Tag: The Bronx

Poetry (and raccoons!) in the Bronx

As the school year was winding to a close, I had the delight of returning to P.S. 86 in the Bronx to lead a series of poetry workshops. I attended P.S. 86 as a young child.

The students were all-in– welcoming, and ready to have fun!

We talked about how every writer has obsessions, favorite things in their life that spark stories and poems and other forms of art. I shared some of mine. I encouraged them to tap into their favorite things, and use their “poetry microscopes”  to notice the small details that make poems come alive.

After talking about hope in hard times, we got loud and drummed on tables to my poem “Drum,” from WHAT IS HOPE? (Pomelo Books, 2023).

We talked about noticing signs of nature in everyday moments in the city: a vine climbing up a building, a frisky squirrel, a swoop of sparrows. These are all images that appear in my poem “Glimpses of Green,” published in the amazing online children’s  poetry journal Tyger, Tyger.* The students added their own examples of glimpses of the natural world (raccoons in the Bronx!) and they each illustrated the poem in their own way.

I treasure my visits to P.S. 86. The chance to go back and get to know the students in the Kingsbridge neighborhood of the Bronx brings me joy and was a great way to end the school year! Thank you, school librarian Matt Egan, for welcoming me back to P.S. 86!


*Tyger, Tyger editor Rachel Piercey recently sent out a blog post linking to a bunch of wonderful summer poems for kids– and “Glimpses of Green” is included!

Poetry of place: where did you call home?

Can you picture the house or apartment where you grew up? The texture of the couch, the sound of water in the pipes? Did the windows rattle, and what did the doorknobs look like? Can you draw a map of each room?

So many sensory images come flooding back to me as I read George Ella Lyon’s poetry collection MANY-STORIED HOUSE. She focuses on family, on small moments, on tiny details of her childhood home. Her poems about memory, relationships, and sense of place are beautifully specific and universal at the same time. She’s inspiring me to write about my first home, a two-bedroom apartment in a fourth-floor walk-up on a one-way street in the Bronx. The closet doorknobs were made of glass; the rumble of the subway was our metronome.

Lyon writes for both children and adults, and I’m looking forward to learning from her in an online workshop hosted by poet Georgia Heard in January. You can read about it here. Maybe I’ll see you there!

On Fridays, I love taking part in Poetry Friday when I can, where writers share resources about children’s poetry. This week, Michelle Kogan hosts the Poetry Friday Roundup today at her blog. Check out the celebration of poetry there today!

My poem in the New York Times!

As writers, we get used to leaning into headwinds, persevering through all of the rejections and maybes and the waiting. Then when something wonderful happens, it’s a shock to the system!

Yesterday, my poem about growing up in the Bronx appeared in the New York Times. Right there in the Metropolitan Diary section of the Sunday Times was “Ars Poetica, Bronx,” a poem I wrote about how I became a poet. It was inspired by a prompt from a class on poetic forms, taught by poet Georgia Heard in spring 2021. It was written in my favorite time of day, when I rise at 5 a.m. to enjoy an hour or two of writing time before the world wakes up, a ritual known to many writers as #5amwritersclub.

New York Times, 7/25/21!

 

Sharing the poem brought me so much joy yesterday– and enthusiastic responses from friends and family in Massachusetts and New York, California and Ireland, the UK and Brazil. It brought back vivid memories of the breakfast table in our apartment in the Bronx, where the Times was a fixture. 

When the “yes” days happen, it’s important to savor them! Yesterday was a “yes” day.