Part of the I-don’t-get-it factor lies in the realm of ambiguity. A good poem is ambiguous. I know a teacher who tells his students repeatedly, “Embrace ambiguity!” In Writing Poems, Wallace and Boisseau describe ambiguity as “a poem’s ability to offer more than one plausible reading at a time.” Put another way by a teacher [...]
Posts Tagged ‘poetry for children’
repetition: prayer or prison
repetition: prayer or prison
When fears, anxieties, and frenetic activity, disrupt our mental equilibrium, they disrupt our breathing and a host of other physiological measures. Yogis and church-goers, alike, remind us that the resonance and repetition of a mantra or prayer will bring us back to quiescence. A line from a poem can serve as a [...]
poem as play
Publishers and teachers alike tend to prefer collections of children’s poetry that are theme-based: winter poems, school poems, love poems, animal poems, etc. This is all well and good; a topic-based collection makes a fine and practical package. Unfortunately though, it leads one to believe that poems are made of ideas. As noted in an [...]
invitation
I like a lot of space: larger rooms, open doors and windows, white space on a page. This desire for space includes metaphoric space. A good poem invites the reader into its roomy world. Its words, tone, and pacing need to say, as Robert Frost said, “you come too.” A poem that does not make room [...]
text or art?
Poems written in the shape of their subject have come to be called shaped poems or concrete poems—a poem about the ocean, say, positioned in the shape of a cresting wave. I would argue, though, that all written poems are concrete poems. The form of the poem, the positioning of words, the length of the [...]
life’s little instructions
I played volleyball for years, but gave it up in my late twenties. I enjoyed it, but was never more than an okay player. And I never had a strong serve. Whether I was serving against a rival team in college or playing with friends on the beach, my serve crashed into the net or [...]
