Poetry Friday for Four Days!

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Catherine Flynn at Reading To The Core. I had the pleasure of spending lots of time with Catherine at the Highlights Foundation last week writing and learning “The Craft and Heart of Writing Poetry for Children” from Rebecca Kai Dotlich and Georgia Heard. It was a marvelous time that I've also written about in my two previous blog posts! 

I'm thrilled and honored to move to the Cybil's Poetry Judges' Round One this year, will love working with Joy Acey, Carol Wilcox, Sylvia Vardell, Jone MacCulloch, Courtney Garrison and Tricia Stohr-Hunt. Don't forget, nominations begin on October 1st!

It was terrific to spend time with other Poetry Friday bloggers, too, like Robyn Hood Black, Buffy Silverman, Linda Kulp Trout, and Charles Waters. 

In these days, we filled up with poetry. We met in smaller groups to share our own original poetry and receive critiques. This made me wish to have this group for every poem. The insights and ideas offer were very appreciated. "Revision" means to "re-see", and this time that "second sight" showed me new ways to look and keep looking for a better draft.  

Georgia & Rebecca took one word and wrote from it right in front of us, showing various ways to start a poem, then change after careful looks. Yes, it was first draft writing, but illuminating to see others do this.  Lee Bennett Hopkins visited with us via Skype, sharing his own important ideas about poetry. When he looks/accepts poems for his anthologies, he looks for those with "heart".

WordSong editor Rebecca Davis, joined us to answer our questions about publishing poetry and to share Georgia’s coming collection of animal poems for two (or more) voices. They even read some different drafts, then asked which one was chosen for the book, and to see if we could decide "why" that one.  And, I now have an "F&G" copy of  Rebecca Kai Dotlich’s  new book with Jane Yolen, Grumbles From the Town. It was fun to hear how these two came to be working together and to read the results of this marvelous collaboration! Catherine shared some examples on her post! 

We did write new things, too. One session included ideas for observational poetry. We began with a rock, provided, and wrote a series of ideas/observations to help start a poem. Then we shared the objects we were asked to bring. Mine was a group of used pencils. There are old stories and new ones of pencils cherished down to the stub, not always affordable, and long ago it was against the law for slaves to possess one. It's hard to imagine not having pencils everywhere. And so I wrote:

Rich

pencil bought, hard wrought

crops in, sheep fed

every one, snug abed

words waiting, calling me          

pencil sharp, poetry

Linda Baie (c) All Rights Reserved 

            The time spend in and out of doors, with friends or alone made me feel rich, too!