poetry | Thinking Through My Lens

Over at The Nerdy Book Club, Cindy has invited readers to share their favorite poets or poems.

I love poetry…especially in the classroom. Each week in our classroom we study a poem, noticing what the poet is doing and paying attention to the images it creates in our minds. We read it aloud and notice how the words feel in our mouths. Individual students read and together we read chorally.

Later in the week, we revisit our poem and create an illustration that captures our understanding of the poem. We glue our poem and illustration into a composition book we call our poetry anthology. By the end of the school year, students have read, studied, and illustrated more than 30 poems…over the course of the three years they spend in our multiage classroom, they have close to 100 poems collected and illustrated to take home and treasure.

One of my favorite poets to share with my young students is Valerie Worth. I love her short poems. They are accessible to children. And I love that she writes about ordinary things. But these are not simple poems…they are full of imagery, word play, and figurative language.

One of my favorites is Safety Pin.

safety pin

Valerie Worth

Closed, it sleeps On its side Quietly,
The silver Image

Of some Small fish;

Opened, it snaps Its tail out
Like a thin Shrimp,

and looks
At the sharp Point with a Surprised eye.

What poets and poetry do you love?

One of my fellow #clmooc-ers, Vanessa Vaile, posted this invitation in the G+ community to remix, hack, create found poetry…and it’s been sitting in the back of my mind, waiting for the opportunity to find its place on my blog.

This morning the twittersphere handed my this poem and it has stayed with me all day, begging me to think about ways to remix and recreate and combine it with my photography.

The World Is in Pencil

BY TODD BOSS

—not pen. It’s got

that same silken

dust about it, doesn’t it,

that same sense of

having been roughed

onto paper even

as it was planned.

It had to be a labor

of love. It must’ve

taken its author some

time, some shove.

I’ll bet it felt good

in the hand—the o

of the ocean, and

the and and the and

of the land.

Source: Poetry (November 2011).

And so, here is my remixed version:

The World Is in Pencil: Remixed

Pencil in the ocean

and the land

Authored with labor

roughed by silken dust.

Love it

shove it

take time

to feel, to handle

Until you can see

as if it was planned

the world

inked on paper.

A map of your life.

This photo was also remixed. Taking a photo I took earlier this week,

I wanted to create a sense of pencil and sketch, roughed and labored.

I used the app Sketch on my iPhone to create this effect.

Here is the original:

Try your hand at found poetry…I invite you to remix mine or find

something that speaks to you. How might you remix a photo or

other image to go with it? Be sure to share!

Thinking Through My Lens

Tag Archives: poetry

Thinking about Poetry

Poster Poems, Found Poetry: Remixed

The World Is in Pencil