On the blog today, Ann Patchett and Lessons from a hummingbird

Hear me read my pantoum poem and get the story behind the poem. I'm guest pod posting at Katie Davis Brain Burps.

I forgot to post over here but prompts and original poems are up for Kick the Poetry Can'ts #3 and #4.

Here's #3
http://bit.ly/GzwN1c

Here's #4
http://bit.ly/GzyewC

Post # 1 in the month long series for National Poetry month.

Read an original poem, get a mini poetry lesson, and then write along with me.

Well I won my round 2 match in the poetry tournament and my round 3 has just been posted. I have the word "impaled" and am up against the very talented Greg Pincus who has the word "truce." After you check out our match, make sure you go back to the Live Scoreboard and read the various other match-ups going on.

Go here to read and vote.

Marissa Moss is launching a new publishing company via Kickstarter. Golden Gate Books plans to fill the void left behind by the major New York publishers who no longer put out a broad range of quality picture books. They will be devoted to publishing quality picture books printed in the USA on sustainably-sourced paper

Check out her kickstarter campaign to raise $50K in 30 days
http://kck.st/GzmsSW

Even small donations can add up and help get this new publisher off the ground.

And yes, I'm backing this wonderful project.

Thanks to all of you who voted and helped me win the first round in the March Madness Poetry tournament. My new poem for the next round is up now. This time it is translucent vs cement.

Please read & vote for your fav and help us get the word out. We'd like to double the votes from the last round. Voting is only open for about a day and a half.

Thank you!

On the new blog, a post about what I put myself through for the "fun" poetry competition. We writers are too hard on ourselves.

http://www.susantaylorbrown.com/blog/being-true/

So I signed up to be in this crazy poetry madness event where children's poets are randomly seeded (kinda like basketball tournaments) and are randomly assigned words with a difficulty of 1 (easy) to 16 (ouch!) and have to write a poem appropriate for kids. Then we're randomly matched up in a head-to-head tournament. We have a short time to write the poems and then readers vote and the winners of the match-ups go on to the next round.

I'd love the chance to continue but I have to win this round. I had the good/unfortunate luck of being seeded 16 which gives me the impossible words. I got nonconfrontational for the first round.

Anyway, they're short, 8 lines or less, and I'm begging for folks to go read, at least my match-up, and vote for the ones they like best.
http://www.thinkkidthink.com/1-carve-vs-16-nonconfrontational

Of course I hope you'll like mine enough to vote for me. :)

At last, the garden website is live! Posts about how we converted our small urban lot into a California Native Garden for wildlife, with info & photos about how created the various water features, rainwater collection, and more.

Come visit POPPINESS!

On the blog today - a post about the art show I am in and the opening reception last night.
http://www.susantaylorbrown.com/blog/art-show-update/

On the new blog today, some long overdue letters to characters.

http://www.susantaylorbrown.com/blog/letters-to-characters-14/

Today on the blog, your chance to brag. Please come over and tell me all about what you do well.

http://www.susantaylorbrown.com/blog/tell-me-something-good-about-you/

My new blog is up and running on my pretty new website. All the content from here (The Of Dogs & Writing posts, all the Incarcerated Teen Poets posts, the journey through poetry to find my father which led me to finding my sister and more) has been moved over and is now better organized so you can find things.

I hope you'll come by and say hello!

http://www.susantaylorbrown.com/blog/

Is to make it friends only.

And I'm going to set it up so that only friends can comment on it. If you don't have a LiveJournal account, don't worry, I'll be posting the URL for the new blog here and you can follow me over there. This way I can still visit with friends who are just on LiveJournal and I can feel free to rant if I need to.

I was going to turn off comments and then I realized if I did that, all the comments from all the previous years of posts would be hidden and I didn't want to do that. I just went to grab some comments I had made in someone else's journal and they had disabled comments and now I can't find them. :(

For this entry, it's still open for the public.

I'm waving to all my LiveJournal friends. I haven't posted in ages for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you all with now. But I did want to update a few things since I am cleaning up around LJ.

First off, if you view my LJ in its own setting it might look a little wonky as I've been moving web hosts and forgot that I had my LJ graphics hosted on my website. I'll get those straightened up soon.

Second, I'm moving to WordPress, the transition is almost done. I know, I know, another one bites the dust. But I'm moving twice! Once for the writing blog and once for my garden/nature blog. I'll post the info here most likely next week.

Third, to prep for the migration of my old journal entries over to the new blog I'm going through and deleting some posts that were kept to a small private group. I've saved copies of them but I don't want them public if LJ should fall apart and when you import, quite often your private stuff goes public so I just want to remove that chance.

I miss LJ and connecting with all of you around our virtual water cooler, especially those I don't see over on Facebook which seems to be an easier place for me to be of late.

Hope everyone in LJ land is doing well.

I'm off to a writing retreat this weekend and am taking some of my collage supplies to share with my friends so we can have some art fun. These are some inspiration cards I did up quickly for examples for them. The small ones are ATC size and the larger ones are those pesky magazine subscription cards. :)

It's been a while since I participated in Poetry Friday. I've missed it. Last night I attended a local poetry reading by San Francisco poet, Dean Rader. He read from his book Works & Days which I highly recommend. He's a terrific reader and his poems are very accessible. And if you are looking for a kidlit connection, well he writes about Frog and Toad. Yes, THE Frog and Toad, but the poems are NOT for children.

The reading was hosted by The Willow Glen Poetry Project which is a terrific group that meets less than ten minutes from my house. I'm so glad I found them. After Dean's reading it was an open mic night and I got to hear a variety of talented poets read their own and a few poetry lovers read poems by other writers.

I decided at nearly the last minute to read too. An original poem that wasn't from my YA novel-in-progress, that wasn't written with my normal kidlit world in mind. These simple facts shouldn't matter but the thing is, they do. They do because I can't remember the last time I had such an adrenalin attack and then adrenalin rush. I speak in front of people all the time with no fear (anymore) but this was a brand-new arena for me where I was a total stranger. No one knew I had been published or not. No one was there because they paid to hear me speak. It was both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. I love it!

This poem had it's genesis back in April of this year when, after taking the month of March off to play, I tried to distill the experience in a poem a day for National Poetry Month. The original poem appeared here. The new and much revised version is below.


Proof of Life 
by Susan Taylor Brown
 
I find it hard to take anything on faith alone.
 
I want proof, facts to nourish the idea that mindfulness
is worth the time it takes away
from doing nothing.
 
Easier to cave in to echoes from the past,
nodding as they aim ink-stained arrows
at my list of undone dreams.

I think I'm finally (okay, just beginning) to understand.
Be here now is not defined
by climbing mountains and vanquishing dragons,
it is a never-ending journey
away from
back to
face-to-face with
the me I can never trust
is good enough.

Today I shadow-step the dog on garden patrol,
down the path behind the hedgerow where unwelcome Bermuda grass
creeps under the good-neighbor fence,
along the side yard filled with dogwoods, leaves still clinging
to the almost-red-for-winter branches,
and past the pond where goldfinches gather for their morning bath.

Nose to the ground, she gobbles any bugs that cross her path,
bugs that will make her throw up in the middle of the night,
bugs she will happily eat again the next day.
 
This is her religion, her testimony to me.
She will keep me safe from all things,
even from myself.

We weave a new path through the overgrown herb garden
until the scent of mint and sage clings to us both
until she has finally sniffed everything that could be sniffed
until she is content to sprawl in a puddle of sun,
trusting I will not stray far.

She knows how brave I’m not.
 
A lone, but not lonely Ceanothus
hugs the fence, just beyond her shadow.
 
Industrious honey bees,
fuzzy bumblebees,
plump carpenter bees
and hover bees that look like flies,
all swarm the blue blossoms,
ignoring the now sleeping, snoring dog
ignoring each other
ignoring me.
 
Faith isn’t always found in stained glass cathedrals.
 
I let go,
let go of unclimbed mountains and dragons still breathing fire,
let go of everything that isn’t here and now,
let hungry, happy bees buzz all around me
and listen to the concert
I almost missed.
 
 
© Susan Taylor Brown
All rights reserved.

Jama has the Poetry Friday Round-up at Jama's Alphabet Soup. Please check out all the great postings. And come back next week when I'll share some of the poetry books I'm reading as a panelist for this year's Cybils!

Dear Boyfriend of Sister #1,
You two have been together a long time. Why? Tell me what attracts you to her. I know a lot of your downs, mostly hers. I don't know any of the highs. You can't hang around in this book as some sort of eye-candy. That's not going to work.

Tell me what she does that really ticks you off. Tell me why she doesn't have any close girlfriends. Tell me if you think the two of you will still be together by the end of this book.




Dear Little Brother of Sister #1,
Tell me your favorite memory you share with your sister. Is she nice to you? Does she help you clean your room or do your homework? Do you ever spy on her?

So far you're acting a lot like a dog in a book, a dog that doesn't really need to be there. If I can yank you out of the story and not notice, well, you're going to be history pretty soon.





Dear Mother of Sister #1,
Do you have a backbone or a heart? I can't figure out which.

Have you told her the truth or nothing but lies?

And that husband you have now, how much does he really know about the real story?


Signed,
me

I'm working on a podcast series for YouTube. I am having so much fun. It will be part motivation, finding the courage to create, part poetry workshop, and part sharing of some of my poems.

I'm having so much fun.

And I can't figure out if I should do strictly video stuff on YouTube or just audio or a combo of both.

I took a stroll through the garden today and found a few things still in bloom.

California Fuschia


California Fuschia


Refugio manzanita


Mallow


Cleveland Sage


Lacewing egg


One of our many wasps

Some of you have already seen this on Facebook or Google+ and if so, I apologize for the repeats. I'm still getting myself back up to speed with posting to my various regular haunts.

Here's the journey through a recent piece of art I did for a memorial book for a friend who had recently passed.

This was the beginning.





Next phase after many more layers.




And the final version.




I learned a lot through this process.

Really. Just a little thing to share some new words of a new project with my weekly goal's group, not my critique group of published writers, a group of readers who would just be listening for story and not thinking about construction and whether or not the book had the potential to sell.

It was just a little thing to read seven poems about one of the sisters in my novel. Really. Just a little thing. Or was it?

I've been away from writing and sharing and critiquing for a while so the thought of putting myself and my words out there made me feel all quivery in my stomach, just like a brand-new writer. But I printed out some pages and put them in the car before I could give myself a chance to change my mind. After all, I didn't have to read them if I didn't want to.

At my goal's group we go around the room and share the progress we've made in our creative life over the last week and talk about our plans for the coming week.I listened to a couple of friends, one beating herself up for not getting things done and another who regularly sets and achieves her goals. And then it was my turn.

The last few months while I've been getting physically healthy I've been doing a lot of thinking, trying to let go of excess emotional baggage (okay, all emotional baggage is excess and needs to be dumped.)  I've spent many years measuring my writing worth against too many of the wrong things --- Whether I write like someone else or as often as someone else. Whether I sell to a certain publisher or make a certain amount of money. Whether I get mentioned some place or not. Whether my reviews are good or bad or whether my books are even reviewed.

Like I said, all the wrong measurements.

Because for me, my writing worth can't be measured by what someone else does or doesn't do for me or to me.

I needed to remind myself of that. The reason I write may not be the reason anyone else writes and that's okay. I've felt a change in my writing self the last few months. Less need to compare, to feel jealously, to worry that I am somehow not doing it right.

I'm doing it the only way I know how. My way.

Writing has always been my way of making sense of the world. I write to discover who I am and why I think and feel the way I do. I write to explore the implications of choices I have made and to investigate the whys behind those choices. I write because writing defines me.

So today, when it was my turn to share about my week, I picked up a few poems and shared a bit of my WIP with readers who just wanted to hear an interesting story. They laughed at what I thought were the funny places. They gasped when I shocked them. And I could see in their eyes that question that every storyteller hopes to see in their audience, "What happens next?"

The best stories, the ones that stick in our hearts and minds, are the ones that reflect life as it is, not as we wish it were. The ones that bring us up close and personal. Sometimes the significance of a piece of work is not just in the work itself but in the memories each reader, and each writer, brings to it.

This is why I write.

I'm going to try and remember that.

Hello blog. It's been a while. First things slowed down (in the middle of the series about my incarcerated teen poets) because Livejournal had the attack on their servers and then, well, life intervened, as it has a way of doing. And even though people say you don't need to say to write a post about being gone I feel compelled to say a few things. Three, I think.

Number one, a couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of going to Las Vegas to speak at their SCBWI conference. I had a wonderful time talking about creating characters and met some enthusiastic writers. But if that wasn't enough of an event, the day after the conference I had the pleasure of finally meeting the half-sister I never knew I had.



My lovely niece capture the very first hug.



What do you think, can you see a resemblence?

We spent a wonderful day together talking about similarities and differences and telling family stories. And as I posted on Facebook (forgive me for those of you reading this/seeing pics a second time) there will always be a hole in my heart from not knowing my dad but getting to my sister and some of the rest of the family goes a long way toward filling that up again.

Second, I've been spending a lot of my time and energy on learning how to eat in new ways and man, that takes more time than I realized. It's taken most of my focus just to get into these new habits but now I'm feeling like yes, they are habits. I'm maintaining the healthy course I want to be on and I don't feel at all deprived. I've lost 38 pounds so far and plan on keeping with the program until I am as healthy as I can be and then staying on the program to keep myself that way. And by "program" I don't mean something like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or some diet with a catchy name. I count calories and track it every day. I've cut out sugar and flour except for rare occassions. And that's about it. It really is that simple.

And third, I've been able to focus on my writing again. At last. In the past year I've let go of a ton of emotional baggage that has been weighing me down for years. And then there's the whole getting healthy thing. Not eating the right foods was rotting my brain and affecting my ability to focus. So I'm back to work, hard and fast, on my YA verse novel, coincidentally enough, about a very interesting pair of sisters. I'm sure you'll get to know them a bit better as the character letters start going back and forth again.

I'm a lucky gal. Life is good and I'm smart enough to know it. You know those songs where they say, "I feel like I could fly..." Well it's like that.

Yeah, just like that.

So hello blog, I've missed you.

I heard a lot of bird chatter out back late this afternoon and went to the window to see if any birds were playing in the water. I took these pictures through the window (gonna have to wash them soon if this keeps up.)  Across about 10 minutes I took over 100 pictures. I kept waiting, wondering how many birds would land on the rock at the same time.

Poor lonely bubbling rock. Maybe some birds will come to visit soon.



One bird.


Two


Three


Four


Five


Six


Seven


Eight!!!


I actually think there might have been more than eight on there at one time but I was so memorized watching them swoop in, race off, and swoop back that I forgot to grab the camera right away.

Today was the eighth of twelve sessions teaching poetry to a group of incarcerated teenage girls.

It was a good day. I expected it would be. It happens in all the residencies I teach in detention facilities - a really bad day gets a few kids in trouble and then the next time I come in they do pretty well. I have four sessions left and the last three, I just found out, will be with a substitute in the class. That makes things really tough. Substitutes usually bring out the worst in them.

One girl got out yesterday so we had a new girl today. Pretty low key though she participated right off the bat. That doesn't usually happen. It's so hard to look at these kids and not know their stories, what brought them to such a place.

The word for the day was TRUST. Here's their group poem:


Trust
Feels like an unbreakable bond, like someone catching you when you fall
Trust looks like two lovers holding hands and it sounds like best friends gossiping on the phone.
It smells like incense in church
Trust tastes like leftovers your mom made and tears.

They wrote individual poems about trust and a few of them shared their writing.

We did another group poem, a sort of mad lib.


This is the poem
that goes in the place where you have to stay on your toes
that flows
because it runs through our veins
because we said so
and when thugs cry at night
happy, alone, solid,
this is the poem
that runs from the ground up to our soul

Another warm-up we did was envelope poems. I have a stack of envelopes, some have cards in them, some have paper folded up. Some just have a postcard. The envelopes are sealed and they are all different. Different colors, shapes, sizes. Some have stamps. Some don't. Some look like they've been folded in someone's pocket for a long time and some have words written on the outside. The idea was for them to have written a poem that is inside the envelope. Some of them did pretty well with this. Those that didn't, well, I think I need to do a better set-up to invite them to write.

I handed out copies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's How Do I Love Thee? I tried to get a discussion going about what they thought meant but that fell flat. I ended up just reading them the analysis. Then we brainstormed various ways you could let someone know you loved them without actually saying the words, "I love you." They were slow to get started but eventually filled the board. From there I had them write their love poems that never used the words love.

Again, only a few girls shared.

I handed out a copy of the poem You Learn (which I have attributed to Jorge Luis Borges) and this poem they felt more able and willing to discuss. They liked it a lot, especially the last line, "with every goodbye you learn."

Then they wrote their own versions of what they had learned and they wrote some marvelous poems.Really good stuff.

I read them the last pages of Hugging the Rock which then lead to a discussion about how come writers don't make very much money.

As I gathered up the folders one I asked one girl if she was doing okay because she didn't share anything today and she usually does. She said, "I'm okay. But I don't know what wrong me lately. All of the sudden my poems getting personal and stuck under my skin."

I told her good. That means you're a writer now.

A few months agao, laurasalas and I read and worked our way through Sage Cohen's book, Writing the Life Poetic with a little blog-to-blog book club we called, Write After Reading. The idea was that we read a lot of craft books but we don't often to the exercises. This way we read together shared the exercises that we did.

One of the chapters had an exercise about using someone else's title as the jumping off point for a poem of your own. The title I chose to write to was "How to Listen".
Here's my version.


How to Listen

Put down that stinky cigarette,
the one you promised to stop smoking.
Quit fiddling with the piano
and no, you don't need another drink.
You never need another drink.

Pretend if you have to ---
you're at work,
inspection time,
uniform neatly pressed,
just like all those lies you told me.

Eyes straight ahead.
Must. Not. Move.

Look at me, no, really look at me
in the eyes, those windows to my soul
you tried to crush.
I know I'm angry.
I want you to know it too.
I want you to hear what I'm saying
with my entire body.

I may not get this brave again.

Don't look down
or away with that
"you just kicked a puppy" expression on your face.
It doesn't work any more.

Focus on me,
the way you used to focus on me,
before vodka became your lover.

That pause between words
isn't an invitation for you to interrupt and tell me
how the world is against you.
I don't care.
Not anymore.

You don't have to listen long.
Just long enough
for me to say goodbye.


© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown.
All rights reserved.


The Poetry Friday Roundup is with Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference.

Today was the seventh of twelve sessions teaching poetry to a group of incarcerated teenage girls.

We had a substitute teacher, the same one we had a week ago and that the girls have quite often. They should have been fine but they were rowdy, talkative, up and down all the time. When I came in two girls had already had incident reports filed on them. One more had been yanked out to talk to a counselor and mental health pulled a different girl out every ten minutes for "check-ins" which makes all the girls uncomfortable.

I persevered but I knew right away it wasn't going to be one of their better days.

Several of the girls had pulled prompt cards on Monday so they could write on their own time. I didn't know if anyone would share but three of them did. Long poems. I was pleased and they immediately asked if they could have new prompts for today. (At the end of class 4 girls took 2 prompts each.)

The word of the day was SATISFACTION.

Here's their group poem.

Satisfaction
Satisfaction smells like victory.
It tastes like your favorite food, something you just cooked, sweat dripping off your cheeks after you win a softball game.
Satisfaction feels like a ton of weight  lifted off your shoulders, a medal hanging around your neck.
It looks like somebody climbing the highest mountain in the world
Satisfaction sounds like windchimes, applause, someone chanting your name over and over again.

We did individual poems on satisfaction but too many of them veered off into inappropriate topics. We tried "I seemed to be, but really I am" poems and we had rounds of "I don't get", "this is dumb" and "I'm done," even though the page was blank.

We tried some "I am" poems.

We tried to talk about Langston Hughes and "a dream deferred".

We brainstormed nouns, adjectives, emotions, and verbs on the board, picked a few out of each column and wrote poems on that.

I handed out prompt cards of unfinished sentences and had them finish the sentence and write a list poem.

Some girls wrote. Some girls popped up and down and asked to sharpen their pencil before every poem.

When I stopped to ask one girl if she needed help she asked me if I thought they were doing good today. I asked her what she thought. She said she didn't think they were having a very good day. She was right.

When I told them there were no treats to hand out today no one argued with me. They knew.

It wasn't the best day but it wasn't the worst. As the substitute they had today said, all we can do is come in with a pure and open heart. The rest is up to them.

These are some of the poetry prompt cards I use with my incarcerated teen poets (though they can and are used with all sorts of creative writing classes.) They can be interchangeable, of course, but for my planning purposes, yellow cards are good prompts for list poems, lavender cards are emotion cards that I use for our "word of the day" sensory warm-ups, white cards are questions and green cards are unfinished sentences. I add to these all the time.

From Poetry Prompt Cards

From Poetry Prompt Cards

From Poetry Prompt Cards

From Poetry Prompt Cards

Today was the sixth of twelve sessions teaching poetry to a group of incarcerated teenage girls.

I confess, it was hard to gear up the energy to go back there today. Two bad sessions in a row knocked the gumption right out of me. It's not that my other sessions have always gone perfectly. There's always a time you hit the wall but you can still see over it to where you know you're heading. But that last week left me feeling like I was floundering, unable to give them that undefinable something that is a gift from a teacher to a student, a power that I know comes with being able to voice your feelings.

I prepped hard all day Sunday. I had tons of writing prompts and ideas and lyrics to some of their favorite songs and a bag full of full-sized candy bars.

And oh how they surprised me. It's not that they suddenly became devoted fans of poetry. It's that they took chances and engaged with the process of writing.

On Friday several of them had asked for one of my prompt cards so they could write some extra poems on their own time. They shared those before we got started today. Then it was time to do a group warm-up on the board. I loved how they all begged for a chance to pick the word for the day. The word they chose was NORMAL and here's what they came up with.


NORMAL
Normal tastes like oatmeal and water and sometimes like Kool Aid.

It feels dull, boring, like tears or a paper cut 'cause life hurts sometimes.

Normal smells fruity like Mango-Tango and flowers and the air around you. It's like when you walk into your grandmother's house and it smells like food.

Normal sounds like your family talking, your favorite song on the radio, my mom

Normal looks like a boy and a girl in love, a girl and a girl in love, a boy and a boy in love, a drag queen.
Normal looks like the girls in here.


From there they went on to write their own poems on the topic of "normal." One wrote about how normal for her means getting up early to take care of children that aren't hers and making sure her mom has something to eat when she comes down from her high. Another wrote about how normal was being molested by her father. I was so proud of the writing they did even though I had to shove my hands in my pockets to keep from handing out hugs.

We talked about various poetic devices in general and then more specifically as it related to the song lyrics they asked me to bring in. And then they wrote their own poems modeled on the songs. They all participated and before I left, most of them had asked for new prompt cards so they could do even more writing on their own time.

What was different this time from the last two times? I don't know. I was just thrilled for them to have such a good session.

One more thing was different from last week. This time, when I handed out chocolate, they said "thank you."

Today was the fifth of twelve sessions teaching poetry to a group of incarcerated teenage girls.

It's killing me. Not just the work, which is emotionally draining, but it is killing my spirit. My confidence is melting.

We had a new student today and she loves to talk and loves to be the center of attention. Major extrovert. Good for her but hard to teach around, especially with little backup from the teacher. Because she was new, the rest of the girls in the class were more interested in hearing her stories than doing their work. I brought in chocolate as a treat for the end of the day and their comment to that, "Whatever. I don't care."

We did the word courage as a group poem. It took twice as long than usual. I read to them from Ruth Gendler's book, The Book of Qualities. It should have been a nice lead from the emotions we did with the group poem but when I asked them to write one of their own they all said, "I don't get it. Can we do something else?"

We watched Sarah Kay perform her wonderful poem HANDS and managed about a two minute discussion on hands before they wrote their own. Only one person wanted to share.

I gave up and moved to art, asking them to trace their hands and decorate them, telling them it would be some of the art we would use to decorate the poetry collection we were building. I brought in lovely zentangle hands and encouraged them to try some tangles. Nope. Not a one.

The entire day the new student was up and walking around, going over to read the other student's work, constantly in motion, constantly talking (but she did do the work.) No matter what I said, she couldn't keep still for long. The teacher finally said something.

Something happened with one girl. She was called out of the room and when she came back she just slumped in her chair and cried. I couldn't ask why but I offered her paper and encouraged her to write about it. I told her she could tear it up when she was done. She just nodded, clutched the pencil tightly in her fingers, and continued to cry.

I don't know what else to do to try and reach them. They won't talk, won't interact so the time just stretches on and on.

This is hitting every single one of my insecurities. 7 more sessions to go. I have no idea what I will use to fill the time.

I don't think it was the haiku. I think they just decided that today was the day they weren't going to write, weren't going to work, weren't going to cooperate. The girl who had written the poem that made her (and me) cry on Friday had lost her privileges for the week so she opted out of everything saying it didn't matter what she did because she was already screwed. She kept mouthing out to everyone around her.

Midway we stopped to talk about what they did or didn't like about poetry. Most of them said they liked poetry fine as long as they could write it on their own time and not in a forced poetry class. I understand them not wanting to write and being half-assed about it all but still, they are in lock up and they have to follow the rules, get credits toward graduation, etc.

No matter what I asked them the answer was no or I don't care.

The two hours felt like 8 and I was completely drained when I was done.

I think this was one of the testing sessions that tends to happen each time I teach in lock-up situations. I need to come up with some really good and fun poetry lessons to share on Friday. I'm thinking of YouTube videos of poets performing their work. I also need to come in full of confidence to show them they haven't beaten me.

I think what is the hardest about days like this is that I know in my heart how poetry and writing can help them think about their lives differently, how it can help them begin to heal. I know how writing things down can make things better, even if it is just for a sliver of that particular moment. I know how writing has saved me until I was strong enough to save myself.

But I can't tell them that. I can only try to light a path.

Today was the third of twelve sessions teaching poetry to a group of incarcerated teenage girls.

We had a full class but a substitute teacher. He seemed to really get into the spirit of poetry which I think made the session more fun for the girls. There were two girls absent on Friday. I had left them each a note with copies of the poems I had shared and the two poetry assignments for the day. I really didn't expect them to do the work but both turned in not one but two long poems. I was quite pleased.

Before we got started the girl who's poem caused such a reaction on Friday handed me a copy of her poem. She hadn't put it in her folder on Friday saying that she wanted to recopy it. I didn't expect to see it again. I thought that after she had written it and allowed it to be shared that she wanted to keep it to herself so I was surprised and pleased when she gave me the copy. But I was floored when a couple of the girls asked me read it again. I did and once more, just like on Friday, they clapped and cheered for the author. It was a great start to the day and, I think, a huge boost to the author.

The word they picked for today was "beauty."  Here's their group poem.

BEAUTY

Beauty sounds like little birds chirping in the morning and an angel playing a harp. It sounds like a waterfall, like the ocean waves hitting the rocks at the crack of dawn.

It tastes like a sweet strawberry dipped in chocolate, honey on your morning toast, an orange, chocolate turtles, a caramel apple. Beauty can also be bitter as a lemon.

Beauty feels like a baby's bottom, gentle as rose petals, soft as silk.

It smells clean,like a fabric softener sheet, like a red rose, like Cherry Blossom perfume at Victoria's Secret, like fresh cut lawn after the rain.

Beauty is graceful like a princess dancing at the ball. It looks like the setting sun, stars twinkling near the moon, a swan floating on a sparkling lake, city light.

Beauty looks like me.

After the group poem they each did a short writing on the topic of beauty. Unlike the boys, there's no grumbling about not wanting to write (even though they know that's why I'm there.) There's one girl who wears a perpetual scowl and rarely writes more than two lines, no matter what the topic. She never feels good and is always in a bad mood. I can sense a world of hurting going on behind her eyes. I just keep opening poetry doors and hope that one of them will click for her.

There are two girls who have slightly unusual names and I continue to struggle with the pronunciation. It is frustrating to both of us when I mess one of them up.

Next we talked about how people judge them, brainstorming various ways of being judged on the board. Then they wrote about how they felt the world saw them. It might have been too soon for this prompt. I don't know. Two of the seven didn't write anything. The others all wrote about how they didn't care what other people thought about them. By the third poem being read I got the feeling they were spouting back something they thought I wanted to hear, something they had talked about it sessions with their counselor. There were original thoughts in the poems but a lot of stuff that I think came from the therapy process this system uses. I'll have to rethink how I introduce this to perhaps get a better response. One girl chose to write about her uncle instead of herself and did a great job. I think the two girls who chose not to write had a lot to say but weren't quite brave enough yet to put it down on paper.

After that we talked about who they really were, who they would see when they looked in the mirror, who they wanted the world to see. The response was about the same. This was one of those exercises that didn't go over as well as I had hoped.

I'm finding that lessons that fell flat with the boys work well with the girls and vice versa.

We talked about list poems and did an example of one on the board then talked about how we could expand the list and enrich the poem.

They also did a group Acrostic on the word POEM

Power within
Overcoming struggles only I understand
Emotions come out
Memories last forever

I finished with reading some more from Hugging the Rock. They are all hoping the mother comes back and I think we'll have the potential for some interesting discussion by the time we get to the end of the book. Even though I had told them that I had written the book and talked about some of my experiences while writing the book, for some reason today it clicked with them, that it was my name on the cover. They appeared to be a wee bit impressed. (The substitute teachers was a lot impressed.)

Before I left, four girls asked if they could pick a prompt card to write an extra poem before Wednesday.

Write more poetry on your own time? Of course I said yes. :)


Read about session #1

Read about session #2

Today was the second of twelve sessions teaching poetry to a group of incarcerated teenage girls. We were missing two girls today so we were a small group of just seven.

When I got there they were just finishing PE and complaining about working out. Two of the girls chose to not get credit rather than do the actual work and I was afraid I would be dealing with the same thing in the class. There was no happy, "Hey Miss Susan!" or "What are we going to do today?" When I work with the boys, even from the first day, they are talking to me, asking questions. The boys are usually much less interested in poetry than they are in talking to me. The girls, while all of them may not be interested in poetry, they'd rather do that right now than connect to me. I understand. I'm new. One more person with power over them (they think) or the power to hurt them. It all takes time.

After doing these types of workshops for a while I've learned it usually takes 3-4 visits before I feel I've made a real connection. And I'm not naive enough to think I connect with each kid. There are always some I don't reach. I know I can't save the world. Not even this little corner of it. I can only plant seeds in what I hope is fertile ground.

We did another group poem to start the day. I let someone pick one of my word cards. (Someone always loves to "pick a card, any card.) And the word they picked was joy. Here's the group poem they did.

All but one of the girls offered up ideas for the poem which was pretty good. I shared a few poems that I liked and tried to get some discussion going but other than a couple of comments, the discussion fell flat. Part of that is they just don't feel comfortable with me yet and part of that (probably most of it) is that I'm not asking the right questions. I'll have to brainstorm more questions for the next set of poems I share. I think my insecurities really ramp up when I ask a question and there is silence. The four other adults in the room heard me but don't speak up. (In other classes the teacher, probation officer or aides have all spoken up. Not here.)

We moved on to what I was thinking of as another warm-up - "I remember poems." I had them brainstorm some things they remembered (recent past and more distant past) with no stipulations on happy or sad memories. I read them a few examples and then let them write. After ten minutes, everyone was done except for one girl. She was one of the ones not interested in poetry. A bit of a smart aleck. Last visit she was willing to miss getting her fine art credits if it meant she had to write poetry and share what she had written.

I went over to check on her. She said she was writing about a friend she made in elementary school. She paused and then said, "He died last year."

I asked her if writing it out was helping and she said yes.

We went around the room and everyone else shared their "I remember poems." They were good. Better than I think they thought they could be. A few of them surprised the teacher. (I love it when that happens.)

I looked over at the girl in the back of the room and asked her if she was done yet. She said no but promised she would finish it if I would just let her write. I nodded. At least she was writing. And she wasn't mouthing off to stir things up. She bent back over her paper.

I shared Maya Angelou's poem Life Doesn't Frighten Me. We talked about fears a little bit and I read some examples of variations of Life Doesn't Frighten Me that some other students had written. Then I turned them loose to write their own versions. When I checked in on the girl in the back of the room she was hunched even closer to her paper, her nose almost touching her desk. I leaned close and asked her if she was done and she shook her head no.

The rest of the class shared their new poems to much snapping and clapping. (Snapping is what they use instead of applause here and in many of the units but try as I might, I can't seem to get in the habit of snapping instead of clapping.)

I finished up by reading a few more pages of Hugging the Rock. I got a few responses to my questions but again, not much. I was getting ready to thank them for their participation in the day when a hand popped up in the back of the room.

"Done! I'm done."

The teacher was surprised but complimented the girl on finishing the assignment when she had a habit of blowing things off.

I asked her if she wanted to read it. She shook her head. I asked if she wanted me to read it for her and she said, in a voice barely above a whisper, "Please."

That girl, that sullen, I don't want to do anything and I'd rather have an F girl, she wrote THREE PAGES. Both sides.

As I read, she curled up into a ball on her chair, pulling her shirt up to cover her face, all but her eyes which stared at the desk.

I read about how she remembered her friend that she met when she was in the fourth grade.
I read about how she remembered him sticking up for her when things were tough, and how she remembered all the fun they had together.
I read about how she remembered when he was changing into a difficult teen and how she consoled him when he broke up with his girlfriend.
I read about how she remembered her own life turning upside down, about how her father kicked her in the stomach and how CPS took her away.
I read about how she remembered lashing out, running away, spiraling downward.
I read about how she remembered this friend, this special best friend, shaking her, telling her to get her crap together because she was better than this.
I read about how she remembered being sent from home to home to home until she landed where she is today.

And then I read. . .  I read about how she remembered getting a phone call from her cousin last year and how she remembered finding out that this friend, this special best friend that she always knew she could count on, was dead.

When I finished reading there was silence in the room. The author of this powerful piece was still hunched over her desk, tears streaming down her cheeks. I put my hand on her shoulder and she was shaking. I wanted to pull this young woman into my arms and hold her and let her cry as much as she wanted but of course, I couldn't do that.

I thanked her for the beautiful writing, thanked her for sharing her precious memory with us.

The room exploded in applause.

This is why I write poetry. This is why I teach poetry.

When we let it, poetry heals.