April is National Poetry Month, and while I’ve never been a poet, I do love poetry, and my mother was a poet, which probably comes as a surprise to many members of our family. Mom didn’t share her poetry much, and I only know about some of it because every once in a while I’d find a poem scribbled on the back of an envelope or grocery list. I think she wrote them primarily for her own enjoyment, which seems to me the highest form of poetry. Just the simple joy of how words can fit together into something lovely, funny, inspiring, memorable.
Mom wrote beautiful long poems, short poems, haiku (the smallest literary form, and with the most rules!), freestyle verse, rhyming poems and those that didn’t rhyme but were just lovely to read and gave one something to ponder, to enjoy, to remember long after the poem had been lost to the trashcan or the fire. Being a homeschooling mom, and unschooling specifically, that was the subject of some of her most memorable poems, for me anyway, and I wish I still had some of them I could share. But alas, after all these years I have only the fond memories of poetry about children snug on cold winter days, and her reading to them by the fire while they enjoyed her fresh warm oatmeal cookies and mugs of steaming hot cocoa.
While I was mailing some things at the post office the other day I noticed a new display they have on American poets, and it was so interesting that I looked up some more information when I got home. Here are a few good sites I found; a few minutes on any of them will provide some inspiring reading:
Famous American Poets and Poems
And then there’s poetry for kids:
In that category I must share a really lovely blog I came across when looking for poetry information: Smallworld Reads: Reading Poetry with Children
From that site, this lovely bit:
“Whatever you do, find ways to read poetry. Eat it, drink it, enjoy it, and share it.” ~Eve Merriam
The wonderful world of poetry is fun to explore, and most of us have many good memories relating to poetry in some way or another. Remember The Cat in the Hat, The Highwayman, The Raven, The Road Not Taken, The Ants Go Marching, Paul Revere’s Ride, Jabberwocky, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Lorax, Trees?
I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree…
I dunno. The poems my mother wrote were really lovely…
Helen
mark
david
“The poems my mother wrote were really lovely”… Yeh true!
My son recently memorized The Tyger by William Blake. He acted it out with props, which included a stuffed tiger (of course), a hammer, a chain, and a flashlight. We compared it to Blake’s The Lamb and discussed why one appeared in his Songs of Innocence and the other in his Songs of Experience. I was actually amazed at the extent to which my 9 year old comprehended the notions of a diety in both poems.
Heather Widener
http://www.rootsoflearning.com