Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit innovative Heidi at my juicy little universe for Roundup. Her WhisperShout writing workshop and magazine for young writers sound amazing!
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| Margaret Simon & Irene Latham |
If you've been thinking of joining Charles and me at Highlights this summer for a Working Retreat June 23-26, NOW is the time to sign up! Just a few slots left...AND we've added a special guest: Carter Hasegawa, editor at Candlewick, who has worked with quite a few poets on quite a few poetry books! We are SO EXCITED about all we will surely learn from him!
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Today she's responding to a few prompts in relation to her experience with ANIMALS IN PANTS.
Welcome, Suzy!
DIFFICULT:
ANIMALS IN PANTS probably wouldn’t exist if pantoums weren’t so impossible to write.I love to write verse that sounds loose and conversational but actually falls neatly within the strict parameters of meter and rhyme scheme. Those parameters always seem to free me up, creatively. So logic would suggest that I’d enjoy adding even more parameters by using traditional forms like sonnets, villanelles, or pantoums, right? Wrong. The extra rules that come with certain forms break my brain a bit, and I often wind up struggling to keep it all sounding natural and fun.
Which brings me to late 2016: I was so frustrated with my progress on a pantoum that I decided to scrap it entirely and invent my own poetic form instead. My new form was called a “pantaloon” (take that, pantoum!), and the only rule was it had to be about animals in pants. Much easier!
Fun fact: the original title of this collection was PANTALOONS. The publisher thought (quite rightly) that it might be confusing from a marketing standpoint, so we changed it. But my agent and I still secretly call it PANTALOONS and I’m sure we’ll never stop.
FRESH:
I wrote the first poem of this collection, “Cat-itude,” long before I knew there was going to be a collection at all. The piece was an assignment for a writing class. Our homework prompt was to “choose two incongruous things and find a way to connect them.” This really resonated with me! So much so that I’ve returned to it again and again over the years, whenever I’m at a loss for ideas. Nothing shakes up my imagination and produces fresh material like taking two things that don’t belong together and smushing them together anyway.
So with “Cat-itude,” I connected a cat with pants. It was so fun that after the whole pantoum debacle (see above, ha), I decided to keep the ball rolling, writing the “pantaloons” that eventually became ANIMALS IN PANTS. And a while later (after buying my nephew a very strange-looking set of dinosaur-head cars for his birthday), I tried connecting dinos with cars, and boom: my second collection, DINOS THAT DRIVE, is coming out next year!
True story: at lunch with my agent a couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I had a new idea, but I wasn’t sure if I should pursue it. I was concerned because I’d be using the same old prompt again, connecting two incongruous things, and maybe that would make the project too similar to ANIMALS IN PANTS and DINOS THAT DRIVE. My extremely patient agent looked at me for a second, then said, “But Suzy, you realize that those are your two books that have…um…sold?”
Long story short, it’s a great prompt. It’s fresh, it’s happening, and everyone should try it!
DELICIOUS:
A few years back, when I first started writing in earnest, I didn’t know I was a children’s writer, or even a poet. I experimented with lots of different genres. Nothing clicked into place. People would say, “Write what you know!” To which I’d say, “NO, THANKS.” Because what did I know, exactly? I knew I’d recently
quit acting (sad), in part due to health issues (depressing), which left me with little to focus on besides a boring day job (yuck). Why would I want to write about any of that?
And yet…
If I were to step in a time machine, zoom back to the ’80s, and tell the kid version of myself that I’d recently written a funny poetry collection called ANIMALS IN PANTS, Young Me would probably shrug and say, “Well, yeah, of course. You’re writing what you know. What else would you be doing?”
Writing’s different for everyone, but for me, it’s less about examining the here and now, and more about unearthing the person I’ve always been—that kid who grew up on Muppets and dad jokes and silly jingles and anthropomorphizing stuff. That’s what I really know, deep down. So when I write, I dig up weird little forgotten bits of myself, mix them together, and use them to pave a strange new path.
That’s what I did with this collection, and everything finally clicked into place.
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Thank you, Suzy! I am kind of in love with that "try smashing two incongruous things together" advice!
And now, I offer you this week's ArtSpeak: FOLK ART poem, after another piece by Alabama contemporary self-taught artist Trés Taylor. Don't miss my first poem after Trés' work here! You can meet Tres and Helene in Uniontown, Alabama, on May 5th when they will be planting sunflowers! (I wish I could go...sigh...but I will be celloing!)
This poem is an "Abracadabra," which uses a the rhyme scheme abacadaba (which is "Abracadabra" without the r's!) Click to read my first Abracadabra poem "Mule Ringing the Doorbell of Heaven." Thanks so much for reading!
Before I drift
to sleep
I lift
my flute,
set my tune adrift—
Come cat,
come chimney swift!
For the path is cold-long-steep
and fellowship is the finest gift.
- Irene Latham
