Poetry from Daily Life: How an old hair tie became a black hole

This week’s guest on "Poetry from Daily Life" is Matt Forrest Esenwine, who lives in Warner, New Hampshire. Matt is an award-winning children’s author and poet who began writing poems when he was 9 years old. He says he loves writing for children about nature, families, and our connectedness. Two books Matt especially enjoyed working on were his children’s poetry anthology “A Universe of Rainbows” (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2025) and "I Am Today," which received the 2023 New Hampshire State Literary Award for Outstanding Work of Children's Literature. In addition to his writing, Matt spent 25 years on-air in radio doing morning shows, hosting concerts, and interviewing people as diverse as Bernie Sanders, Alice Cooper, and Jeff Foxworthy. ~ David L. Harrison

The unexpected importance of the Most Boring Object Ever

Too often, when people think of poetry they think, 'Oh great, another love poem.' Or another nature poem, or another poem rife with socio-political commentary.

Well, I'm here to tell you there are myriad other subjects waiting for their own poems — and kids write some of the best!

When I do school visits, I talk about a variety of things; one minute it might be the process of a picture book being created, the next it might be dinosaurs and what we're still learning about them. But I also do poetry workshops, and this is where the fun really happens.

I encourage students to not worry about rhyme, meter, syllable counts, and all those other academic poetic devices everyone wants them to learn. Rather, I focus on what I believe is the most important aspect of writing poetry: understanding one's subject.

This means asking questions. What is the subject? Why is it worthy of a poem? What else could the subject be, literally or figuratively? What would happen if the subject was in a different location, or a different size, or behaved differently? What if YOU were the subject?

These questions help a poet get a better sense of what story is waiting to be told, or what element of the subject is in need of a poem; much like the practice of mindfulness, the poet becomes more intimate with the subject and therefore hopefully gains the insight needed to write.

This is where the MBOE comes in!

The MBOE (AKA, the Most Boring Object Ever) could be a dust bunny, a rock, a twig — whatever a student decides. It's my way of engaging students in a crowd-sourced poem, whereby we ask questions of the subject, brainstorm ideas, and jot down lines or phrases we think might be worth considering — and then begin filtering out what we don't think will work.

For example, at one recent middle school poetry workshop I asked students to offer up what they believed was the MBOE. One suggested a black hair tie she pulled from her ponytail, and we were off and running!

I engaged the students in asking questions and jotting down ideas on the classroom white board: "black," "dark," stretches," "round." All reasonable descriptions. Boring, but reasonable.

Once we got past the obvious, however, the kids' imaginations took over.

"You could stretch it like a weapon!"

"It's round, like a mirror!"

"It's infinity because it never ends!"

"It's a hole to travel through!"

"Like a black hole in space!"

"It could be a portal!"

"That leads to the universe!"

Now, we were getting somewhere.

Once these were all written down we sifted through the phrases and images we thought we could connect. 

Eventually, we came up with this poem:

Black Hair Tie

Into the infinite portal:

black hole reflection.

I am the weapon

of universal chaos.

Then, we took a few other phrases, rearranged them, and came up with this:

Black hole portal

into infinity, looking glass

of chaos.

I am the universal weapon.

We took those phrases again and switched them around a third time:

Weapon of chaos:

reflection, never-ending

black hole universe

It just so happened that that last one turned out to be a haiku — an unexpected treat, because I got to show the kids how structure sometimes finds its way into poems whether we plan it or not.

And it might be hard to believe the class came up with such bold, creative poems about an old black hair tie, but there we are. And it only took about 15-20 minutes!

So don't dismiss poetry as only being about love, life, death, and the current political climate. And don't dismiss those MBOEs in your own life! Who knows what random, unspectacular subject is waiting.

After all, having discovered that MBOE means YOU are the perfect person to write its poem!

Matt Forrest Esenwine’s picture books include the Kirkus-starred “Flashlight Night” (Astra Young Readers, Sept. 2017) and “Once Upon Another Time” (Beaming Books, 2021), which ALA’s Booklist called “a necessary addition to picture book collections.” His poetry can be found in numerous anthologies like “The National Geographic Book of Nature Poetry” (National Geographic Kids, 2015) and “Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall” (Encircle, 2019). Find more about him at MattForrest.com.