The ABC's of Poetry: A Dictionary for Children and for Fun

  

[From the Introduction to The ABC’s of Poetry: A Dictionary for Children and for Fun]

Poetry and young people make great friends! Even the youngest child responds to voice, tone, and musicality, delighting in the catchy sounds of rhyme, rhythm, and refrain. As language skills develop, most children also find it's fun to play with words, and poetry lets people of all ages do just that.

To help young readers easily explore the many sides of poetry, this book has easy-to-find-entries, arranged alphabetically. Each A-Z topic includes a pronunciation guide and a brief definition with poetic examples from the works of present-day poets or the public domain. To encourage readers to find more info on unfamiliar terms, small caps in the text point to a related topic or a poetic technique covered somewhere else in the book.

At first one topic may seem harder than another, but most can be understood, enjoyed, and practiced by elementary or middle grade school students in a classroom or home alone on their own.

Besides helping young readers to explore poetry, this book aims to aid lively discussions with your students, children, or neighbor kids. As the text guides this timeless adventure into language, the classics might get clearer, new poems get written, and young artistry get ready to bud! Anything can happen, so don't be surprised if someone you know falls in love with poetry. I did as a young child, and, oh, how I wish I’d had this book waiting for me – as poets of all ages now do, thanks to you!

[Examples of entries]

accent   [Pronounced ACK-sent.] In any language, people place an accent on syllables as they speak. For example, the word, "accent," has an accent or stress on the first syllable but not the second. The pronunciation guide beside each word in a dictionary shows you where the accent goes. That information helps you to speak correctly. It helps you to write poetry too. How? An accent gives a word its beat. Combined with other words on a line, this brings rhythm to your poem. In fact, a big difference between poetry and other types of writing is that a poem usually has more accents, which makes more rhythm on each line.

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beat   [Rhymes with eat – sweet!] A healthy heart goes tha-THUMP/ tha-THUMP. That beat is good to hear! Poets who want that rhythm use iambs in their poems.

Like a tha-THUMP, an iamb has two syllables. The first syllable has no accent. The second one does. Put several iambs together, and the beat sounds like a heart. You can clap your hands and tap your foot to the beat. But it also sounds like a nursery rhyme! So most poets will change the beat a little bit.

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cadence   [Pronounced KAY-dense.] As you talk, your voice goes up and down. Some words sound soft. Some sing. Some have a strong beat. In poems the beat makes a kind of music. You can hear it in the Bible. You can hear it in free verse. You can hear it as people talk.

Poems with rhyme have cadence too. But rhymes can get loud! Cadence is easier to hear if words do not rhyme.

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clerihew   [Pronounced KLURR-eh-HUE.] This humorous verse has two couplets of two lines each. The couplets rhyme in a pattern or a rhyme  scheme of aabb. That means lines one and two make rhyme A. Lines three and four make rhyme B.

The first rhyme includes the name of a person. Often well-known, that name makes an end-rhyme for one of the first two lines.

To write a clerihew, put yourself into it! Think of words that rhyme with your first or last name. Then say something funny about yourself. For example, a name that sounds like "sailor" might make you think of someone who loves to be at sea. Not me!

Mary Sayler

will merrily say her

stomach waves with motion,

sailing on the ocean.

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iambic pentameter   [Pronounced i-AM-bick pen-TAM-uh-ter.]  In accentual syllabic verse, any five feet on a line make pentameter. If three or more of those feet are iambs, you have iambic pentameter. If all five feet are iambs, you have ten syllables on a line.

The beat then sounds like this:

ta-TUM/ ta-TUM/ ta- TUM/ ta-TUM/ ta-TUM.

Say ta-TUM aloud five times. Of course, it's silly, but here's the thing: Once you hear that cadence coming into a poem, you'll know iambic pentameter by the sound of its footsteps.

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syllabic verse   [Pronounced suh-LAB-ick.] For this type of poem, count the number of syllables you place on each line. Some poets use a form with a particular number of syllables. For example, haiku has a count of 5, 7, 5 syllables on three lines. A cinquain has 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 syllables on five lines. Follow those patterns. Or design your own. Your syllabic verse can have any number of syllables you choose. That number can change from line to line or stay the same.

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tongue twister   A tongue twister is alliteration  gone wild! You can write one with vowels. But consonants work better. They get loud! For this example, I used the consonant, "r."

 

Rory writes riddles really well.

Ruby raps rhyme and rhythm.

Ruby writes rap and rhythmic rhymes.

Rory fiddles with riddles.

Read fast. Do the R's trip your tongue? That's half the fun of a tongue twister. The other half comes from playing with sounds. Be silly! Tongue twisters make sense of nonsense!  For example, "Suzy sells sea shells by the sea shore." That's funny when you think about it. Why sell sea shells where people find them, free?

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vowel   [Rhymes with towel.]  The letters a, e, i, o, u, and, sometimes, y, make vowels. Every other letter in the alphabet is a consonant. In English, you need at least one vowel per word. If you repeat the same vowel sounds on a line of poetry, you get assonance.

This brings a sound echo that's quieter than consonance. To hear this for yourself, read aloud the tongue twister entry. Then meet me back here and say: "Ah!" Eh? I? Oh! You! Why? Heed the soft voice of vowels. That's Y.

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For more fun with poems, I hope you'll order The ABC's of Poetry: A Dictionary for Children and for Fun - and give it a starry review! Thanks and blessings.

Mary Harwell Sayler

 

 

Caretaking into Poems

As primary caretaker for a loved one with late-stage Alzheimer’s, I’ve had little time to think about poetry, except for a flood of haiku that recently found its way into my book, Haiku Happening. I hope you’ll buy it, read it, and write a glowing review! But, with the aim of encouraging those of you who are caretakers too, I hope you will express your thoughts and feelings and look for ways to turn the joys and sorrows into poems.

For me, this began with a diagnosis.

Testing

When the neurologist
diagnosed his Alzheimer’s,
confirming my fears nearing
panic, some tried to help
by saying things like:

“Everyone gets Alzheimer’s
as they age!” or, more likely,
“Oh, I’m forgetful too!” 

But do you know what
season of the year we’re in
or who presently sits in the
presidential suite? Can you
draw a square that doesn’t
sag into a parallelogram?

Can you make a phone call?
Do you know each step
to take to clean a comb?

If I dropped you off in town,
could you find your way home?

©2022, Mary Sayler

If you’re taking care of someone who can no longer take care of himself, you’ve likely felt the shock of knowing you have to be continually vigilant, remaining alert for potential hazards you previously had no need to consider. For example:

Things to Be Aware of
When You Need to Be
Everywhere at Once

TV remote left
within reach

Medicines favoring
candy mints but
with flavors not meant
to be chewed

Snacks inclined to choke
a reclining person

Toothbrush – totally dry –
day by day

Heavy-laden disposables
in the recycle bin or
laundry basket or, worse,
tiny pieces of paper and
plastic polka-dotting the
clean clothes in the dryer

Shampoo containers
resembling face cream

Tubes of any ointment
looking like toothpaste,
in case the person
remembers to brush
his teeth

©2022, Mary Sayler

Thankfully, moments of levity ease the sorrow as expressed in this poem, included in the Silent Spark anthology 2022.

Nothing Heartless Here

They call Alzheimer’s
the “cruel disease,”
which shows no
understanding
of the individual
nor his amazing
plays on words –

puns indiscriminately
inserted into
conversations –

or the childlike discovery
of previously unnoticed
wonders

or the way he says,
“I love you,” then
forgets and says it
again and again.

©2022 Mary Sayler

 

Our priorities have changed, of course, and so will our perspectives as we make a point of looking for the bright spots in each day.

 

Little things matter –
bird nests, pine cones, seashells, clouds
reaching for the light.

©2022 Mary Sayler

 

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Repeat after me: Repetition can be used effectively

Many poets in our Christian Poets & Writers group on Facebook use repetition in their poems, which, when well-done, helps to create drama and memorable phrasing. Sometimes, though, repeating words or phrases make poems lose musicality and also the interest of readers who might want to say, "Stop! I heard you the first time."

For those of you who like to use repetition, these previous posts on the Poetry Editor blog mention various uses of repetition:

"Writing a ghazal"
"The poetry of the Psalmists"
"Writing a ballad"
"Writing children's poems for actual kids to read"
"Poetry and the forgotten Beatitude" 
"Villanelles need something worth repeating"

Hopefully, you'll find something in at least one of those posts that evokes your "Aha!" But, when I started thinking about the topic, this poem written during WWII came to mind as a very effective example of the use of repetition.

Today we have naming of parts
by Henry Reed

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,

We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica.
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.

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posted by Mary Harwell Sayler

7 Poems responding to 7 Poets

The idea for this blog post came about because of the tremendous encouragement I received from posting a poem dedicated to Mary Oliver on a social media page honoring her.

After reading the works of hundreds of poets, deciding my poems were totally out of sync, and giving up on the genre I’d loved since childhood, I ran across a little book by Mary Oliver with accessible poems I related to so well that I began to write again. Naturally, I wanted to acknowledge her work, which, at the time, used the unique format I mimicked in this poem:

 

Late Night with a Seasoned Poet
            after reading Mary Oliver

I cannot reach you
  at five a.m. when you spring
   awake to watch a summer rose

 fall into a pink-petaled
  lake where fishes bloom.
    I'm not a morning

person unless a winter-
  less night yawns & stretches
    into dawn with jarring songs 

of owls & whippoorwills
  and the charming squeak of
    a bat. Outlined at dusk,

 its soaring silhouette
  intersects the evening
    sky, circling insects

 and other small mysteries
  revealed to me before the
    pink-pollen light recedes.

                                         And then,
                                   everywhere,
                             everywhere,

     black roses blossom: hybrids
   cultivated from a long, wild
growing season of the night.

Mary Sayler, from Living in the Nature Poem and A Gathering of Poems

 

Although he’d unfairly fallen out of favor in the late 20th century, the work of Carl Sandburg drew me, too, because, like Mary Oliver, his poems were accessible and his metaphors apt. For example, his famous fog coming in on cat feet resulted in this response:

Weathering Sandburg 

The fog comes in cat
fur: pale gray Persian
with traffic sounds
rolled into the round
core of a purring rug,
each end opening to
skies of Siamese blue.

Mary Sayler, from A Gathering of Poems

 

As I continued to discover poets whose work I wanted to read more than once, poetry books by Wallace Stevens started to appear on my bookshelves. His intriguing titles and love for Florida (my almost-native-home) evoked this poem:

 

Landscape Loved by Wallace Stevens 

If you could fly over \ yards and yards
of green lace lining the Gulf and Space
Coasts, you would see low-lying bands
of land seeding the sea with pockets blue-
beaded with water, and you’d wonder how
one more word could fit into the shell-
shaped pattern, hemmed with canals, and
not unravel beneath the weight of so many
people pushing the delicate fabric, poking
the intricate design, picking at flaws not
found in winter-bound spools of wool.

Mary Sayler, from Living in the Nature Poem and A Gathering of Poems

 

As a writer and poetry-lover, I’ve often aspired to saying as much as possible in as little space as possible. So, with that in mind, you can guess why Walt Whitman’s longer-than-long poems didn’t initially appeal to me! But then, his poems happened to be the only ones in a bookshop in the beach town where we were vacationing for the weekend. 

Reading this poet-ahead-of-his-times, I discovered the incredible inclusiveness of his poetry. My response to him came right when I’d found I liked reading and writing prose poems (aka paragraph poems), but the impetus for the following poem came when I caught a glimpse of someone who looked like a photo of Whitman.

 

Leaving Walt at the Mall

Coming out of Dunkin’ Donut, I walked right by Walt Whitman without even speaking. You know how he likes to include everyone in a conversation and can go on and on, and I just wanted to get home before my caffeine let down. Later I felt bad about giving him nothing more than a nod, especially since I’m sure his driver’s license expired long ago. He’s been gone for over 100 years now and was almost that old when he died, so I could have at least offered him a ride somewhere, even though, by his very nature, he might not like being confined in this little boxcar of a poem.

Mary Sayler, from A Gathering of Poems

 

Interestingly, a contemporary of Walt’s, Emily Dickinson’s life and poems were almost the exact opposite of his! While he traveled widely and embraced fully almost everything, Emily lived a rather self-contained, reclusive life in New England where her poems resulted from penetrating observations of people. Often this included a breathless approach, dry wit, and the musicality of ballads.

 

Emily Dickinson Dips Ink

The music breaks
crystal.

Shards
strike the page
with spikes and slivers.

Vermont maples
explode
red and gold 
with no syrup
to make the fragments stick.

A dark stare
from a paper-white face
peers
at that bruise beneath
your left rib.

Mary Sayler, from A Gathering of Poems

 

While still enamored with prose poem-writing and intent on discovering poets whose lives and cultures contrasted with my own, I ran across the sensitive, insightful, and soulful poems of Attila Jozsef. In his poem, "The Dog, for instance, the creature and the poet morph into one. Anyway, I hope you will look up his work on the Internet and become familiar with him and, indeed, all the poets honored in this post.

 

Scavengers
   after reading Attila Jozsef by Attila Jozsef

Attila the Hungarian poet, I really love you. Please
believe me before you throw yourself beneath that
train. The fright of flying freight crushes my reading
of your prose poems – poems poised with insight
and odd juxtaposition. I try to rescue the paragraphs
you pose from extermination, reeling as I read. What
can I do but pet The Dog you left behind, ragged and
muddy, ready to avenge your wounds and scavenge
the pieces of God you hid in my upper berth on this
looming train?

Mary Sayler, from A Gathering of Poems

 

A tragic loss for the poetry world and for those who loved him, Jozsef committed suicide in his early thirties. Since this month is being devoted to mental health awareness, perhaps his work will be rediscovered. I hope so.

Around the same time I devoured Jozsef’s poems, the poems of Marin Sorescu provided a delightful diversion. Despite living under unimaginably oppressive conditions, Marin apparently made the decision to write with wit and irony, rather than direct confrontation, which kept his work publishable in his home country and, eventually, here.

 

Sorescu’s Core
in honor of a Romanian poet

Marin, I’ve been staring
at the painting that you did
as a cover for translations
of your poems: a bowl
of fruit, well-suited to design
the colorful plump phrases
pared to sink your teeth
into the pulp of apples,
oranges, lemons, life-sliced
and spiced and eaten with
your hands
behind your back, elbows
akimbo, juice

dripping

      down my chin.

Mary Sayler, from A Gathering of Poems

 

Before publishing this post, I revisited poems by these seven poets, trying to find specific hotlinks to recommend to you. The many options make me plead with you to find and read their poems online!

Well, with five shelves at home devoted to poetry books, this post could go on and on! However, visual problems hinder my reading, writing, and (definitely!) arithmetic as numbers disappear and words or sentences look like they’ve been smashed by a compacter! Nevertheless, my love for poetry hasn’t lessened, so I hope to continue with this blog, albeit irregularly and with occasionally long gaps.

Thanks for bearing with me all these years!

May God bless you and your poetry adventures.

Mary Harwell Sayler ©2022

 

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Poets on poetry

 

Recently, I had the pleasure of discussing poetry, faith, and his new chapbook with Matthew J. Andrews in an online interview for Agape Review. Not only is Matthew the Associate Poetry Editor of Solum Press, he has the unusual-for-a-poet job of Private Investigator.

I hope you'll check out Matthew's and my discussion, and since family concerns have kept me from posting here lately, I also hope you'll use the Search box to find other subjects of interest.

May your New Year be blessed with peace, joy, and poetry!

(c) 2021, Mary Sayler

The Arts have much in common

 

A composer composes a tune or score of music.

An artist considers the composition of a sketch or painting.

A writer writes in a composition notebook.

A poet composes a poem.

And, if we hope to be the best possible poet, writer, artist, or musician, we might need composure to compose ourselves!

The Thesaurus inherent in Word software offers these synonyms for "compose": 

• Invent
• Create
• Unite
• Combine
• Make 

In each of the arts mentioned, our work consists of the following factors we can connect, make something of, or combine in inventive ways:

 

Composition – A particular arrangement of notes, syllables, objects, or words can be boring, pleasing, or, preferably, breath-taking.

 

Line – A line of musical notes, a line of poetry, a line drawn on canvas or paper provides coherence to the work as a whole. The direction of those lines affects the artwork too. For example, a visual artist might draw a diagonal line to depict dynamic movement, a vertical line to show stability, or a horizontal line to evoke calmness.

 

Rhythm – The tempo, beat, or pace of a piece of music is generally obvious to our ears, but the musicality of a poem or the flow of lines and shapes in a painting have rhythm too – rhythm as vital as a person’s pulse.

 

Tone – The sound of music and the attitude suggested by a poem or painting heightens the tone of voice, while contrasts of light and dark add tonal value. With these elements at play, the work might come across as calm, lively, moody, maudlin, or an explosion of anger, grief, or joy.

 

Color – Colorful words in poetry occur best as strong nouns that readers can envision and active verbs that set those pictures into motion. In a painting, one color or hue highlights, complements, or contrasts with another. In music, jazz is often called “the blues.”

 

Texture – Since texture adds layers of interest and/or roughs up an otherwise smooth surface, we likely hear it in music with a change of tempo or a change of the tension between harmony and discord. For more about texture in art and poetry, see the last blogpost, “How can a poem have texture?” 

 

Theme – Each of the arts addresses or expresses topics that will be interesting or relevant to most people – subjects such as birth, death, faith, hope, love, infinity, and everything in between. Often, creative people have life themes recurring in their work. In mine, the same basic themes keep coming up: “God is good and can be trusted to work things out for our good” and “Everyone on earth needs to be treated with respect."

 

Techniques – Sometimes artistic people prefer to play by ear or wing it, rather than learning the technical tools at their disposal. For poetry or other forms of writing, a good grasp of grammar and a wealth of words will help, whereas visual artists need to know the effects of brushes, surfaces, and other utensils, and, musicians, lyricists, and composers need to know how to read music. These tools take only a little time to learn but a lifetime to utilize and open up more opportunities.

 

Similarly, a poet needs to know how to read a poem and an artist to read a piece of art in order to fully experience, enjoy, and learn from the work of someone else. All of us need to study our favorite forms or genres, of course, but studying works you never thought you’d attempt yourself can be especially insightful and delightful.

 

Most likely, other similarities occur in the arts, and if you have some to add, please do in the Comments section on this page. Thanks. And, regardless of your artistic interests, don't forget to experiment, practice, play, and have fun.

 

©2021, Mary Sayler, poet-writer, and maybe-someday artist

 

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