Green Papers for Art

Excellent new website I found: Americans For the Arts (http://www.americansforthearts.org/) and they have two blogs I like.

Green Paper: Arts in Healthcare

Green Paper: Artists’ Residency Programs

Read all about a nationwide effort to make sure arts education gets the attention, respect, and resources it deserves. Here's what their Facebook page says:

Arts Education is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL for the development of our children, from as early as kindergarten all the way up into higher level education.

An education in Fine Arts encourages:

• more developed habits of critical and creative thinking
• more perseverance and dedication to a given task
• better psychological and physical health
• self-discipline, intrapersonal and interpersonal skills

A child who participates in Fine Arts is:

• more likely to succeed academically
• more likely to succeed socially
• more able to express his or herself
• inclined to be more literate than his or her peers

If America's children are to be sucessful in all aspects of their life, then an education that emphasizes Fine Arts is crucial.

Support the Arts!

Funny Poets Dot Com

A website with list upon list of funny poems. Even some rude limericks, for those of us who love them and can never remember them. Anyone can submit a poem to the site.

Here's a wonderful one. I may have to take these words to my poet kids during class.


Eschewing Obfuscation

The raison d'etre of this dissertation is an etude in eschewing obfuscation.

Each day, with cyclicality quotidian,
Ante- if you wish, or post-meridian,
Make a time for self-examination
For floccinaucinihilipilification.

And if encountered in this introspection,
Expunge it! Hurl it forth in firm rejection.
For surely there's a modicum of worth
In everything God put upon the earth.

Ex nihilo, for certain, nihil fit
So take a chance, and see what comes of it.

(The raison d'etre of this dissertation
Is an etude in eschewing obfuscation,
For hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian
Words to me, are obviously alien.

Copyright; Tad Lawson
Email: tagady@aol.com

Almost 49 "if all else fails, sharks have a keen sense of hearing"

Yes, tomorrow is my birthday. I have elaborate plans, and several new empty notebooks, for getting my "50th year" off to a good start. Diet, exercise, vitamins. Water. Walking a little, swimming a lot. Keeping a daybook -- half diary, half journal, half sketch book, half PAD -- that's just like me, too many halves. I've been in a tiny email correspondence with Angela, who's raising money for flood victims in the Philippines, and I've started my thesis planning in earnest. Al is being very generous, and gently prodding, and I have to get going before I blow it. I even left a message for Laurie on her 50th birthday -- the actual day. My poetic life is up for grabs -- I plan to catch it myself.

I am happy to have found "What To Do About Sharks" by Vivian Shipley on the AAP website. What a great poem, and I hope to teach it to my 5th graders at Regnart this spring. They've asked me to come back, although I can't imagine where they are getting the money.

I'm intrigued to try to find and read something written by the new Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Herta Mueller (with an umlaut, not an 'e'). I like what the committee said about her: "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed" -- and I love the title of one of her books, at least the English translation, The Land of Green Plums. (Heart-animal is good too)

Herztier, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1994. Published in an English translation by Michael Hofmann as The Land of Green Plums, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1996

I just finished reading Francine Prose's 2000 novel, Blue Angel, which I adored, and kept me good company yesterday while I was home sick -- a cold? swollen throat -- headache -- I think it's more likely Remodel Pneumonia.

Here's a little lovely poem from Heidy Steidlmayer, published in Poetry in 2007. I know, I should have read that issue a while ago, but I am slow. I love the sounds in this poem. And the form. I'm a sucker for sound and shape and poems that have body and not just mind.

Scree

I have seen the arrested
shrub inform the crag with grief.
Lichens crust the rocks with red.
Thorns punctuate the leaf.

Sorrow is not a desert
where one endures the other --
but footing lost and halting
step. And then another.

Poem In the Making -- Or -- Process Flow??

This is a the cover of a thank you note I received from one of the third graders who came to hear me speak at Discovery Day, Regnart Elementary School's annual day when community members come and tell the kids what they do for a living.

Even though I don't make my living as a poet, I love to talk to the students about how a poet lives and works. They love me, too, which is the best reason to go. I get four third grade classes, for about 35 minutes each. We write a poem together as a class, I give them prompts, they shout out, we write on the board, we argue about which word is best, and their classroom teacher writes down the finished project. Then I answer the inevitable quesitons: "do you have a book" and "are you famous" (no, and no) and we all break for lunch. Then their teachers make them write me thank-you notes, which I love love love, especially the ones that say "Mrs. Brown, you are the BEST POET EVER." Who wouldn't love it??

Anyway, this year, one of the boys drew this on his thank you note. It's a picture of the process -- me writing on the board, the kids all shouting out their ideas. I love it, because it's not one of the overly cute and perfectly scripted letters that third grade girls are so good at. I showed it to my boss, and he was amazed -- this kid may have a future in business! What a kick.

And here's the poem we were creating:

School

Third grade floats as high as Ms. Cavanaugh.

We are smiley, shyly, shoelaces,

highly smart.

We float to another galaxy, like a television.

School obeys, does what we tell it to do,

comes up, starts dancing

with screamy, colorful moving pictures like a TV,

floating

squeezed tightly in a box.

Don't you just love it??

Poem In Your Pocket and Bundle Boards

Jackson surprised me last night by telling me he had to have a poem for "Poem In Your Pocket" day today for school -- Mrs. Sharma, bless her Language Arts teacher's heart -- was requiring all the kids to pick poems, write them down, and carry them around! So, I dug out of the garage (where it is in temporary storage while we are temporarily living in this funky mint green rental house on a hillside) my box of poetry books I use when I teach. The good news, is that right away Jackson and I were able to find a poem, about wolves howling. "They howl and it seems to comfort them" or something like that. A perfect teenage boy poem. He wrote it out by hand, and by the time he was done, he almost had it by heart, a fine unintended side effect. He also sat on the couch and read from that anthology, "Talking to the Rain," for at least 30 minutes. I had to bite my lip to keep from telling him how happy I was to see him reading poems -- not a perfect teenage boy's mom thing to say.

(Check out the cool blog about books I found while looking for the wolf poem!! They have a whole list of kids books.)

In the meantime, I'm writing two poems: one about bundle boards and one about something else I can't remember right now. I'm tired. It's not as bizarre as it sounds.