2013 Kidlitosphere Progressive Poem

I hope you will join me along with 29 other Kidlitosphere friends who are participating this year in Irene Latham's Progressive Poem Project. Each April day, in honor of National Poetry Month, invited poets will add one line a day beginning on April 1st. No one knows where the poem will go, so the twists and turns come as each poet adds his or her take on the direction it's already going. At any point, a stanza may break, or a line may be enjambed, leaving it up to the next poet to decide how to finish the thought. It's a roller coaster ride, or (as Irene's logo for the project shows) a lovely wall being built brick by brick. Something tells me that 30 bricklayers might make for a crazy wall, and there might be extra mortar in places or a lack of mortar in others - but that's all part of the fun. For me, it's hardest to follow a line with abstractions in it - I think poetry does best when it looks at those abstractions indirectly. "Show, don't tell" applies to poetry along with fiction - and staring too directly at an abstraction or a sentiment is the telling side of things. I like poetry that comes at things sideways. As Archibald MacLeish famously said, "For all the history of grief / An empty doorway and a maple leaf." Get too sentimental, and you get abstract - and abstractions can take all the breath away from a poem. That's my approach, anyway. With a poem written by many people, there are many ideas of what is best for a poem, so hang onto your hat, the roller coaster ride is about to begin!

My day to add a line is April 8th and I'm looking forward to it.

You can click on dates below to see how the poem is progressing. I will also add the growing poem to my Poetry Friday posts this month. 

Here we go, with the first line, second line, etc.

When you listen to your footsteps       (Amy, 4/1)
the words become music and              (Joy 4/2)
the rhythm that you're rapping gets your fingers tapping, too.     (Matt, 4/3)
Your pen starts dancing across the page  (Jone, 4/4)
a private pirouette, a solitary samba until   (Dori, 4/5)
smiling, you're beguiling as your love comes shining through. (Gayle, 4/6)

Pause a moment in your dreaming, hear the whispers (Janet, 4/7)

April

1  Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

2  Joy Acey

3  Matt Forrest Esenwine

4  Jone MacCulloch

5  Doraine Bennett

6  Gayle Krause

7  Janet Fagal

8  Julie Larios

9  Carrie Finison

10  Linda Baie

11  Margaret Simon

12  Linda Kulp

13  Catherine Johnson

14  Heidi Mordhorst

15  Mary Lee Hahn

16  Liz Steinglass

17  Renee LaTulippe

18  Penny Klostermann

19  Irene Latham

20  Buffy Silverman

21  Tabatha Yeatts

22  Laura Shovan

23  Joanna Marple

24  Katya Czaja

25  Diane Mayr

26  Robyn Hood Black

27  Ruth Hersey

28  Laura Purdie Salas

29  Denise Mortensen

30  April Halprin Wayland

 ------------------------------
The Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted this week by Mary Lee Hahn at A Year of Reading. Head over there to see what other people have posted. And wow, it's April - a lot is happening for National Poetry Month!

10th Line for the 2012 KidLit Progressive Poem!

Today, as part of the ongoing celebration of National Poetry Month, I'm contributing the tenth line in the 2012 KidLit Progressive Poem, dreamed up by Irene Latham. My friends and I used to do an "Exquisite Corpse" version of this at our annual retreats. We passed a single sheet of paper around and each person contributed a line, but as we did so we had to fold over all but the preceding line. By doing that, we couldn't really tell where the poem had started nor where anyone meant the poem to go - things got pretty wild with those rules. You ended up with odd poems, not exactly sensible - or, if one of the poems made sense, it thrilled us. Insensibility and unplanned sensibility have their  roller-coaster charms. We even created a fake poet to sign the poems and send them out to reviews to see if we could get them published. Never did.

In this incarnation of the game, we could actually see the cumulative growth when we wrote our own lines. We could see where the poem started, and the course it had taken,  but we didn't know what direction future poets would make it go.

Here's the poem as it stands right now, with my contribution. Tomorrow, it moves on to Kate at her blog, Book Aunt. She'll see what she thinks her job is - maybe to make it clearer or to calm it down, speed it up, throw a curve, make it sadder, make it sillier, make it more cerebral or more emotional  - we won't know until tomorrow. And who knows what will happen by the 30th of April??

If you want to see my thoughts about why I wrote the line I did, just read the P.S.

Thanks for setting it all up, Irene - fun!

If you are reading this
you must be hungry
Kick off your silver slippers
Come sit with us a spell

 

A hanky, here, now dry your tears

And fill your glass with wine

Now, pour. The parchment has secrets

Smells of a Morrocan market spillout.

 

You have come to the right place, just breathe in.

Honey, mint, cinnamon, sorrow. Now, breathe out

--------------------------------------

P.S. Here are my thoughts about adding a line: In a poem like this (actually, in all poems, but even more so for this kind) I think there should be a few surprises. Different voices contribute, with different tastes in choice of words, images, and rhythms. Shifts along those lines can be interesting. Predictability and accessibility are not the be-all nor the end-all when the structure is cumulative, with many poets contributing. For me, adding a line meant seeing how the poem was doing in terms of surprises, and throwing in a curve or two. When I saw tears and a hanky and wine, I figured it wasn't a poem for kids. I also got worried because oh-oh, a crying jag was coming on. My inclination at that point would have been to introduce a laugh and not let the poem get over-emotional. But looking at the additions in the last couple of days, I have to say I love where it's gone - the jump to the parchment, and to Morocco - both so mysterious! So I wanted those smells and that mystery in my line, and I wanted not only a metaphorical breath in, but a physical, cleansing breath out.

Can't wait to see where this thing goes.See the schedule, below.

-------------------------------------

Here's the Progressive Poem schedule - follow along and watch it grow!

2012 KidLit Progressive Poem:  watch a poem grow day-by-day as it travels across the Kidlitosphere! April 1-30

Dates in April: 

1  Irene at Live Your Poem 

2  Doraine at Dori Reads

3  Jeannine at View from a Window Seat

4  Robyn at Read, Write, Howl

5  Susan at Susan Taylor Brown

6  Mary Lee at A Year of Reading

7  Penny at A Penny and her Jots

8  Jone at Deo Writer

9  Gina at Swagger Writer's

10  Julie at The Drift Record

11  Kate at Book Aunt

12  Anastasia Suen at Booktalking

13  Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference

14  Diane at Random Noodling

15  Ruth at There is No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town 

16  Natalie at Wading Through Words 

17  Tara at A Teaching Life

18  Amy  at The Poem Farm

19  Lori at Habitual Rhymer

20  Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe

21  Myra at Gathering Books

22  Pat at Writer on a Horse

23  Miranda at Miranda Paul Books 

24  Linda at TeacherDance

25  Greg at Gotta Book

26  Renee at No Water River

27  Linda at Write Time

28  Caroline at Caroline by Line

29  Sheri at Sheri Doyle

30  Irene at Live Your Poem