Original Poems III

Mundane
Pen

I stare at you
as you sit there
in my hand,
unmoving.
I wish you would move,
wish you would write.
I am at a loss for words.
You're supposed to help me out,
you're supposed to know what to say
when I can't find words.
I'm waiting for you to fly across the page
with an amazing story left for me.
I'm waiting for you to come up with something
creative and original.
I wait and wait but you do not move.
Not until I tell you to.

Concrete
Apple

I

take a bite. The juice dribbles onto

my tongue, rolling over my taste buds

while they tingle and explode from the

flavor. It’s the perfect combination of

crunchy from the skin and soft from

the inside. The sweetness delights

me. I savor every bite I take, not

eating too fast otherwise it will

be gone too soon. The color

is a perfect red, like a

christmas red.

Springboard Poem

Explore

I want to explore the world.

I wish I could go wherever, whenever.

I need to experience life outside of my home.

I hope to see Europe, South America and Australia.

I feel trapped in a tiny town, when theres so much more to see.

I yearn to find exotic places, people and animals.

I crave adventure.

I imagine myself on a beach in Greece,or a castle in England or a temple in Egypt.

I long to meet new people and see new faces.

I will visit all these places one day.

I am going to adventure and explore no matter what.

I can't wait to see where life takes me.

Original Poems II

William Carlos Poem
Free

I watch the bird
swiftly
gliding through air

Spreading its wings
as it floats
with the clouds.

Free as can be
soaring,
becoming one with the sky.

I wish I could be free
like the bird
as it flys through space.

Memory Poem
Those days

Sometimes I wish we could go back
to those days when everything was easy.
When we would walk down to the pond
and look for garden snakes
because back then we weren't afraid of anything.
We would spend the whole day there.
Just enjoying being young
without a care in the world.
Our parents would come get us
when dusk rolled around.
Their faces would light up
when we showed them our new friend
and the home we made for it.
I wish we could go back
to those days
and those memories
we spent together.

Ladder
Storm

Thunder
Lightning strikes
The rain pounds
Banging on the roof
But then it sloes down
Soft taps calm me
The clouds part
Drifting away
Slowly

Original Poems 1

ACROSTIC POEM
Friends

For each moment spent together,
Relishing each other's company,
Is a person there for you
Every second, every minute, every hour.
Never judging, never selfish.
Developing memory after memory,
Someone that will change your life forever.

"THIS IS JUST TO SAY"

I Wish I Knew

I can't even begin to explain,
or put it in words.
I can't take back
what I thought was okay

I know it makes no sense,
I'm not quite sure either.
I'm trying to figure it out,
trying to make it clear.

This time will be different,
I can promise you that.
But I can't promise it will work,
we'll have to take a chance.

WHERE I AM FROM
From Memories Created by Family

I am from clothes, from Tide and stain remover.
I am from the sprinkler in the yard (spinning, squirting, chilly on my skin as I sprinted by.)
I am from the spruce, dandelion, the grass in the backyard that hosted neighborhood kickball games, the pines, marigolds, the bees attracted to their vibrant colors.
I am from big gatherings and dark hair, from Helen and Julius and Kraus.
I am from the loud mouths and straight A's.
From reading books and trying not to make messes.
I am from Protestants who don't go to church very often.
I'm from Niskyuna and a little house on a farm, sweet strawberries and burgers on the grill.
From the house my grandma sold, the place we used to spend christmas, where my mom would make her famous green beans and bacon.
I am from scrapbooks carefully put together and hidden in drawers, from hundreds of pictures stuffed in the cabinents, all mixed up and out of order.
I am from those memories created by each picture and each moment spent with family.

Vocabulary On My Mind

I absolutely hate winter. The cold weather always puts me in a lassitude. I never want to get up and go places because it's freezing outside so I'm usually sluggish and hang around my house all day. Where we live winter is way too long. There is a huge discrepancy between winter and summer. I'd love to live in a place where winter is ephemeral or nonexistent. Summer is so much more enjoyable and congenial because of the warmer weather. In summer I'm very transient and go out a lot but in winter I don't. During winter it's dark most of the time. When I wake up it's dark outside and an hour after I get home from school it's dark again. I barely see sunlight except on weekends. As soon as I go outside the cold wind bites at my face. All I want to do is be home laying on my couch next to the fireplace with a cup of hot chocolate. There is usually a plethora of snow or sleet. You have to walk  gingerly and be vigilant while driving because the roads are covered in ice. The only plus side of that is getting a delay or snow day. Our soccer season is hampered duirng winter because we can't practice outside and are forced to play indoors on tiny fields. After a few months of winter I am fervent when spring comes around.

What I Need to Know about WRITING AND WRITERS to Become a Better Writer

After hearing all four speakers I definately learned a lot about writing that I didn't know before. There are so many different forms of writing and each form speaks to the reader/audience in a different way. Poetry speaks to the reader through rhythm, sound, repitition and rhyme. It's like hearing a song or a melody when you read a poem. Sometimes you make up your own rhythm when it's a free verse poem. Oral storytelling really engages the audience and is a real experience becuase you can hear and see the presenter. You see their facial expressions and body movements and it makes the story that much more exciting and real. It is told directly from them and their point of view. Myserty creates a whole other world with made up characters and plots. If you are reading a good book you will get so lost in it you won't know how much time has gone by until 3 hours have passed. That's what I find so amazing how writing can take us to a whole other world. When we read something that really touches us in a certain way, makes us laugh, cry, smile, we lose oursevles for a little while. I think this is the beauty of writing, I think it's why writers write and why readers read. To get into that zone where you can't put a book down or read a poem that makes you cry or read a book over and over just because you love it that much. I want to know what makes this happen. What makes writing speak to readers? How does it grab their attention and lock them in? What is it about a piece of writing that makes the reader listen and react?

1/17 Speaker ****

Round Four= Marni Gillard

         I think there are a lot of things that work very welll in the journey chapter. I think right away in the first paragraph the story pulls you in. It's always good when a reader has questions in the beginning because it makes them want to find the answers to the questions. After the first paragraph I'm already wondering about her life and her family and what they went through after her dad passed away. "I first wrote a brief story of that evening as a Christmas gift for my mother. She and I had grown closer since my pregnancy, and I secretly hoped the story might help us share memories of my dad. He died in a one-car accident shortly after I turned thirteen. Mom’s way of handling it was, “It’s over. We have to move on.” So we all dealt with the shock and sorrow of it privately or not at all. As if it were invisible."
          I really like how she started the piece by bringing emotion and some backround information to make the story become so real right away. Marni uses such amazing language to share her mothers emotions and I think this is really touching and it triggers my emotional side. It helps me understand how Marni and her mother are feeling. "Reading my high dive story gift, Mom briefly opened her safety deposit box of emotions...But later, the way people return holiday decorations to the attic, Mom and I filed away the story, and any further talk of Dad." I think it's important how she talks about why she chose to tell stories instead of writing them but I think that part ccould be cut down a little like maybe taking out why fiction writing didn't appeal to  her. "Fiction writing didn’t appeal to me. My own experiences and understandings were puzzle enough." I think it's more important to explain why she loves to tell stories and less about how it happened like becoming a teacher. Those facts are still important but she could take out a few parts.
          I also really like how Marni explains that each time she tells the story it's different. Since she doesn't have it written down you know it comes from her heart everytime and she's not just repeating the same words over and over. Each time she tells the story it tells her something new about her life that she didn't realize before. "Once it surfaced, I realized the child narrator had more to tell me about what “she” had hidden for years." Her character in the story of herself as a child comes out when she tells the story. She also explains how the audience can dictate how she tells the story... "Every gasp or laugh, every puzzled or entranced face potentially affects the story, if I let it. Each of these details appeared because of some listener’s response: the drawn-out sound-effect of falling from the board, the smack as I hit the water, the way I wiggle my ruffle-bottomed suit and snap my bathing cap, my frown at the big kids' teasing, and Dad’s blowing bubbles with Meg. Details come and go, if I stay present to the memory as it surfaces."

1/12 Speaker= ****

Round Three= Mary Moriarty

            A villanelle follows a specific pattern of rhyme and stanzas. There are 19 lines and 6 stanzas. The first 5 stanzas all have 3 lines and the last stanza has 4 lines. Throughout the poem there is a repeating rhyme sound of the last word on the line. Every other stanza the first and third lines rhyme and in the last stanza the last 2 lines rhyme. So in stanzas 1, 3, and 5 the first and third lines rhyme and in stanza 6 the last two lines rhyme. In this pattern the same rhyme is continued throughout the entire piece. I also noticed that there are only 3 words used to rhyme. In One Art by Elizabeth Bishop the rhyming words are master, disaster and faster.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.” This is an example of the third stanza where the first and third lines rhyme.  Elizabeth repeats certain lines in the poem. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” is repeated 4 times in the poem.

My Villanelle:

The ocean calls to me

As I watch the waves pat the shore.

The world below the surface beyond what I can see.

The water is a vast wonderland,

begging me to explore.

The ocean calls to me.

The ocean calls to me

as the waves crash to the shore.

I want to escape beneath them, where I can be free.

The water holds unknown answers

to what lurks behind the door.

The waves hold the key.

The waves try to reach and grab me,

to pull me underwater where I can soar

in a world extensively free.

I lay in the sand and wonder

what it would be like to explore

the world of the sea.

The ocean calls to me.

            Julia Copus’ poem The Back Seat of My Mother's Car is like a mirror or symmetrical. She repeats the same exact words from the first stanza to the second stanza just in the opposite order so that the first line of the first stanza is the last line of the second stanza. She begins the poem with “We left before I had time to comfort you, to tell you that we nearly touched hands in that vacuous half-dark” and ends the poem with “…hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted
to comfort you, to tell you that we nearly touched. We left before I had time.” It’s almost the exact opposite but the order of the words but it’s changed a little to make sense. It was like reading two different versions of the same poem. She breaks up the middle of her sentences a lot like Susan Cominos.

“I was calling to you – Daddy! – as we screeched away

into
the distance, my own hand tingling like an

amputation.” This makes the poem read differently and sound different than how you might think.

            I enjoyed reading the poems from photographs. Both Sharon Olds poem and Mimi Moriarty’s poem described the picture without saying too much. It was like they told a story but left it up to you to fill in the missing pieces of the story. There isn’t enough information to know exactly what is in the picture just enough to be able to infer and imagine your own story of what the photograph tells. In Mimi’s poem, Track Photo, she leaves you wondering what happened after reading the poem. “How could we abandon you in a wall when all you wanted to do was run.” You wonder why he was abandoned and what was he running from? Since she doesn’t tell you, you can make up your own story or try to guess what she is telling about the photograph. In Mimi’s poem Fatherland she talks about the photograph in a different way. She is telling a story about the story of the photograph. I like this poem because it gives more clues to what the photograph is about like her childhood and her father coming home. “I remember little of his charred homecoming, the fog of my childhood muddles the fatherless beginning, the hollow middle with its coatless summers.” You can infer that maybe her father was in a war and the photograph was a terrible reminder of it that he didn’t want to talk about.

My Photograph Poem:

I’ll never forget that vacation,

when we transported to another world,

where dreams really do come true.

Where everything was magical.

We laughed, we sang, we danced,

we smiled.

It was like walking into a movie

where princesses marry princes

and heroes fight villains

and everything ends happily ever after.

I wish we could stay there forever.

The five of us together as a family

in a world where there are no limits

and imagination never ends.

1/10 Speaker= ***

Round Two= Marilyn Kemp

Marilyn Kemp is a very intriguing writer. She uses vivid detail and literary devices to create a more real experience. As I was reading the excerpt from her book Death of a Dancing Master I was picturing in my mind the scene as Jacob Joyliffe barged into Perkney’s house. It was easy to do this because of how clearly she described what was happeneing like when she says "There was a round table to the right, with paper, a quill, an inkpot and a silver tray for calling cards upon it.  A narrow chair set next to the table.  To his left the wall held hooks for coats and cloaks.  Beneath the hooks a small rug covered the floor, with a bootjack for removing muddy footwear." She describes every little detail about the scenery like what was on the table, the walls, the floor etc. Marilyn does this throughout the excerpt and it makes the story more realistic and interesting as if you are really there. She also uses metaphors and similes to describe the characters emotions and actions. She describes how Joyliffe feels after finding Perkney dead ".  Joyliffe gazed in horror, unable to turn his head from the sight, unable to move, unable to cry out.  His brain was filled with wool, his jaw as frozen as ice, his throat as parched as sand." The matephor "filled with wool" and simile  "parched as sand" show how shocked and in disbelief Joyliffe was. It makes the story more entertaining than simply saying "he was in shock". I thought she did a nice job of giving personality to her characters. Right in the first paragraph you get a sense of how Joyliffe is a gentleman "No matter – the young man felt it his duty to tender an apology for his intemperate words, and apologize he would." Also when she says "He’d hurried back on purpose, in painful shortness of breath, so that he would not interrupt the man’s lessons, even if he could not approve of the man’s lesson in lascivious and wanton dance." Even though Perkney isn't in the excerpt as much she also describes his personality "Perkney was quite particular about his guests removing their muddy clogs or boots." Overall I thought the excerpt was appealing and something I would consider reading.

Questions: How do you create a plot for a mystery to make sure all the pieces fit together in the end?
 How can you make sure you create characters that are realistic?

1/6 Speaker= *** stars

Round One: Susan Comninos

Susan Comninos has a style of poetry that is very different from poetry that I'm used to reading. Her poems aren't simple but more complex with deep thoughts built into them. You couldn't just read it once and be done. You have to read it again, maybe even a couple times, to really grasp a full understanding of what she is trying to say through her poem. She writes a lot about religion, which is not something that I read a lot about, especially in poetry.  "Knocking or nailing?—a crucifix at the door, or hammer from the flat below?" from her poem Rome Visits When I’m in the Bath. Her poems leave me with many questions because she doesn't just come out and say what her poem means. She leaves it up to the reader to uncover to message weaved in the words of her poems. In her poem Covet she sends the message of how a person shouldn't get something by wrongful means or hurting others... " Thou shalt entertain no note without instruments, sloth without toil – sweat from strong languor. Thou shalt not stroke wood of others’ baseboards, nor bewail banisters to a barren house." Another reason Susan's poems are different is because she uses words from other languages in her poems. In her poem Pecan, Rodef, Clam she uses Hebrew and Yiddish words. "Like any nut zipped up tight in its shell. Like a clam’s clipped momser, the locked maw talked open by fire..." the word momser is Yiddish. I think using these words in the poem gives the author a different voice. Susan also has a unique style to her poems. She breaks up her stanzas in the middle of the sentences which makes the poem read differently. She does this in her poem Deconstruction Workers
"Green’s the grace

most of us would like. To miss
you netted by needles
is to have the foresight
of a wood pest, eating
what builders won’t abate —

blind." I think she wants to put emphasis on certain words and create a pause to add dramatic effect.


Questions: What do you think makes a poem powerful?
What makes poetry different from other types of writing?