October Poetry Box Challenge – Imagination leaps

 

 

I love letting my imagination set sail when I write poems (amidst a thousand other things).

So for October, I challenge you to write a poem with a dollop of imagination.

I suggest letting your poem sit for a few days before you send it to me so you can spot things you might like to improve – or mistakes.

 

Here are some tips and starting points:

Ask some what if questions. What if I could fly? What if the world were made of broccoli?

Imagine you are a character from a book.

See things in the real world completely differently. A world of tall things. A topsy-turvy world.

Invent some animals as I did in my poem ‘Anifables.’

Write an ordinary poem about ordinary things but then give it an extraordinary ending.

Imagine something strange happens in your back garden.

Imagine you have a secret.

Invent a new food or tree or machine.

Imagine you meet a famous person.

 

….. or surprise me … with your own imagination             l   e   a   p

 

Hunt for really good detail before you start writing your poem.

Listen to every line.

Test out three very different endings.

Remember to give it a title.

 

How will you set your poem out?

Hide a surprise in your poem somewhere.

 

Imagine something that happened in history very differently.  Like landing on the moon.

 

h a v e     f u n    !

 

SEND your poem to paulajoygreen@gmail.com

DEADLINE Friday October 28th

Include your name, age, year and name of school. You can include your teacher’s email if you like.

P l e a s e    p u t   ‘Imagination poem’ in the subject line of your email.

I will pick some favourites to post on the blog and have a book for at least one reader and maybe even a book for a class.

I will post on  Monday 31st October.

 

 

 

August Challenge on Poetry Box – telling little poem stories

Poems that tell little stories can be really fun to read. Your challenge this month is to write a story poem. It can be really short or medium.

Here are some tips for you:

 

Use something that happened to you or someone you know as a starting point.

You don’t have to tell the whole story! Tell the bits that interest or fascinate you.

You can keep it real or add a dollop of imagination. Or do more than one version.

 

Retell a story from a book you have read

You might keep bits the same and you might add your own twists but you will have to miss things out – it is a poem after all.

 

Retell a myth or legend

Which bits matter and need to be in your poem? You might write from the point of view of one of the characters.

 

Take a book title as a starting point for your poem and then write your own story poem.

 

Take a newspaper headline as a starting point and then write your own story poem.

 

Take a favourite character from a story you like and invent a little poem story for them.

What changes about them?

 

What changes in your story poem?

Is there a surprise? There doesn’t have to be!

 

Try different beginnings and endings.

 

h a v e     f u  n     ! * ! *!

 

SEND your poem to paulajoygreen@gmail.com

DEADLINE Saturday August 27th

Include your name, age, year and name of school. You can include your teacher’s email if you like.

P l e a s e    p u t   ‘Story poem’ in the subject line of your email.

I will pick some favourites to post on the blog and have a book for at least one reader and maybe even a book for a class.

I will post on Wednesday August 31st.

Poetry Box June challenge – I love poems with things in them

 

 

Now that winter is here, and the fire is roaring, the soup simmering and the wind whipping about our house like a mad dog, it is time to snuggle into good books and a spot of poetry writing!

This month I challenge you to write a poem about a thing.

It might be something you love or something someone in your family loves.

It might be comfortable, strange, old, new, surprising. Maybe you don’t like it that much at all!

It might move. It might stay still. But it is not alive. It is an object.

 

I love poems with things in them.

 

You might use the thing to tell a teeny tiny story.

You might hide how you feel about the thing in your poem.

You might use words to take a photo of your thing.

You might not ever say what the thing is.

 

You might use the thing to write a poem about a person (tricky!). Maybe it is something favourite of your mum or dad!

 

You need to think carefully about how you start and end your poem. Have a few tries and then pick your favourites.

HOT TIP: Try hunting for lots of good words before you start writing!

 

ANOTHER HOT TIP: Listen to the sound of every line so your ears can tell if your poem flows well.

 

SEND your poem to paulajoygreen@gmail.com

DEADLINE Tuesday June 28th

Include your name, age, year and name of school. You can include your teacher’s email if you like.

P l e a s e    p u t   ‘Thing poem’ in the subject line of your email.

I will pick some favourites to post on the blog and have a book for at least one reader and maybe even a book for a class.

I will post on Thursday June 30th.

 

Early morning in Auckland City

Early morning in the city
and I hear little waves
of trucks and cars
like little waves of moths
against my window.

.

my periscope cloud and another winter challenge

Children often ask me where I get my ideas from.  I usually say the world. Ideas just come to me like little flocks of birds. Little starting points jump out at me.

This poem I wrote fits our Winter theme this week. It was the most amazing sight! Maybe you can have a go at a cloud poem for the Winter challenge. Where to send it is below!

 

Today at the beach

I saw a skinny cloud

sticking its long skinny head

up like a periscope, as though

it wanted to see over the Tasman Sea

to Australia, and see what all

the other clouds were doing

and to see (most especially)

if any other cloud

knew how to look like

a long skinny periscope!

 

 

DEADLINE for your Winter-Poem Challenge: Thursday June 12th

Send to paulajoygreen@gmail.com. Include your name, year, age and name of school. You can include your teacher’s name and email. PLEASE say it’s for the Winter-Poem challenge.

I will post my favourites  and have a book prize for one poet (Year 0 to Year 8).

similes are EYE catching … give it a go

Similes are way to give your poem extra zing.

Similes can be EYE catching.

I always hunt for a few when I need one … then I test them out and choose my favourite.

Sometimes a poem gets an extra spark with just one EXTRA good simile.

Sometimes you can use a truck load of similes.

 

H e r e    i s     a    c h a  l  l e n g e:

Pick an animal.

Write down all the important parts of the animal (colour, kind of skin, ears, pattern, trunk, special things like tusks and so on).

Find similes for some of them.

Write a short poem about that animal using just one EXTRA good simile.

Write another poem using as many similes as you like but only use your favourite ones.

LISTEN to your poem.

Get a friend or someone in your family to tell you which simile catches their EYE!

 

You can enter this in the Eye-Poem Challenge.

DEADLINE for your Eye-Poem Challenge: Thursday March 27th

Send to paulajoygreen@gmail.com. Include your name, year, age and name of school. You can include your teacher’s name and email. PLEASE say it’s for the eye-poem challenge.

I will post my favourites and have a book prize for one poet.

Using my eyes on an aeroplane

Usually I write a poem with my head in the clouds and my feet on the ground.

Last week I flew to Wellington and wondered what it would be like to write a poem with my head on the ground and my feet in the clouds.

I used my eyes to hunt for a poem through the aeroplane window.

What strange place can you go hunting for a poem? And use your eyes to spot things?

 

F l y i n g

I am flying through a blue

that falls all the way to the ground,

but my feet are in the clouds.

I can see Mt Taranaki

with no winter clothes,

and white caps of foam

waving on the sea.

I wave back.

 

Have a go at writing a poem from somewhere different. Use your eyes to help you.

You can enter your poem in the Eye-Poem Challenge.

DEADLINE for your Eye-Poem Challenge: Thursday March 27th

Send to paulajoygreen@gmail.com. Include your name, year, age and name of school. You can include your teacher’s name and email. PLEASE say it’s for the eye-poem challenge.

I will post my favourites and have a book prize for one poet.

the fabulous IF: A Treasury of Poems for Almost Every Possibility & a wee challenge for you

  

When I was mailing my list of AMAZING NZ Bookshops that sell poetry for children  (see my page), I discovered some books I would like to buy. I can’t buy them all at once so I still have my secret eye on a few. I am going to tell you about a book I got at TIme Out Bookshop in Mt Eden (they have a lovely wee room especially for children’s books!). I saw at least one other bookshop had a copy of this book.

If: A Treasury of Poems for Almost Every Possibility Edited by Allie Esiri & Rachel Kelly (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2012)

Allie was an actress for a long time (looks like she loves Shakespeare) and worked for the New York Times. She has three children.

Rachel worked at Vogue then at The Times in London. She has five children and has always loved poems.

The book is divided into sections (‘Growing Up,’ ‘Humour and Nonsense,’ ‘Tell Me a Tale,’ ‘Magic, Friendship and Love,’ ‘Animals, Nature and Seasons,’ ‘War History and Death,’ ‘Lessons for Life’ and ‘Bedtime.’  That does seem to cover a BIG range of possibilities. I can think of lots more though: Special occasions, food, home, moods, machines, things, places, people, clothes,   adventure, our bodies, space, science, mathematics … BUT! You can never fit all you want in treasury as I have discovered on several occasions now.

There are loads of very famous (world famous!) poets in the book: Shakespeare, Edward Lear, ee cummings, Lewis Carroll, Spike Milligan, AA Milne. Many of the poets in this book wrote for adults more than they wrote for children, many of the poets are dead and most of the poets are men. If I had the whole world from which to gather a a collection of poem gems from I would come up with a very different mix. Lots of the poems I would pick would be written by authors who usually write for children (like Hilaire Belloc, Valerie Worth, Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, Caleb Brown and so on), but I would go back into the past because that is fascinating. But this is a wonderful collection full of poetry diamonds, emeralds and volcanic rock!

I adore the illustrations. They are a mix of drawing and cut-out words in lemon-yellow and white, with tiny little lemony drawings floating on pages ( a cat, a flower, a star and so on). It is a beautiful book to hold and smell and look at.

The poems take you on a fabulous poem journey. You go along the roads and paths of  poems written from the distant past until now. I loved reading writing from ages ago when I was little — discovering how poems written in the past sing in your ear in a different way.

Next week I am going to tell you more about AA MIlne and give you a special challenge but his poem ‘The King’s Breakfast‘ is in the book. I loved saying this poem when I was little:

The king asked

The Queen, and

The Queen asked

The Diarymaid:

‘Could we have some butter for

The Royal slice of bread?’

The Queen asked

The Diarymaid,

The Dairymaid,

Said ‘Certainly,

I’ll go and tell

The cow

Now

Before she goes to bed.’

(it is a long poem so that is just the first verse. But it is really good to say out loud because it has a great rhythm and repeats itself beautifully.)

The wonderful thing about this treasury is you keep finding poem gems.

A Challenge: Try writing a poem that fits in one of the sections in the book (see above)! I will post my favourites. Send to paulajoygreen@gmail.com. Include your name, year, age and name of school. You can include your teacher’s name and email address if you like.

My big walk and a gigantic machinery challenge for you all to do with a cool prize

Hope you had a lovely Labour Weekend! I went for a huge two-and-half hour walk around our country roads (actually I did it twice!). There are lots of hills and some are extremely steep which is always fun. It took me an hour to get to the station so I had an ice cream at the shop.

Most of the days though I read which I think is BLISS!

When I was at the beach last week I saw some gigantic bits of machinery that were all set to work on the road. I thought it would be great to do some machinery poems – especially diggers, and graders and steamrollers. It is always fun thinking up similes and sounds to use in machine poems. But I decided this was a golden opportunity to play with verbs (action or doing words).

So I invite you to write a poem about a road machine. Make a list of all the verbs you can think of that fit your road machine. Verbs can give a poem zing and zest. Play with how you put them in the poem. You might just use one or two verbs that shine out or you might use LOADS of verbs. Over to you. You can even include a drawing that I could post too.

Send your poem to me by Thursday November 7th. Include you name, age, year and name of school. You can include your teacher’s name and email address if you like.

I wil post some of my favourites, but I will pick one poem to award a special prize to thanks to Scholastic. They have sent me a little blue bag containing five Little Digger books by Betty and Alan Gilderdale. These books are classic New Zealand picture books. The stories have such a good rhythm they BEG to be read out loud, time and time again. They are like a poem story or a story poem (‘So they got a bigger digger/ but the bigger digger stuck’). The rhyme is like the engine of a train because it keeps the story moving with a clackety clackety clack! I think there is an essential spot on every child’s bookshelf reserved for these books. Five little treasures, I say. Thank you Scholastic.

The Grey Day gets a second draft … hmmm

Yesterday I wrote my poem using colours. Today I want to write another draft of it because it didn’t sound right to me as I read it.

Here are some things that I like to try when I edit my poems:

1. Is the first line doing its job? I try out others and then pick my favourite.

2. Is the last line doing its job? I try out others and then pick my favourite.

3. Does every line sound good? If not I play with the words a bit more.

4. Are there too many adjectives?

5. Is there something I could take out and leave the reader to guess?

6. Am I happy with the title?

 

Here is the first draft of my poem. I have put in bold the bits I am not happy with.

 

 

The Grey Day

 

out of the day glazed with grey

a black rooster with a red comb

a horse wearing a pale blue coat

a piece of orange rind on the black sand

a shrivelled yellow ball that will never bounce

footprints like stitching across the wet sand

two walkers dressed like black rocks

black rocks shivering like walkers in raincoats

purple jellyfish opening out like Japanese fans

little bluebottles that look like blue pebbles

a rusty pinecone and a pink hairclip

 

the misty grey racing in from the sea

is not like concrete, it’s like hairspray

 

there is a gull flying over me high

squawking, squawking, squawking

as if to say hello and good morning

unless they squawk and squawk

even when the beach is empty

 

 

 

Here is the draft I have done. I will look at it again next week to see if I am happy with it. Let me know what you think.

 

The Grey Day

 

Out of the day glazed with grey

there’s a black rooster with a red comb

a horse with a pale blue coat

 

On the sand, a piece of orange rind

a yellow ball that will never bounce

footprints like stitching across the wet sand

 

Two walkers dressed like black rocks

black rocks dressed like walkers in raincoats

purple jellyfish opening like Japanese fans

bluebottles that look like blue pebbles

a rusty pinecone and a pink hairclip

 

The misty grey races in from the sea

and it’s not like concrete, it’s like hairspray

 

There’s a gull flying over me high

squawking, squawking, squawking

as if to say ‘hello’ and ‘good morning,’

unless she squawks and squawks

even when the beach is empty