Poetry from Daily Life: Word by word, line by line, collecting, stacking, making a rhyme

My guest this week on Poetry from Daily Life is Rebecca Kai Dotlich, who lives in Indianapolis, Indiana. Rebecca began to find the fun and magic in words as a child and her ally was her dad, who wrote silly poems for her and with her. She attended Indiana University in Bloomington, has served twice on the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children Committee and others and is an award-winning author of more than 20 books for children. She often teams with Georgia Heard to conduct poetry workshops. ~ David L. Harrison

Words woven through life

Words. Alone or strung together they are delicious, emotional, heart-tugging and clever. They are woven throughout our lives. They evoke images and memories we have stored in our minds and hearts. As a young girl, I couldn’t name it, but I was falling in love with, and collecting, words. I pasted poems and song lyrics into my diary. I treasured the lyrics found on thin crinkly paper inside of a well-loved record. I found it simply wondrous to repeat words like … "Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread." Shiver. Loved it. Or I can never forget, "Take me out to the ballgame, take me out to the crowd, buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack …" My older brother listened to that song so often from his small record player that it is stamped onto my brain. Songs, images, poems; a puzzling of words full of memory and mystery.

I have written poetry since I was about 11. I still have a few of those poems. One (or a hundred) was about a boy, one about my little sister, one about death, and one was full of silly nonsense. None of these were good poems. And it didn’t matter. Writing them made me happy. It became a hobby. I wrote on tablets, on notebook paper, in diaries, and on the white cardboards that came from inside my dad’s laundered shirts. My dad wrote silly nonsense poems, and we often wrote poems back and forth. At one point my grandfather gave me his old typewriter and I fell even deeper into the world of words along with the sound of click-clacking while I typed. (I hadn’t learned to type yet, I just punched one key at a time.) I loved that sound. I had things I wanted to say, and so I said them. Word after word, and line after line. Some poems rhymed and some didn’t. I don’t remember worrying about ideas, or how to get an idea, I just wrote what I was feeling, seeing, and thinking.

Pome

To Becky T.

A sweet little big girl

with long short hair

skips along in dark white shoes

very worried without a care

Brushes her teeth regularly

once in a while

and for a real friend she’d

walk a mile

Hair is neat but what a mess

even Ringo has much less

You’ll cut it off some fine day

this bill I’ll gladly pay

What is important to keep

you’ll later see

is a sincere and lovable

personality

But as life is rushing on

and things go wrong

just ask your dad to sing

A song

(Written by my dad, John Thompson, for me circa 1965.)

Now that I am a grown-up writer, I’m asked quite a bit where I get my ideas for poems. The truth is, not much has changed, they come from what I see, what I feel, what I remember, and what I wonder about.

For years I have immersed myself in studying the craft of poetry, finding joy in comparing one thing to another, taking time to notice, to observe all the details that I can, reading as much as I can, making word lists, finding the just-right word. Often, I fall in love with what I’m writing about for just a moment; the stars, the sky, the twisted trunk of a tree, the small frog, and I find myself being amazed by it, marveling at it. This might be holding a glassy marble in my hand, watching the whirling spokes of a bicycle, staring at a starfish, a heart-shaped rock, a penny on the sidewalk, a kite caught in a tree.

Poems don’t have to be about big, complicated things. But they can be. I’ve written about a friend moving away, missing my grandfather, and being heartbroken, things every human being thinks about, feels, and then tries to find the words to share with others. Words. What beautiful things to have woven through a life.

Rebecca Dotlich's books have received a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor, an AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize Finalist, a Bank Street Best Book of the year, and an SCBWI Golden Kite Honor. Her newest picture book, "Little Scoot," is a lyrical tale of resilience and determination for young readers. To learn more about Rebecca go online to https://www.rebeccakaidotlich.com/.