Love to Hate Writing Poetry

I remember being in a PD workshop session while still at CPS, not too long after our kindergartners had begun their work with writing poetry.  "Amanda loves poetry," some colleague put forth.

"I do," I admitted. "I want to take a bath in it."  And it's true. As much as I love poetry and poets, most recently, Billy Collins, and in the past, Langston Hughes (of course,) Whitman, Creeley, Sexton, Sandburg, Frost, and oh, I just can't name them all - I absolutely loathe attempting to write poetry.  I remember coming across three poems I had written in my painful pre-teenage years of Midwestern suburban hell while I was going through old school papers, post-college.  The absolute agony of pre-adolescence was captured in a drippingly angsty poem entitled, believe it or not, "Sacrifice on the Altar."  It was eerily reminiscent of this:



Since those embarrassing times, whenever compelled to draft a poem in a class or teacher's workshop, I sometimes like it for a minute, and then wad it up immediately.  Everything clever, sarcastic, absurdly saccharine or revelatory has been written already, you see, by great and mediocre poets alike, and what my pen hurls (that's right, hurls) onto the page is usually tinged with a smidge of Hallmark pus.

Anyway. I teach, therefore I write. It's not fair to ask kiddos to write poems about everyday objects, or from the heart, without attempting it occasionally in front of their eyes.  So a few weeks ago, in the "everyday object with a poets' eyes" lesson from Calkins, I brought out my treasure chest of rocks, shells, and dried leaves as possibilities for poetry fodder. Not wanting students to mimic too closely my writing a poem about a pine cone or a dried leaf, I mentioned getting a gift from one of my tutoring kiddos the previous afternoon.  "S. knows about this," I confided with a nod to the gift giver. "It's an everyday thing, right? A puzzle. But Langston was crazy about this one. 100 pieces, and it covered the floor of his room! So I think I'm going to write my poem about that. I'm going to see that puzzle with a poets' eyes."

So I started writing on poster paper, and a few choice schmalzy phrases were trimmed in the final minutes of composition.   "Pieces fitting together," my marker squeaked onto paper as students followed with silent eyes. "Clinging!" a girl blurted. I felt goosebumps rise and turned. "Yes. Can I steal that word, E.?" She nodded seriously.  A few other student changes were suggested, sometimes without the strictest adherence to our sacred mini-lesson rules.

Here is the final draft of a poem that I won't, perhaps, crumple up:

A Puzzle For My Son

A shower of 100 pieces

Rained out of the box

Let’s find the corners first

The edges, too

So it all

Makes

Sense

Now we have a picture frame

Pieces clinging together

Like you and me

When we hug

In the mirror