Little bits and pieces . . .

Today I join my fellow bloggers in "serving up a slice" 
to the Tuesday Slice of Life sponsored by

  Two Writing Teachers.

Two weeks ago I composed a five word ditty for Poetry Friday:

Poetry's

tentacles swirl,
students succumb!

Those tentacles continued to swirl for sixth grade students from rooms 103 and 104 as they joined Janet Wong on Friday for a poetry workshop.  We learned about her journey from practicing lawyer to published author.

We listened as she shared these nuggets about writing poems:

"Little bits and pieces of my life find their way into my poems."  

"The best poems are about specific things that are universal."

Percy poses proudly for this photo op with our visiting poet!

We examined poetry from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School compiled by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong, our presenter.  Janet led us in an exercise for writing new endings to poems with this important question:   

"What do you notice?"  

Does the poem rhyme or is it free verse?

Does it follow a specific pattern for rhyming words?

Do the stanzas (little rooms to group ideas) provide a pattern for the poem? 

Does the poem follow a specific rhythm?  

Does the poem provide a predictable scheme?

And then we took out our writer's notebooks and wrote new endings for the narrative poem "Cod" by Holly Thompson.  Listen to Holly's multimedia reading of "Cod" that she created as part of a multimedia unit in this post (it's the second video).

Janet asked us to write a new ending for the poem after this stanza:

"but late afternoon on her walk with the babies

when she strolled past a bar where the captain

sat laughing and from the pier looked down

to the floating dock and the tub full of fish

her cod on top sun bathed and rotting

its dim, milky eye focused on her, she realized"

It was amazing to watch her create three different endings for the poem (a poem selected from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School when a student called out a random page number).  She penned her stanzas on chart paper, revising on the spot with scratch outs and added words:

Version 1:

"she knew it was not enough

to catch the fish, 

but she needed somehow

to capture the heart of the captain too.

She walked into the bar,

a baby in each arm, and said,

'captain, the fish you're going to fillet for me

will fill these babies up tonight  

they thank you too'"

Version 2:

"she decided to fillet the fish herself 

how hard could it be to take out some guts and bone

and she climbed down on the dock,

hoisted it up,

stuffed it like a pillow 

alongside the babies 

and rolled her cargo home"

Version 3:  

"she cried, just sat and cried

so helpless, so hurt

and the babies knew exactly how she felt"

My version, with Janet's final advice to add three new words, (now deleted per Janet's advice in the comments):

"with a sudden stab of sad remorse

she wished to turn

back time and return

the cod to his watery primeval home"

Our time together was splendidly capped off by these new endings shared by several student writers:  

from Marina - 

"she was sad

she was mad

she wanted to show her family

and they would dance happily"

from Peyton - 

"hey captain

didn't you say you would

filet my fish

today?"                          

from Bella -

"one day not far 

from now she would return

the favor to the poor, helpless, 

rotting cod

that next day she went

with the captain again 

she caught another cod and

set it free for it should

have another chance"

from Jamisen

"as she passed the bar

the captain saw her flaw

he left the room

with dreary eyes he walked away

'goodbye,' he said

as he disappeared"

from Xander - 

"to throw him overboard

look at him, monster eyed

I looked down below 

and I saw how he died"

from Hunter - 

"she realized that the captain

was gonna get it

she knew he lied to her

her cold eyes met his and

he knew she was going 

to be the new captain

the babies would be her sailors

this war has just begun"

Our efforts at rewriting took just a few minutes, but Janet's workshop gave us new strategies for writing endings for the poems in the Poetry Box and for continuing our journey as poets. 

Thanks, Janet Wong, for a fabulous morning!

A big thank you to Holly Thompson for permission to include the link to her multimedia reading of "Cod" from her blog and to share our new endings for her poem.  Holly's extensive website explores her intercultural world and the writing that has emerged from living abroad for the past twenty years.  While she is usually based in Japan, she is living in the United States (Massachusetts) for the 2014-15 school year and loves to do school visits.  I can't wait to read her verse novel (one of my favorite genres), The Language Inside which was a Notable Book for a Global Society last year and was highly recommended by Janet Wong.