It’s Poetry Friday! My dear poetry and notebook-keeping mentor, Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, is hosting the round up this week. I do hope you will visit her at The Poem Farm, and lots of other PF participants throughout the upcoming week. In addition to her sweet (and often sad) poem project about John and Betsy, Amy offers up a bit of “how to advice” for writing list poems, the form which her poem takes today. My Kindergarten poets love writing list poems, so I have been working on one, too, with different words for walking that I have been collecting.
And now for more playing with poetry!
Yesterday my #playwithpoetry playmate Margaret Simon honored me by borrowing a line from my haiku I shared on Wednesday. (Click here to see her original post.) Today I am repaying the favor by borrowing a line from a collaborative poem she wrote with her students — “In the spring-sprinkled garden.”
A peek into my poems and process.
- I’ve been collecting words for a long time. My list poem about walking features just some of the many words for walking, one of my favorite pastimes. A favorite walk of mine and my husband’s is the nearby Emerson-Thoreau Amble. Dear friends Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson enjoyed walking together, and one of their favorite woodland walks was the 1.7 mile path that began behind Emerson’s home and ended at nearby Walden Pond. You can read more about this walk here. The “good friends” in my poem was inspired by these famous good friends.
- Here in New England we are only just beginning to see true signs of spring in our gardens. “Sprinkled” is the perfect way to describe the hints of color beginning to crop up here and there.
- The photo in my spring poem is of a long, narrow garden bed that runs alongside my driveway. It makes me happy when I pull in and see some sprinkles of color.
- When the sun is shining, and there is a light breeze blowing, the intoxicating perfume from my early spring bulbs in bloom wafts in through my open windows. It is truly delicious!
One full week of National Poetry Month to go, gang. If you are looking to share a little poetry wonder with your students, check out this Padlet of all the poetry-related wonders on Wonderopolis. Perhaps they’ll find a bit of inspiration here!
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And introducing….
On April 1, the Poetry Friday family launched the 7th annual Kidlitosphere Progressive Poem organized by author/poet, Irene Latham. (Click here to learn more.) Many of us have signed up to provide a line for the 2019 poem. Author/poet Matt Forrest Esenwine kicked things off with some familiar “found” phrases merged to get us going. Today’s line comes from Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe. Participants are having fun lifting favorite song lyrics to create the next line in the poem. I was excited to provide the 14th line on Sunday, April 14th. I hope you’ll join us to see what happens! Here’s the itinerary for the poem.
April
1 Matt @Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme
2 Kat @Kathryn Apel
3 Kimberly @KimberlyHutmacherWrites
4 Jone @DeoWriter
5 Linda @TeacherDance
6 Tara @Going to Walden
7 Ruth @thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown
8 Mary Lee @A Year of Reading
9 Rebecca @Rebecca Herzog
10 Janet F. @Live Your Poem
11 Dani @Doing the Work that Matters
12 Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
13 Doraine @Dori Reads
14 Christie @Wondering and Wandering
15 Robyn @Life on the Deckle Edge
16 Carol @Beyond LiteracyLink
17 Amy @The Poem Farm
18 Linda @A Word Edgewise
19 Heidi @my juicy little universe
20 Buffy @Buffy’s Blog
21 Michelle @Michelle Kogan
22 Catherine @Reading to the Core
23 Penny @a penny and her jots
24 Tabatha @The Opposite of Indifference
25 Jan @Bookseestudio
26 Linda @Write Time
27 Sheila @Sheila Renfro
28 Liz @Elizabeth Steinglass
29 Irene @Live Your Poem
30 Donna @Mainely Write
Wondering and Wandering 
Spring sprinkled garden…..I’m swooning. I adore that friends share poetry lines and the creativity only grows and grows. So beautiful. The word ‘footslog’ is new to me. I love it! I’m adding it to my word pile from this week’s Poetry Friday. It’s right after Linda Baie’s heartsease. I do enjoy my poetry friends so much! Enjoy the spring awakening, Christy!
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It’s a funny word, isn’t it? 🙂
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“Like presents/from the dirt” – YES! This is true for gardens…and kinda true for words too. They just come up out of the dirt of our minds. How supercool that you are playing a game with Margaret’s poets. Love. Teacher-to-teacher. Your students would maybe have fun together too. Happy continued playing, pal! Homestretch! xx
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I love how your lines and ideas are bouncing back and forth!
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You’ve turned our sun sprinkled line into a new present from the dirt. Love playing with you.
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There’s a lot to love about this post. I think my favorite thing is the line-borrowing, back and forth. It is such a privilege to join in the Great Conversation!
Ruth, thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com
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I do love that ‘spring-sprinkled garden’ as you do, too, Christie, and I also love flowers “like presents from the dirt”, a new way to look at it. Thanks!
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I love all these words for walking. In these lines here,
)flowers opening
Like presents
From the dirt)
you have exactly captured how I feel about the first flowers of spring.
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What a delicious day indeed, and even more so after such a long, cold winter!
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You created a lovely poem, and I must admit that I’ve never heard of the word tootslog 🙂
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Lovely collection of poems you’ve shared Christie! As Kimberly mentioned above, “tootslog” is new to me too, and such a fun word–I like the list poem you created from your walk. Hope the bits of color continue to expand in your garden!
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It’s actually footslog. Isn’t it funny?
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Beautiful play with poetry and your spring-sprinkled garden.
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