Seems like the right week for a reprise of this little ditty (as I once again file an extension).

Letter to the IRS

Every year I promise myself and the government that I will not file an extension.

That I will be a good citizen and get my taxes in on time.

Every year, I make the same promise.  Every year, I file the same extension.

Dear IRS,

I had every intention . . .

I was bent to the task,

pen to the paper,

face to face with those forms –

And then sang a summons, such sweet invitation,

Algerian finger chimes, fairies, ethereal pipes.

A daydream come to dance,

holding warm cups of wonder to pour on my head.

"Not now," I said.

Bills piled in baskets, receipts on the floor.

I never take calls when the bottom line's dead at the door. 

I implored that dream --

Come, take my hand, dance me, not lightly, sure palm at my back.

Let’s stomp the lights black and blue, bop bip be do,

swing song some slow notes, swollen long low notes,

hold along oh notes, slowly with me.

But after I scour the mail for what's been bought where

for how much and how many.

After all dues and subscriptions are entered, recorded with salaries, commissions.

After I've checked each check’s balancing act, please –

Blow bliss down my back till I rise and arch into the soft kiss of maybe.

Whisper my ears,

run your hands down my sides

till I reach for the moon.  Soon.

As soon as I stack and arrange last year’s leftover dust,

gather the details the daily dog scattered beside of his bowl.

Counting in columns, red and black slaloms down dry paper crinkles,

straighten the wrinkled statistics, specifically –

Closer, come closer, sweet, delicate breath on my face

help me erase all this data,

after I cross

this desert of detail –

douse me with moisture,        

corsage me, delight

            Not till I’m finished

            then –

take me lavender dancing, scarves in the wind

Hold me with honey, all the law will allow.

Move me.  Moonbeam me.  Fudge sauce, whip cream me.

Dance along dream me.

Hold me.

            Not now?

Sincerely                                                         

©1999 Sara Holbrook, Isn’t She Ladylike, Collinwood Media/Bottom Dog Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED                             

Backwards Day All Year Long

Dan Ferri

Some poems visit you at sunset. Some haunt you in the wee hours with Jabberwocky logic because, let's face it, anything seems logical at 3AM.  There are poems you reach for when a friend dies, when a marriage implodes, when gratitude washes away pain.

Dan Ferri's poem, Backwards Day, follows me down school hallways behind 7th graders hiding their faces in hoodies. It stands with me as I watch the kid who can't hold a pencil and whose school won't let him use a keyboard try to make a joke out of it. It sits on my knee in a kindergarten class while everyone else is sitting on the carpet.  This poem is for those who would rather cartwheel than walk, draw instead of formulate equations, those who write, know how to harmonize, and problem solve.

Holidays, snow days, and low grade fevers should never happen on the weekend.  This Saturday is Backwards day, and because of that, I was afraid it would be overlooked this year.  

You know what this list is?  It's a list of what proficiency tests do NOT measure.  I found it in a book by Gerald Bracey, On the Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public Schools (Heinemann 2003, in case you are looking for some light reading).  

As we head into testing season (I know this because of schools that call asking for a visit "after the tests") I'm thinking maybe Backwards Day shouldn't be only an annual event like the 100th day of school or Dr. Seuss' birthday, but a holiday that we celebrate all year long.

Dan is a seasoned middle school teacher transplanted from Chicago to Canberra, Australia, and as such he knows schools, holidays, and isn't afraid to call out puppypoop when he sees it.  Reprinted here with permission. 

Backwards Day

Sometimes at school we have a special day

We call it backwards day

Everyone wears their clothes backwards

Or wears colors that clash

I have a modest proposal

Forget your silly backwards hats and tee shirts

Forget this stripes and checks together puppypoop

Let's get serious

Let's really shake school up

In math class, for homework

Describe the associative, distributive, and

Commutative properties

In dance

Choreograph it, dance it, show your work

Points off for clumsiness

In Social Studies, for homework

Prepare two Civil War marching songs, one North one South

Sing in four-part harmony, show your emotion

Points off for flat notes

In English, for homework

Carve a sculpture that expresses Hester Prynne's solitary courage

The cowardice of her lover

The beauty and strangeness of her child

In Science, for homework,

Bring in a broken toaster, doorknob, or wind-up toy

Fix it

You get extra credit for using the leftover parts to make something new

Points off for reading the directions

On the S.A.T.

Every one of the questions

Will be in haiku

You get two scores

One in whistling, and one in Legos

No calculators

Let's take a stroll down the hall

Let's see who is in the learning disabilities classroom now

Will you look at all those guys with pocket protectors

Sweating, slouching, and acting out

  

Hey, no one cares that you can divide fractions backwards in

your head buddy

You will stay right here and practice interpretive dance steps till

you get it right

Will you look at all those perfect spellers with bad attitudes

Look at those grammar wizards with rhythm deficit disorder

What good is spelling gonna do you

If you can't carry a tune

Toss a lariat

Or juggle?

You are going to stay right here and do the things that you can't

Over and over, and again, and again

Until you get them right,

Or until you give up

Quit school

And get a job

As a spell checker

At the A&P

~Daniel Ferri

Taking it to the Next Level

A wise philosopher (Cher?) once said that “everyday’s a new audition.”  That’s a lot of pressure!

And no time is that more evident than January 1, when we resolve something or other starting with the new year. 

In the writing and the reading, poetry gives me pause. To others I may appear motionless, but the truth is, I'm just tuning my voice.

Watch out, 2015.

Why Do You Write Sad Poems?

Why do you write sad poems?

Defensive answer: I don't ONLY write sad poems. Did you see the one about how happiness comes hopping? Or the one about saying gross things at the dinner table? Funny stuff.  Seriously funny. Not sad. Not sad at all.

Self-conscious answer: Oh, no. That didn't make YOU sad, did it?  I'm so sorry. It's just that. . . no, seriously, I'm really really sorry.

Have had a lot of years to think about it answer: It makes me feel better. Seriously.

No Way

In a swirl of nothing
Saturday
lay
inhaling hours
of in between.
What mood is this?
Lost? Collapsed?
Left out? Just tired?
Leftover scraps
of expectation
now outgrown.
Of disappointments
overblown.
Speech bubbles
of stifled screams.
Drifting clouds.
Unticketed dreams.

Writing a poem is a way to tuck sad feelings in, kiss them on the forehead, and turn the klieg lights out on them.

Heads Up Publications and By Definition: Poems of Feelings

Why are you doing that?

No one else does it that way.

What’s the matter with you?

Creative people don’t like to be told what to do. We can be annoying. Distracted. Non-compliant. Misfits, who at our worst clog systems and at our best make up new and better systems.

So what is the choice? Creatives can either rebel and go places where no one else has been or fall in line and be unhappy.  Not that going your own way is a guarantee of happiness. Hardly.  It pretty much assures that you will be justifying your actions for the rest of your days, but the alternative is emotional and intellectual suicide.

Creatives don’t fit well in schools. At all. Schools put students in boxes based on how well kids can fill in boxes.  Creatives don’t like boxes unless they welded them together themselves, designed them in Photoshop, or turned a refrigerator box into a pyramid with a razor blade and duct tape and renamed it “box with a point.”

The successful creative kid learns to multitask early on. Hold her breath and make a quick pass at what is required before letting the mind go out to play. The less successful creative kid gets parked with the Welcome Back Kotteresque meatheads, a room that is harder to escape than a prison lockdown. Sitting for 12 years among The-Most-Likely-to-be-Incarcerated can be hard on a person’s sense of productive worth.

Go Back While There’s Still Time:

When I quit my job as a vice president of an ad agency to be a poet, turned in the paperwork for the company car, trashed my rolodex, and went out into the cold (it was actually a sunny, Indian summer September day), I remember the panic on the face of a co-worker, “You did what? Go back, there’s still time. Tell [the boss] you changed your mind. He’ll take you back. He’ll take you back.”

Part of me knew he was right. I was a single mom with a mortgage, two kids poised on the edge of the diving board ready to take the plunge into college and two dogs in need of kibble. But I just couldn’t hold my breath any longer. It was 1990, the last decade of the 20^th century. I was running out of time, and I needed to breathe.

I started out self-published because education isn’t the only place that wants to put people into boxes. Publishers were looking for the next Shel Silverstein in the early nineties when I came along with my “I Hate My Body” poems for middle readers and there was no category for adolescent poetry in those days. Zero.

With the support of classroom teachers, I sold 43,000 books, and then at least one publisher was willing to talk. Boyds Mills Press. Grateful, I knew I should be compliant.  Only that’s not my nature and I had sacrificed a whole lot of security to be able to breathe. I quickly developed a reputation for being difficult to edit (I wore out three editors on the first book).  BMP and I have had a 25 year relationship and I continue to be forever grateful that they were willing to take a chance on me.

By Definition: Poems of Feelings (BMP) came out in 2004. In my mind, the art and the poetry in this book were a mismatch from the start.  I was writing for middle readers, the artist was drawing for primary kids.  Bad fit.  Last year, the book went of out print and the rights returned to me. 

I decided to repurpose the poems into a power point presentation for classroom use. 

Why are you doing that?

No one else does it that way.

What’s the matter with you?

Research based response:

Michael Salinger (my partner-in-rhyme) and I have been so jazzed about projecting poetry in classrooms, with everyone’s head up and ready for discussion.  No one is hunched over text, pretending to be reading, doodling, drooling or any of the things I used to do when asked to read in class. Projected text, particularly when it is combined with a fetching image, gets kids’ attention just long enough to engage. 

If you are looking for research to support this, this is the research:  We tried it about 600 times.  Projected poetry engages better than printed text. Try it, you’ll see.

So is born our idea of Heads UP publications.  These are not books that are conceived to be cradled in the arms and consumed alone. These are books designed to be projected and shared in a classroom situation, with a teacher leading the discussion.  We may even include a discussion starter question or two.

The next question we had to confront was, how do we best market a Heads UP publication?

Trade or Professional?

Teacher professional books are research based with the text divided between a few new ideas and citation after citation after citation of old ideas hand selected old ideas to support the new ideas. It’s a tedious process to write these books (been there) and (I fear) the audience for them has been dwindling, distracted by the PD offerings from YouTube, TedTalks and Twitter. Our product is what is called "classroom ready," or not research based. Teacher professional publishers are not equipped to market a product like ours (so we hear). Besides, poetry is a tough sell.

Trade books are books kids check out of the library. Trade publishers are still coming to grips with ebooks and have no conveyance method to sell books designed for projection.  They are busy trying to reformat texts so that that they are as close as possible to books with covers that can be held in the hands. Trade publishers are not equipped to market a product like ours (so we hear). They are too busy conceiving of increasingly obscurely themed poetry books (40 poems on tiddly winks? Anyone? Anyone?). Besides, poetry is a tough sell.

Every Poem is a Mini lesson:

Still, teachers are always looking for poetry and new ideas.  Every poem is a mini lesson.  Want a quick lesson on point of view, descriptive or figurative language? Poems are at your service.

“When heading off to a conference, I always dare to dream that I will be heading home somehow made new,” began a teacher in a recent email. And then she kindly added that our presentation of using words and images in the classroom had done just that for her.  Michael and I consider ourselves to be teaching artists, we spend a great number of days in the classroom each year, but don’t have to do the grades or the staff meetings.  It’s a good gig, we realize that. And we want to efficiently and economically give back to the people we most love to support. . . entrepreneurial and mostly financially strapped teachers. 

This had led us to the site: Teacher Pay Teachers to host our products.  We are in the process of converting some of our projectable lessons and Head UP publications to this site.  You can find us here: link.

Here are our first three offerings: All $6 or under (cheap).