Random Words

Poetry is something I've always been a fan of. Maybe, dare I say it, it is one of the things that I am as close to passionate about as I get. There: I didn't really say it.

In the past, I have always incorporated a great deal of poetry into my school day. Nearly every day, we interacted with a poem. The kids and I read it, analyzed it, wrote it, spoke it, shared it. It is my favorite kind of literature to "play" with, both as a reader and a writer.

This year, I have done much less of it. For a lot of reasons that I am not about to get into. However, for the past several weeks (even if the "Currently Teaching" links don't show it) we have been working on poetry (and reading Cat's Cradle).

That, of course, gets me interacting with more poetry, and, in turn, it gets me writing more, mostly as exercises with the students, but, on my own, as well. It is inevitable: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more it pours out of you. I'm like a sponge, that way.

Anyway, today in class, we worked on "Random Word Poems." I saved all of my pages from my "Word A Day" calendar, and I dealt out one word to each of them. Their task was to write a poem that had something to do with that word. They could include the word in their poem. They could write about the word. They could write about how the word made them feel, what they thought of when they first saw the word. They could do just about whatever they wanted. Some of them were pretty good for first drafts dashed off in fifteen minutes. As always, I wrote with them. My word was "hydromancy," which is divination through the use of liquid (usually water). Or something like that. And, here is my poem:

Hydromancy

My grandmother read the portents
in the tea leaves.
My mother told others' fortunes
with the tarot.
I use hydromancy to
divine futures.

With every flush
I
predict
the
end
of
the
world.