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).

Poem for Last Days of School

©2010 Sara Holbrook, Zombies! Evacuate the School!

All Rights Reserved Boyds Mills Press

TWO MORE DAYS?

It's not the last day. It's not the first. It's not the 100th, President's Day, Valentine's Day or even crazy sock day. Everyone from the bus drivers to the kids to the teachers and the class hamster is worn out. The pencils have exhausted their points and take home notebooks are just barely holding it together.

What do you do for the SECOND to the last day of school? Grandson Dan told me at his school, the kids get to teach the teachers, so I shared a poem for him to teach.  Every poem holds a built in mini-lesson!

TWO MORE DAYS!

Two more days of school,

of lockers slamming in the hall,

of "class please find your seat,"

and "turn your chairs to the back wall."

Then, no more

who sat where at lunch,

no more giggles by the bunch.

No more watching Wilma's wiggle

when she writes up on the board.

No more trying to look interested

when classes are a snore.

I can't wait!

To go without a pass,

and not count seconds till the bell.

No more hunting for a pen

or hearing stressed-out teachers yell

at some poor slob who just forgot

where he was supposed to be.

No more handing out detentions,

especially not to me.

When summer gets real boring,

I'll be ready to come back.

But now,

two days is two too much.

If it were three 

I'd crack.

©1996 Sara Holbrook, The Dog Ate My Homework

All Rights Reserved Boyds Mills Press

Finding Voice in Writing: A Dialogue

“If you come to my country, you got to understand my language if you want to communicate.” By his own estimation, the man spoke three languages: the projects,housing authority executive, and Citibank.

Ronnie Davis was my boss at the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA), he the Chief Operating Officer and me the Public Information Officer. He had grown up one of eight children mothered by a single female head of household in the projects in New Orleans and gone on to get an advanced degree in urban planning from Harvard.  Not sure what the odds are against an African American kid doing this, but I think he might have had a better chance becoming a quarterback in the NFL. The phrase “long shot,” doesn't go the distance to describe his life’s trajectory.

I was getting schooled in his office, sitting there in my little navy blue suit and gold button earrings, hands folded on my leather planner having just moved from doing PR at a prestigious international law firm to CMHA.  He explained that the reason my co-workers didn't like me (they didn't) was that I only had one language.  I communicated just fine to the media and the outside world, and he appreciated that, but I wasn't able to communicate with people in the hallway.  My worst offense was that I flinched when I heard what I had always understood to be “bad” language.

Writing lessons don’t always come via a seminar or a workshop. They come from reading and listening to people talk. As Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird, (paraphrase alert) most of life is like static on the radio, you have to stop and adjust the dial to get the message. Luckily that day I was tuned in because Ronnie was giving me a valuable lesson in voice. Ronnie was a good communicator.  He never sounded like he was putting on an affect or an accent. Call it code-switching or linguistic gymnastics; Ronnie had developed a flexibility in speech that was both effective and genuine.

He taught me that finding an authentic voice is output from a centrifuge of author and audience.  When I hear teachers lament that their students struggle with finding authentic voice in writing, I often flash back to me in that navy blue suit, sitting obediently in a chair, trying so hard to do the right thing.  My problem was, due to the lack of diversity in my upbringing, an unrequited desire to be teacher’s pet, and my dear mother, captain of the grammar police, I had grown to believe I had only one right voice. I knew how to speak (in my mind) properly.  But was my idea of “proper” always effective; did it fit the venue?  Worse, was it blocking my ability to listen?

At the time, none of my poetry had been published, but I had been spending evenings and weekends secretly playing around with different voices in my poems.  Here writing as a second grader, there as an adolescent, I was scrolling back the years and finding the voices I had mostly stuffed as a child, the voices that had been strangled by my self-conscious fear of saying the wrong thing.  Most recently, I had spent eight years writing for lawyers whose narrow-eyed stares had beaten even the contractions out of me.  I was in a sad state.

Turns out that poetry is the best place to practice this voice thing since poems are naturally first person narratives. And you get to choose your own point of view. And, they are short! Which means you can practice the same text or writing on the same topic in different voices without attempting Moby Dick.

The following two poems are about love (yeah, yeah, poets always write about love), but they are in different voices.  In order to write the poems, I had to assume the age of the speaker of the poem, sure.  Try it on.  But also, in the case of both poems, I had a particular audience in mind, and I did my best to speak in their language.

FAST MOVES

Cooties.

Gobbers.

Stinko.

Dread.

Alison got kissed by Fred.

He caught her squarely on the lips,

puckered up and let 'er rip.

Then, Fred‑the‑Lip?

He strut and bragged.

And Alison?

She spat and gagged.

Fred's a rookie,

didn't ask for permission.

Should have known that in kissing,

you play your position.

If he tries it again,

he may get a new twist

from the school's brand new nickname . . .

Alison‑the‑fist.

©1996 sara holbrook, The Dog Ate My Homework, Boyds Mills Press

LIKE A FEATHER LIFTING

Like a feather lifts, floating on a breeze,

a pillow rolled behind my neck just right.

Window cracked, a rustling of trees,

I spread my wings to dream of you tonight.

A barely moon set in a starless sky

where we can drift together, then apart.

Imagining the dance, I close my eyes

and tuck beneath your shoulder, ear to heart.

Although I know you’re really blocks away,

inhaling, I can smell you next to me.

I dream about your smile, then press replay,

what was, what is, and what is yet to be.

Our story takes so long to comprehend,

I fall asleep before I reach the end.

©2010 sara holbrook, More Than Friends, Boyds Mills Press

Link to video

Developing voice in our writing isn't something we do once.  It isn't even something we do over and over with the goal of finding that ideal voice.  It is being able to find the right voice for a specific occasion, a particular audience.  In a way, all writing is dialog. 

So, how did Ronnie’s language lesson go?  Well, first he made me put my ego in an empty Ball jar he kept on his desk.  (Note: this lesson has been modified to fit the potential audience for this blog).

Ronnie: Say mother-socker.

Sara: Blush.

Ronnie: Say mother-socker.

Sara whispers back: Mother-socker.

Ronnie: Louder, slower.  Mou-ther-sock-er.  Mou-ther-sock-er.

He made me say mother-socker about 26 times until I could say it without flinching, not even an eyebrow twitch.  He told me, if I wanted to work in the projects, I had to be able to hear what people were saying even if they were speaking a language different than the one I was used to. 

He was teaching me how to listen. 

And then he told me I should lose the leather notebook, get a yellow pad, and get out of his office.  He didn't have anything to say about the navy blue suit.

The fact is, most of us come to writing wrapped in a suit of our upbringing and along the route we begin to shed those restraints, experimenting with diversity of expression. I have never really adopted that particular compound word as part of my regular vocabulary (well, that one time, with the airlines), but I no longer let it keep me from listening. Listening leads to understanding and feeds my writing, enriching it with quirks and intonation.

When we write, we want to be understood. Learning how to listen helps me as a writer to find a voice, a language that my intended audience will not only understand, but truly believe.

Do I succeed all the time?  No way.  I am still learning.  And some voices I would never even attempt.  For instance, I have never composed a rap.  Middle-aged, white lady rap.  Think about it.  We all have our limitations.  And I am still searching for the right voice to make myself heard to airline representatives. Swearing (see above) does not help one bit in making myself understood. 

Lessons learned.

Finding voice.  It’s a life-long pursuit. 

Advice?

First, find yourself an empty Ball jar.

Or, git you a Ball jar.

Or, Hey you! Ball jar. Ego. There.

Your choice.

  

I Used to Be, But Now I Am: Repurposed

Did you used to wear diapers?  Was there a time when examining your feet was more fascinating than watching the NFL? Are you a former stair surfer and who had the carpet burns on your chin to prove it? 

Then grab a pencil or personal device, you have the research in you and you are poised to write. In High Impact Writing Clinics (HIWC), Michael Salinger and I decided to resurrect and repurpose “I used to be, but now I am,” a famous writing exercise that (to the best of my knowledge) was first put forward by Kenneth Koch in his seminal book on writing, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, originally published in 1970.

Kids love doing these quick writes.  You can call them poetry, story starters, or just plain fun – fun to write, share and illustrate. This writing exercise has been a staple in writing classrooms for over 50 years.

One of the saddest outcomes (one of many) of the No Child Left Behind Act along with their accompanying curriculum driving tests, is that for many kids, particularly those labeled as lagging in literacy and math skills, they never or rarely got/get lessons in social studies and civics.  How is it that history dropped to the cutting room floor?  Easy.  What wasn't on the test wasn't in the curriculum.  

I remember one time heading out to a portable classroom in Florida to do a writing workshop with (I think) fifth graders.  "What are they studying in science and social studies?" I asked, thinking since it was a self-contained classroom, we would use their common studies as something to write poetry about.  "Oh, these kids don't get science or social studies," I was told. (insert look of stunned disbelief) "Well, they can't pass the tests in reading and math, so they get reading in the morning and math in the afternoon." It was shocking the first time, but it just became discouragingly familiar as I realized it was a national trend. Arugh.

Trend-buckers that we are, Michael and I are all about writing across kids' lives and their learning. What we like to do with this writing exercise is to first have kids write about their own personal experience.  Sometimes the writing is poignant, often hilarious.  I used to sleep on airplanes, now I throw up in the aisles.  I used to have no teeth, then I had teeth, now I have no teeth again. We have fun looking at ourselves and how we have evolved.

But then we like to grow this exercise, add a little research, and expand our horizons focusing on a changing world.  What was life like for workers before there were unions? How was life for women before they could vote or own property? What was travel like before the steam engine was invented?  Through independent research, students can use their personal reflections as mentor text to build their own comparisons and a deeper understanding of history.

The gun manufacturers have done a bang up job (sorry, couldn't resist) of making sure everyone knows what the second amendment is all about, but what was life like for folks when they didn't have the protection of the 8^th amendment?  Fuzzy on that one yourself?  No cruel and unusual punishment, kids, which btw does not mean being grounded from your Xbox for a weekend nor does child labor mean when the parent says, “hey, grab a dishtowel and pitch in.”

This exercise also provides an opportunity for the writer to assume another’s point of view.  In HIWC, we take the point of view of the American Bison, using one citation for the first draft and multiple sources for subsequent versions.  Writing from another’s perspective helps to build not only understanding in the writer, but also empathy as we look at our changing world. 

“The consequences of an ignorant population who have no concept of history, the Constitution, social studies, and hard fought battles for basic human rights, are rearing their ugly heads in a myriad of ways in legislatures across the country. The decimation of history and social studies in schools, resulting from what isn't tested isn't taught, means Americans have no clue who or what they are voting for, if they even bother to vote at all.” In a recent blog, an anonymous teacher who calls herself “free to teach,” writes about the long term realities of test driven curricula that limit rather than expand student’s historical visions. The fact that this teacher seemingly feels the need to write anonymously itself is a bit frightening. But her observations go a long way to explain how the public can be so easily persuaded that "ignorance is strength," to quote George Orwell.

We are hoping that teachers use this writing clinic (one of 20) not only to help kids appreciate their own growth, but to look closely at the changes in the world around them.   

   

My Global Moment

#MyGlobalMoment from The Ubuntu Center on Vimeo.

“And you call yourself an educated man.”

I was having a buffet breakfast in 2006 with two Afghan teachers at a conference for Middle Eastern educators (TARA) in Bahrain.  The man was young, maybe thirty, the woman, Hamaira, more seasoned, with a married daughter of her own. She had told me of her marriage at the age of 11, how she was in the garden playing with dolls when her father came to fetch her to meet her new husband.  While they had grown close over the years, she was quick to distinguish her marriage from her daughter’s, which, with a slight straightening of the spine, she described as a “love marriage.” Her daughter lived in Atlanta, far removed from her but also from the fighting in Kabul. “It is good,” she said definitively.

Hamaira, who had endured refugee camps and had very little in the way of material belongings insisted on giving me her headscarf when we parted, an act of generosity that I could not refuse, but which hurt to accept.  Years later, it still smells of her perfume.

The young man had a permanent look of concern.  He thought the ideas being exchanged at the conference were all good ones, but, he tipped his head, unfortunately not much use to him as his students had neither desks nor pencils.  These were only a couple items on a long list of what had gone missing in Kabul as the result of war.  No electricity. No clean water. His grandmother had no legs as a result of an American land mine.

“And you are sitting here having breakfast with me?” I asked.

“You did not plant this bomb,” he said matter-of-factly, evidencing a maturity of reasoning not present at home where educated folks had actually debated the merits of calling French fries “freedom fries,” a few years prior -- a phrase still in use at that time (and still in use in some restaurants even today).  Americans know how to hold a grudge and spread it with ubiquitous contempt from border to border.

The conference had sponsored the attendance of these two teachers.  They were both classroom teachers and trainers of teachers in a school system in which many children go to school in 2 hour increments because of their work schedules.  Not the teachers’ work schedules, the kids’.  With so many of the men absent from families after decades of war, basic provisions were a joint effort. As we sat trading stories, the young man said something that made Hamaira flare. “Ah, you say these things, and yet when you ask your wife to bring you a glass of water, you do not look her in the eye or speak her name. You wave your hand and say, water.  And you call yourself an educated man,” she sniffed.

“What do you expect?” The young man replied with a shrug. “I live in my father’s house.”

Changing the hearts and minds of people with such deep traditions suddenly looked to me to be a foolish, misguided and painfully arrogant notion, dreamy, magical fiction, transient as freedom fries.

To some extent, we all live in our father’s house.  How we find common ground is never along path carved out by one party.

Do you have a Global Moment?  Post it here and read others: http://theubuntucenter.org/moment/

Lies My Teacher (almost) Taught Me

I began by writing poems for my kids, envisioning a single collection for all ages, to be read by families, preferably fireside.
 
I have no idea where this fantasy originated since as a single parent, after I was done working overtime to make ends meet, after the kids’ play practices and homework, if we did sit down together as a family it was to watch reruns of the Cosby Show, not read a potpourri of poems for teens and toddlers. Family friend Betsy Byars straightened me out on that score; she told me if I could sort my poems out by age and subject matter, there was a chance I could get published. I snapped out of my fantasy world and followed her advice.

I mostly write about my own experiences and neuroses and have never been inclined to write forty poems about dinosaurs or holidays, poems that would cleverly fit into a single topic and therefore grade level lesson plan. However, I have done my best (with a whole lot of editorial assistance) to group my poetry by age level. A pouty poem such as “I Hate My Body” just doesn’t work for second graders, for instance. They may be able to decode the words, but the sentiment of the poem doesn’t catch up with them until adolescence.

Today I received the following email from a fourth grade teacher: “Question-what reading level is your poem, Lies? What age level is the audience of this poem? Please respond asap, thanks!”

I answered: “I have always thought that part of me was stuck around the age of 12 – I often find myself writing in a voice of that age. But I have to confess, that I have not even as an adult totally outgrown the sentiment of this poem. This poem is about putting on your game face instead of facing up to how you really feel. When do kids start to do that? I’m not sure.”

She responded: “Thank you!! I teach fourth grade and am required to teach this poem to 9-10 year olds...I am not finding they have the maturation for it....and I so appreciate your telling us what you meant when you wrote it. Thanks again!”

Required?
The word “required” makes my teeth itch.
The 9-10 year olds are required to read this poem?
She is required to teach it?
Whose fireside fantasy was this? That it would be beneficial for us all to be introduced by requirement?

I am developing increasing sympathy for the ghost of William Blake.

LIES

I got burned, but

you can't say that I'm abused,
I'm just down
and feeling used.
My eyes are dark
but dry;
no one knows
about the lie.

I never should have smiled

and said
that everything's all right.
I should have said,
"Hold on,"
but I’m scared to spark a fight.

When I'm all buffed up

in smiles
you can't say I'm victimized.
This arson is my crime.
I set fire to my insides
with a lie,
a smile
that let my hurting
hide.

©1997 Sara Holbrook

Walking on the Boundaries of Change

Hint: If you are required to teach this poem, begin by asking kids if there was ever a time when their insides did not match their outsides.