Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry
Poetry of the People
The academic world of poetry has never interested me as much as the mundane world of poetry. Some people might balk at putting “poetry” and “mundane” in the same sentence, but let’s look at the origin of a word that in the popular imagination means a bunch of negative things: common, ordinary, banal, unimaginative. Continue reading “Poeta Mundanus”
If you don’t believe a story
Can stay with you in the background
Like a picturesque tree you pose before
For all of your life, witness this:
I loved the baking powder can
That Billy saved his money in to buy
Those two redbone coonhounds.
The Clabber Girl with her shy smile
And plate of biscuits sits in my cabinet
And empty on the shelf beside the sink
Where I put twisty ties and pennies. Continue reading “Red Ferns and Red Hounds”
When I first started having my high school students participate in Poem in Your Pocket Day, they thought I was nuts. Carry a poem around in my pocket for a day? What? Take it home and read it to people? What? Have them sign the back of the poem? What? Continue reading “It’s In Your Pocket!”
I am a thing-finder. I am a word-finder. I am a paper-finder. I cannot walk past something handwritten on a scrap of paper that is lying on the sidewalk or in the ditch or on the seat on the bus. I can’t remember not being a thing-finder. In things, I find poetry. Continue reading “Poetry-Finder”
When I was teaching high school English, I spent the month of April on poetry. Yes, the state was going berserk doing tests, TESTS, T E S T S but in between all that nonsense, it was the perfect time for poetry. (And it’s National Poetry Month, after all). If you have made a space for poetry in your classroom, meaning that your students know it is okay to experiment with words, to break rules, to have fun with the language, then give them a break with something like this: Continue reading “Object Transformation”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 