge #179
Random Acts of Kindness
Today in honor of Random Acts of Kindness Day, let’s write a Random Acts of Poetry poem . . . with very specific, seemingly random, rules:
# of lines: the digits of today’s date (or whichever day you choose) added together (If it’s the 17th, add 1+7=8 and write 8 lines or if you’d rather go with the year: 2+0+2+1=5, write 5 lines)
# of words on the line: the number of letters in the month. (For example, February has 8, write 8 words per line; or 3 for Feb.)
Repeating letter: the 3rd letter of your name. Use this letter as many times as possible. (Mine’s L; what’s yours?)
Rhyme scheme: ABCCBA…repeated as long as you need it. That means the 3rd and 4th lines rhyme, as well as the 2nd and 4th, and the 1st and 6th.
You can write about kindness or random or acts or anything else you can think of.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing
Don’t Think About it, do it! BE KIND
And if, like me, you are heartened by accounts of other’s kindness, click over to The Kindness Pandemic Facebook page. Throughout this pandemic, whenever I need a boost (several times some days) I click over to read a story. What generous amazing people there are in this world. Kindness is Contagious!
Here’s the official website link with activities, suggestions, color sheets, too: Random Acts of Kindness.org.
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge more than 1766 days ago! We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
Click on Fishbowl link and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl): SUBSCRIBE TO THE FISHBOWL