Poetry Challenge #190-Lift Off!
It’s National Astronaut Day! Why May 5th? On this day in 1961, “Astronaut Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. became the first American in space aboard the Freedom 7 Space Capsule. Shepard’s “brief suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere,” came in the wake of Cosmonaut Yuri Gargain’s flight orbiting Earth (April 12, 1961). Less than three-weeks later, on May 25th, Pres. JF Kennedy challenged the US to send a man to the moon. The Space Race was on!
Eight years later on July 20th of 1969, only 12 years after Sputnik blasted off, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. And now, more than 50 years later, only 10 other men, from 3 countries, have been to the moon. 65 Women have been sent to space, and we’ve set our sights on Mars…or beyond! The only limits are our imaginations!
At least 10 Astronauts, 2 Cosmonauts & current candidates attended Space Camp as kids. Here’s more!
Poetry Challenge #190
Lift Off!
Imagine yourself an astronaut. With current technology it’s estimated that a trip to Mars would take between 5 and 8 months. What would you do? Think? Feel mid-flight? When you peered out the windows, would you look back? Or forward?
As there’s no gravity in space, it seems fitting to write in free verse. Free Verse poetry does not follow a set rhythm or rhyme scheme, but it does employ literary devices.
Prepare for Lift off!
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
3-2-1-BLAST OFF!
National Astronaut Day Playlist:
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 word play time. 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 #189-Leftovers Again??
In our old house what’s for dinner was never a question: Meatless Monday, Tuna Tuesday, Whatever Wednesday, Taco Thursday (yes, Tuna Noodle Casserole—don’t knock it…), Pizza Friday, Saturday and Sunday Surprise! That was then. Nowadays and since CoVid-19 struck every meal is a mystery. The only thing that’s remained is Whatever Wednesday as in Q: What’s for dinner? A: Whatever you can find. It’s our version of Leftover Night.
Thanks to my sis-in-law Valarie, who forwarded this The New Yorker article by Roz Chast, I’m realizing every house with a fridge has Leftover Night with at least 1700 different names for it. I know because Roz Chast, clever Instagramista @rozchast, took a poll. After reading through some options, I’m changing ours to Touski, the Quebecoise version of leftovers. It’s short for tout ce qui reste, “all that’s left.”
So, from this post on, Tuna Tuesday becomes Touski Tuesday for the way in sounds not because we have many leftovers on Tuesdays. With fridge pickings in mind, Touski Thursday would be better but it’s a tongue twister. And as food is the way to this writer’s soul and the sole purpose of this prompt is using up leftovers, let’s pull out our touskis (Ala Scarlet, the matter of what to do about tuna casserole will wait.)
Poetry Challenge #189
Leftovers Day aka Touski On!
The best thing about Leftovers Day (Touski Tuesday) are the strange combinations you can make into a meal.
The same goes for poems. Read through some old poems and pull out some juicy tidbits. They can be whole lines, phrases, or one special word. Combine your “leftovers” into something new.
Put 7 syllables/words onto the first line and 5 syllables/words onto the second line. Repeat this pattern for the whole poem.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just Toutski!
And, because I know you want—need it: Cheesy Tuna Noodle Casserole Recipe
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 word play time. 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 #188-Bulldogs Are Beautiful!
I was walking down the street the other morning (no joke) and was almost bowled over by a wrinkly, short, squatty, bowlegged creature so ugly it was cute…make that flipping adorable! His name was Hamilton, and as his proud human announced while straightening Hamilton’s cravat, “It’s his day!”
And while that was Hamilton’s day—because evidently it needed to be proclaimed— today (April 21st) is Bulldogs Are Beautiful Day!
Poetry Challenge #188
Bulldogs Are Beautiful
Think of the ugliest dog you’ve ever seen. Somebody loves that face. Somebody thinks the noises it makes are beautiful. Somebody loves the way it walks.
Write a poem from two points of view. One line from a person who thinks something (it can be a dog or something else) is beautiful and one line from a person who thinks it is the ugliest thing ever. You can make the two people speak to each other or one can speak and the other can be thinking.
Imagine the ugliest thing you can and get writing!
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
Get into the ugly mood with the Bulldogs Are Beautiful Playlist:
She Was Hot to Go by Lyle Lovett, if only to sing “She was ugly from the front” and call out: “You Ugly Too!”
Bob Wills’ Roly Poly sung by the Dixie Chicks: “Roly Poly, Daddy’s little fatty, fatty’s gonna be a man some day...”
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 word play time. 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
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.
Click on Fishbowl link and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl): SUBSCRIBE TO THE FISHBOWL
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.
Click on Fishbowl link and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl): SUBSCRIBE TO THE FISHBOWL
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.
Click on Fishbowl link and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl): SUBSCRIBE TO THE FISHBOWL