Ten-year-old Texans spend their fourth-grade year studying the state. Texas geography. Texas history. Famous Texans.
My daughter reported on one of the early Mexican explorers, made an iMovie about the mountain region, and is working on a piece about Barbara Jordan. Yesterday, this immersion in all that is huge and mythic culminated in a class trip to the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum.
It’s all a little dizzy-making for a Colorado-Wisconsin hybrid girl like me.
See, here’s the thing about about Texas. Before it was a state, it was a nation. And it has not forgotten that. The battles, the oil, the cotton, the hurricanes. The cowboys, the cities, the politicians. Texas has a big, fat, ol’ story to tell.
Seriously. And that’s before we even mention the snakes…
Heart
by Catherine Bowman
Old fang-in-the-boot trick. Five-chambered asp. Pit organ and puff adder. Can live in any medium save ice. Charmed by the flute or the first thunderstorm in spring, drowsy heart stirs from the cistern, the hibernaculum, the wintering den of stars. Smells like the cucumber served chilled on chipped Blue Willow. Her garden of clings, sugars, snaps, and strings. Her creamy breasts we called pillows and her bird legs and fat fingers covered with diamonds from the mines in Africa.
The smell of cucumber…. Her mystery roses….
Heading out Bandera to picnic and pick corn, the light so expert that for miles you can tell a turkey vulture from a hawk by the quiver in the wing.
"I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer…"
— The Tempest, Wm. Shakespeare
Today I watched my eldest in the first of two Shakespeare performances. This was a scene from The Tempest; next week it’s Much Ado about Nothing.
The outreach program responsible for all this literary mayhem is the University of Texas’ Shakespeare at Winedale Program. In just a couple of months, coordinator and genius Clayton Stromberger has these kids (from 3rd-5th grade) eating out of old Will’s hand. He throws open the windows on Shakespeare’s humor, his confounding mix-ups, his fools…
Too much for elementary school? Are you kidding? This is the stuff of a ten-year-old’s dream!
This morning there was a good piece on NPR about the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s sonnets. 400 years. The guy has some staying power, to be sure.
But when you hear him on the outdoor stage behind a sweet little school on a bright Wednesday morning, I promise you it feels brand new.
"Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!" — Much Ado about Nothing, Wm. Shakespeare
One of the reasons I rarely post pictures on my blog is I don’t want to show the piles around my desk.
Lately, they’ve been epic. Peaks worthy of pick axes and crampons. Topo-maps gone missing.
But I am here to say that I’ve just completed all there is to do for one of two classes I taught this semester.
I’ve critiqued the manuscripts. Written the editorial letters. Submitted the grades.
And I’m pretty confident that I’ll be done with the second batch by Thursday.
How am I scaling the summits?
Working outdoors. (It is bright blue and 73 here today…) A little Peter Tosh on the ipod dock. Chocolate-and-toffee covered peanuts and a smoothie. Bare feet.
And the familiar tug of a work-in-progress I really, really, really want to get back to.
What? You work sitting up straight wearing sensible shoes and a glass of ice-water at your elbow?
I don’t know how many people come to my blog or web site, or where they came from. My posts aren’t tagged. I don’t tweet.
But one of my wiser friends told me I need to set up some Google alerts so that I get word when my books are blogged about or I’m mentioned somewhere on the web.
(Does that sound like an adolescent nightmare, or what??? Everytime someone talks about you, we’ll let you know!!! Bwaaahaaaa…)
Anyway, she assured me it wasn’t that bad and it was so easy, even I could do it.
But here are some of the alerts I’ve gotten in regards to my next book title — All the World:
The College All-Star World Series (about Ohio baseball) All’s Fair on the World’s Stage (about Israelis and Palestinians) The best all-around meal the world over (about the Food Network) Out of all the speeches, I’m wondering how in the world… (about college commencement) All the world’s a stage (about role playing and the World of Warcraft)
Nothing against the aforementioned topics, but I’ve got plenty of reading material already. I haven’t even gotten through yesterday’s New York Times.
So. Don’t tell my friend, but I’m thinking that even Google Alerts aren’t for me.
A few years ago, when my sweet Grammy was negotiating the maze of Alzheimer’s Disease, I wrote a whole series of poems about it and about her. I didn’t do anything with them because, although they were written with bald and unflinching love, I thought they might hurt my grandfather. Just the simplicity of them on the page when nothing felt simple at all.
Now, both my grandparents are gone, and one of those poems has seen the light of day in an anthology from Kent State University Press called Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose About Alzheimer’s Disease. It is a rather lovely and tender book, filled with heartbreak and humor and all sorts of amazing writing by folks you’ve never heard of and folks you have. It turns out Alzheimer’s Disease is kind of like cancer. Everybody knows somebody…
My poem in the anthology is called The Suitcase Propped Open, and it’s about helping my grandmother pack for a summer at their cottage on Lake Michigan. The one I’m going to share today is another from the same series, later in the progression of the disease.
The Slow and the Sudden
December 26, 1999
Breakfast is a quiet, subtle meal –
last night’s fatty lamb still rich in the air –
and yet, the simple textures of soft boiled egg,
of plain toast on her tongue are excruciating.
The melony walls, everyday china, her own
daughter’s voice – everything glares unfamiliar
and threatening as a foreign alphabet.
The shift to this moment is invisible – newspaper
on the table, coffee milky and warm, a single
cardinal keeping chickadees from the suet near the glass.
And then, an ordinary exhale and she is on her feet,
loud and panicked. “Somebody help,” she calls, moving
quickly through the kitchen and into the garage.
“Somebody help. They’ve got me in here.”
Yelling again and again into the hollow air
and out the open door into the snow – her husband,
daughter and son-in-law trying to catch up, to reassure
her they are kin and are where they should be.
But with a sibyl’s insistence she keeps on, her voice box
divining what nobody else yet knows: she will leave today,
I’m celebrating Children’s Book Week by doing a library visit tomorrow, a school visit on Wednesday and… oh, heck… buying some new books. In particular, I’m on the lookout for Linda Urban’s Mouse Was Mad, Kristy Dempsey’s Me With You and Francisco X. Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World.
My friend Sara let me know about today’s online Haiku Festival — especially appealing to me since I just finished up a month straight of writing daily haiku. There are lots of lovely links here for you like-minded fans…
My next picture book has been given an official release date of September 8th (which just so happens to be exactly one day after my eldest daughter’s 11th birthday). All the World is out there on the virtual bookshelves already… here and here and here. There was also a lovely ad that ran on Shelf Awareness for a week.
As you know, yesterday was Mother’s Day. From Tall One I got an acrostic poem that included all of my names (some of which are lengthy). A few of my favorite descriptives? Loving, Intelligent, Bendable, Radiant, Ommmmm and Nobody-like-Mama. Oh, also, apparently I’m a "Nice-y-ater". That’s good, right? From Small One, another one of her woven-with-love potholders and a darling little book in which she declared that I am "nice to animals, a good cook and pretty." Also that I "like" her and her sister. So. At least we’re all clear on that.
We spent the day on the Lampasas River, with hawks and snakes and wet ol’ dogs. It was lovely. Getting outside is always, always a good idea.
slipping down slick bank landing right where I want to; floating like a fish
I’ve been away for a week. National Poetry Month came to a close. My family came to visit. And this week has been all madness all the time.
The end of the semester (for me and for my students and for my daughters) is so full of celebration and responsibility, my knees buckle a bit. And when you add in the fact that it is school visit season (I’m on my way to one this morning), blogging and breakfast dishes take a back seat.
It’s no wonder that what I wanted this morning was a quiet poem. A lovely, leaf- and rain-filled quiet poem.
I found one:
The Copper Beech
by Marie Howe
Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,
with limbs low enough for me to enter it
and climb the crooked ladder to where
I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.
Today I got to talk to my daughter’s 2nd grade class about reading poetry aloud. Because tomorrow, they’re hosting a Poetry Reading (capital P, capital R) in the library — the culmination of National Poetry Month.
Small One tells me she’s reading her Free Verse (which still sounds like Fwee Vewse, even though she’s in speech therapy) and her Diamante (which I guess is about Dumbledore and He Who Must Not Be Named).
I really think I’d rather go this poetry reading than see The Rolling Stones. For real.
So, we talked about speaking loudly, slowly, clearly. And about how you can look at the top of your audience members’ heads and it’ll seem like you’re making eye contact. And about how important it is to really know the piece you’re reading and, at the same time, to remember that your audience doesn’t know it at all.
Then, some of these smart, funny, rascally, eight-year-olds volunteered to practice and they brought down the house. We all nodded and laughed and mm-hmmed at appropriate times and then sent up a roar of finger-snapping at the end. And this was just the rehearsal. I’ve got to go set my alarm right now…
But first, I have to say, as we close out National Poetry Month and put April to bed for another year, I love poetry. I love it for children and I love it for beauty and I love it for grief. I love it for meaning and for humor and for relief. I love it for it’s roundness in a linear and chronological life and for it’s sensuality in a technological age. I love poetry.
And, specifically, right now, I really love haiku. I’ll admit that I set out to write one haiku a day this month because haiku are short and I figured I could handle it. Really. I admit it.
But I didn’t realize how much more than that the practice would become.
So, here’s the deal. I cannot stop.
I am not making any promises right this minute because, instead, I want to see what I feel like doing. But I will say that even though April’s over, my haikuing days aren’t.
Thank you for joining me this month. Namaste…
Haiku 30
cat, do you need oil, wailing like an old screen door? in or out, my friend?
