After

It's Poetry Friday, and I'm in Western Washington for a Poetry Friday Anthology Day with an amazing gathering of children's poets on, fittingly, Friday, and Poetry Camp (for adults!) on Saturday at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Thank you to Sylvia Vardell, Janet Wong and Sylvia Tag for organizing this outstanding poetry program.

Yesterday I visited with fifth grade classes of budding poets at a school in the Bellingham area.

We talked about narrative poetry and ways to tell stories through poems. Referencing my Notice Poems series,  I had students take a photograph in their mind, sketch that photograph, then write a story poem.

Here, with permission from the students' teachers, is a sampling of the poems created. The simple titles added, in most cases, are mine. One poem is in Spanish.

Some of the students had been impacted by the recent mall shooting in Burlington and chose to work through their thoughts in their poems. I include one poem on that difficult topic. And I title this blog post "After" in memory of the lives lost and with deepest condolences to all those affected by the incident. May we find some hope and consolation in poetry.


AFTER
MY DAD'S TRUCK
WILLOW
LOST
BUS STOP
TRAMPOLINE
DANCING FOUNTAIN
I applaud these fifth-grade writers. I was so impressed watching them experimenting with various poetry elements--figurative language, rhythm, repetition, lineation, imagery--and I loved reading the poems they discovered in just 20 minutes of thinking, drawing, and drafting. Bravo!