Poetry Friday & #227 - A Dictionary Poem

Dictionary Forest Hike

by Amy LV

This is poem #24 in a Friday series of poems about poems.

Students - it is an interesting exercise to try to write many poems about one topic, and I have done this for the past 24 Fridays - poems about poems.  If you don't want to repeat yourself over and over again (poetry is great, poetry is great, poetry is great), you must discover new ways to hold an idea up to the light.  This poem is about a half-real/half-imaginary place.  For some time I have been longing to write a poem about the dictionary as a place to hang out, and this poem grew from that long-time-longing.  Here is where a writer's notebook comes in handy; each little scribbling waits patiently, hoping to be snapped up by a project.

Another funny thing about this poem is that I really wanted to include all eight parts of speech.  I learned from Donna Hooker-Topping and Sandra Josephs Hoffman's GETTING GRAMMAR that you can easily remember the parts of speech if you can recall the name IVAN CAPP (interjection, verb, adverb, noun, conjunction, adjective, pronoun, preposition).  This book has is stuffed-full with fun and easy-to-play grammar games and tips for remembering grammar rules.  Writing this poem, I actually jotted the names IVAN CAPP on my paper to be sure that I included all eight parts of speech!

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Next week, I look forward to spending Poetry Friday at NCTE in Orlando, Florida.  Most exciting will be the Friday session about poetry and blogging featuring poetry bloggers Sylvia Vardell of Poetry for Children, Tricia Stohr-Hunt of The Miss Rumphius Effect, and Elaine Magliaro of Wild Rose Reader.  Sylvia, Tricia, and Elaine have been featuring Lee Bennett Hopkins, Marilyn Singer, Pat Mora, and Jame Richards, poet members of the panel, for the past week and will continue to do so.  If you are attending NCTE, you can find details about this session here.

Two Fridays from now (the Friday after Thanksgiving), we welcome literacy specialist Amy Zimmer Merrill from Calvin Coolidge Elementary in Binghamton, NY for another Poetry Peek!  If you are a teacher or librarian or homeschooling parent willing to share a bit of how you enjoy poetry with children, please drop me a note.  I'd love to feature you on such a Peek too!  See the right hand sidebar for previous Peeks, full of favorite ways to dish up bowls of poems.

Teachers and Parents - the holidays are sneaking up, and I must refer you to MotherReader's list of 105 Ways to Give a Book.  It is a fabulous list, and after today, I will leave the link in my right hand column list of parenting links.  Thank you, Pam!

You can find today's Poetry Friday roundup with Terry over at Scrub-a-Dub-Tub.  Mosey on over there to see what's happening poetry-wise in the blogosphere, and know that you are all welcome to participate in Poetry Friday at any time.  You can find a link with all of the details here and also in the right hand column.

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