Poetry Challenge #305-Stick Out Your Tongue Eve!
A name’s a noun a proper noun, laugh so hard it knocks you down.
I learned that jaunty jingle when I was a kid. I hope my teacher also taught us other parts-of-speech jingles, but “Name’s a Noun” is the only one that stuck, and after reading about Eve Merriam, I can imagine her writing it.
Eve Merriam, July 19, 1916-1991, said she didn’t choose poetry; poetry chose her. She said it was the rhythmic rhymes—those jingles!
What endeared Merriam to me especially is that it was musicals— Gilbert and Sullivan albums her brother played—that set her off.
She began writing poems when she was seven or eight years old and never stopped—nor did she stop writing poetry for children. Eventually Merriam became fashion copy editor for Glamour magazine. In the meantime, her first collection of adult poetry, entitled Family Circle, won the 1946 Yale Younger Poets Prize.
“Out Loud” was Merriam’s mantra. She maintained that no one learns to love poetry without hearing it read out loud ...
“If we can get teachers to read poetry, lots of it, out loud to children, we'll develop a generation of poetry readers; we may even have some poetry writers, but the main thing, we'll have language appreciators.”
"Whatever you do, find ways to read poetry. Eat it, drink it, enjoy it, and share it."-Eve Merriam
Listen to Eve Merriam’s poem “Weather” read-aloud and discussion by Tavis du Preez: Weather by Eve Merriam - YouTube
Poetry Challenge #305
Stick Out Your Tongue Eve!
Choose a noun that tickles your funny bone. Purple…Bumbershoot…Parsnip…Bloomers…maybe Tongue. (After all, July 19 is “Stick Out Your Tongue Day”).
With that word as the title, play with the word, bounce it around, roll it, twist and tangle it and others into a playful romp of a read-aloud poem.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, Write It!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2600+ days 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. (The link to comments is below to the left of the heart.)
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Poetry Challenge #304-Pablo's Tuna is Your_________
Pablo Neruda was born July 12, 1904, in Parral, Chile. He is called the “most influential Latin poet of the 20th century.”
He became a published poet at age 13.
His father opposed his interest in writing and literature, but . . .
by age 16 he was writing poetry full-time.
In 1971, he won a Nobel Prize in Literature "for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams."
“I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees.”—”
In the U.S., Pablo Neruda is mainly known for his love poems and odes translated from Spanish.
For example, his Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market honors the food we eat, comparing the tuna to a torpedo, a well-oiled ship, and the only true machine of the sea.
Poetry Challenge #304
Pablo’s Tuna is Your ?
Read Neruda’s poem, “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” and then think about a visit to the market and a food you want to honor.
Write an ode to this food, speaking directly to it.
Use similes and strong verbs to show how much you appreciate it.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, Write It!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2400+ days 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):
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Poetry Challenge #303-Astonish Cocteau
A crusty loaf, bottle of wine and summertime—feels like France! And so, with no further ado, let’s tip our jaunty red berets to Jean Cocteau, born July 5, 1889. Bon Anniversaire!
If the name sounds familiar, it should. Jean Cocteau (pronounced Zahn Kaw-toh), poet, novelist, designer, dramatist, filmmaker, artist, and playwright “was among the best, most multi-talented artists of the 20th century.” -artnet
Cocteau started writing at the age of 10, and, by age 16, was already an established poet! At the age of 19, Cocteau published La Lampe d’Aladin, his premier compendium of poems. Quel Magnifique!
Regardless the medium/genre, Cocteau said all of his creations were essentially poetry.
The ballet, Parade, is Cocteau, written with composer Erik Satie, painter Pablo Picasso, choreographer Leonide Massine, and Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev of the Russian Ballet. The story goes that Cocteau and Diaghilev were walking down the street one day (sounds like a joke set up, right?) when Cocteau mustered up his courage to ask why the founder of Ballets Russes was so reserved in his comments on Cocteau’s work. As the story goes, Diaghilev adjusted his monocle and said: “Astonish me.”
From those 2 words “Astonish me”
Parade, considered the first modern ballet was born.
Poetry Challenge #302
Astonish Cocteau!
As Cocteau said, all his work was poetry, let’s use one of his drawings as inspiration for a poem. Write a poem inspired by one Cocteau’s drawing Cantate (above) or another—google Jean Cocteau’s art, it’s worth the trip.
Study the drawing for a bit and write a poem inspired by it. Is there something in the image—the form, the subject, a feeling—or the feeling it evokes in you—that’s astonishing?
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, Write It!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2600+ days 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):
All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Poetry Challenge #302-No Messing Around
The first time I heard Lucille Clifton’s poem, “Homage to my Hips,” I thought she wrote it for me. It was bold, it was sassy, it was playful, and like the hips it honors, didn’t mess around.
Lucille Clifton, born June 27, 1936 is gone now (since 2010), but in her lifetime, and in her poetry, she didn’t mince words or spend time messing around with nonessentials.
Clifton was the first author to have two books of poetry chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (1987) and Next: New Poems (1987), and from there the list of awards goes on and on. . .
When asked how she wanted to be remembered, Lucille Clifton said,
“I would like to be seen as a woman whose roots go back to Africa, who tried to honor being human.
My inclination is to try to help.”
“The first thing that strikes us about Lucille Clifton’s poetry is what is missing: capitalization, punctuation, long and plentiful lines. We see a poetry so pared down that its spaces take on substance, become a shaping presence as much as the words themselves.” -Christian Century review of Clifton’s work, Peggy Rosenthal
Poetry Challenge #302
NO MESSING AROUND!
Many reviews of Clifton’s poetry make note of her lean style and “physically small” poems. “Poetics of understatement,” Robin Becker called it in the American Poetry Review “—no capitalization, few strong stresses per line, many poems totaling fewer than twenty lines, the sharp rhetorical question.”
For today’s prompt, write a poem in which you try to “honor being human” the way Clifton herself might have written it.
Keep it short, tight, honest, stripped down, unapologetically lower case—no messing around.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, Write It!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2600+ days 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 (below the giveaway notice).
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Poetry Challenge #301-U-Turn
Confession Time: I can get lost in my own home—and do! I’ll be on my way to do something, something very intentional—maybe even important—and right in the middle of the going I’ll forget what I was fetching.
Or, even with the not-so helpful help of Google Map telling me to “Head North” or “Head South” I’ll have to proceed until it tells me to “make the first legal u-turn” or not to find out for sure which direction I should be heading.
And other times, like yesterday—or earlier when I had to turn back to where I’d come from and begin again before it dawned on me where I had been going, what I had been doing in the first place.
That’s what this is. U-Turn!…beep-beep-beep backing up!. . . . Change that to You-Turn!
Poetry Challenge #301
You-Turn!
Turn back to the poems you’ve already written.
Find two (or three) that have the same or similar topics.
Read through them and mark your favorite words, phrases, or images.
Now try to combine the poems into one. You can add and take away words as needed.
Watch for sound, incidental rhyme, and strong feelings!
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, Revise It!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2600+ days 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):
All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Poetry Challenge #300-Rap-A-Rapa-Rap
Rap gets a bad rap. We, oldsters, now, ourselves raised on rock-n-roll, listen with our ears craning to pick out harsh sounds, harsh images, “nasty” words the same way our grandparents (parents?) listened to Chuck, Elvis and the Beatles—heads poised to shake, tongues already tsking. What they didn’t know—and so many of us seem to have forgotten—words, music, poetry is a way to express feelings-get them out. The first step to healing.
No one illustrates the healing power of words than Rapper—"embodiment of gansta-rap aesthecitc” –and actor, Tupak Shakur RIP. He was gunned down in Las Vegas and died on Sept. 13, 1996. His murder was never solved.
Tupak Shakur was born June 16, 1971, in Harlem, to Afeni Tupak, a single, struggling, mother of two. The family moved often, in and out of shelters, finally, fortuitously, for Tupak, to Baltimore. That move may well have made all the difference.
Recognized, immediately for his intelligence and personability, Tupak attended the Baltimore School for the Arts, where biographer Robert Sam Anison noted in a 1997 Vanity Fair feature, Tupac felt "the freest I ever felt” …where, Tupac discovered the power and release and comfort of words. By seventeen, when he was already “obsessively” writing poetry and listening to Hip-Hop.
Below is Tupak’s poem “The Rose That Grew from Concrete” and here’s an analysis from Poet & Poem: CLICK!
With his music, his words, Tupak expressed the frustration, anger, pain so many others felt, and are still feeling. To date he’s sold over 75 million albums, making him one of the top-selling artists of all time.
If you’d like to read the lyrics to Dear Mama as you listen: CLICK!
The “main-stream” public found the power and rawness of Tupak’s music frightening and tuned out before listening (me included, until a friend’s son Xan shamed me into listening.) Tupac often complained that he was misunderstood—Sound familiar Elvis? John?
"Everything in life is not all beautiful. There is lots of killing and drugs. To me a perfect album talks about the hard stuff and the fun and caring stuff. ... The thing that bothers me is that it seems like a lot of the sensitive stuff I write just goes unnoticed."-2Pak
Poetry Challenge #300
Rap-A-Rappa-Rap
For today’s prompt let’s put aside any pre-conceived notions about Hip-Hop and Rap and try to write it.
Rap, also called Hip-Hop (which also includes the culture), by definition is a “musical style in which rhythmic and/or rhyming speech is chanted (“rapped”) to musical accompaniment.”
Which comes first, the rhythm or the words? That’s up to the creator. Some Rap is created by fitting words to an established rhythm. Others create rap by first writing a poem, then reread it and listen for a natural rhythm. Either way, once the rhythm is set, revise by changing, moving, rearranging words to make the rhythm strong and repeatable.
As Tupak did with his writing, challenge yourself to write about “the hard stuff and the fun and the caring stuff” in your rap.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, Rap it!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2600+ days 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):
All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Poetry Challenge #299-Dream On Nikki!
As soon as I began reading about our June 7th birthday poet dream songs swirled: Dreamer, Daydream Believer, Beautiful Dreamer. . . the Everly Brother’s crooning Dream-Dream-Dream…
Nikki Giovanni is all about dreams. Nikki was sickly child which made her, in her words, “Lucky!”
Lucky because she was always sniffling.” Why?
Because she writes in her website bio, she could stay home and read the books she wanted to read. And her family’s library was extensive and inclusive—no subjects were deemed too big, complex or taboo.
Nikki Giovanni has written many books of poetry, biographies and numerous children’s books including my favorite:
I Am Loved!
Poems with the late Ashley Bryan’s glorious art!
When Nikki became a mother, she moved into writing for children.
Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943, and grew up spending the school year in Cincinnati and summers back in Knoxville. She’s on the faculty at Virginia Tech, where she is a University Distinguished Professor.
Her first poetry collections were published in 1968, and the list of awards Nikki Giovanni has received since reads like a novel. Perhaps because she is a committed explorer:
“My dream was not to publish or to even be a writer: my dream was to discover something no one else had thought of. I guess that’s why I’m a poet.”
Poetry Challenge #299
Dream ON!
Many of Nikki Giovanni’s poems deal with family and life. Read “Her Dreams” “Bay Leaves” and/or “The Longest Way Round” (above & below).
Think of a moment in your life and write a poem about it.
Play with the words until you get exactly the right ones.
Try having only one word on a line once or twice in your poem.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, Write It!
Here are the links to the poems referenced here via Poetry Foundation, so you can read them in their entirety and/or read more of this beautiful dreamers work! (you’ll need to cut and paste them into your browser.)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/159788/her-dreams
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/159787/bay-leaves
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/159790/the-longestway-
round
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2400+ days 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):
All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Poetry Challenge #298-Chewing On a Cigar
When anyone asks about Long Island, where it is in New York, especially in proximity to Manhattan, I describe it as being a long thin cigar sticking out of its mouth. And today’s poet, Walt Whitman, known as the first writer of truly American poetry, was born and raised at the head of the cigar, on the family farm in Huntington, Long Island.
The second of nine children in a farming family, Whitman lived from May 31, 1819 -1892 and often wrote about democracy, nature, love, and friendship.
His first collection Leaves of Grass, a thin volume of poem, called a quintessential collection of American poetry, was published in 1855, not by an established publisher—because none would take it—but by friends of his Whitman strong armed. Leaves of Grass has been in print ever since.
Whitman often wrote about political figures without naming the person. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain, My Captain” are both written about Abraham Lincoln. Below is just the opening of “O Captain, My Captain” and a bit more of “When Lilacs…”:
This poem goes on for 16 stanzas. Read it in its entirely at Poetry Foundation:
Poetry Challenge #298
Chewing on the Cigar
Walt Whitman often ignored the standards of rhyme and rhythm and is said to be a father of free verse.
Choose one historical person or event and write about it without naming the person/event. You can write with rhyme or not. Try to capture the feeling you have about this person/event.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, Write It!
Walt Whitman’s Birthplace is now a museum, interpretive center and the start of the Walt Whitman trail, 40 miles of glorious nature trails with nary a tobacco plant to be found, with Jayne’s Hill, elevation 400 feet, the high point. Here’s a photo taken when Whitman, then 65 visited.
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2400+ days 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):
All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .