Love Letters to Poetry | Hybridity, Voice, and Vignettes: An Interview with Ari Tison
GLORIA: First off, CONGRATULATIONS on the publication of SAINTS OF THE HOUSEHOLD!!! It's so exciting. I hope you're pausing in the whirlwind of the book release to take in all the goodness of this moment!
ARI: Gloria, thank you so much. That really means the world. I’m so very happy to get to talk with Diverse Verse about poetry! This collective is so beautiful. It is its own pantheon of poetry folks.
Love Letters to Poetry | The Power of Poetry
I think the reason I’m a writer is because I believe that one of the most important types of power we wield is the power of language. The words we choose to use. I’ve always felt this power, most acutely, in poetry. As a child, I dictated poems to my mother before I could read – and I filled notebook after notebook with my laboriously written poems.
Love Letters to Poetry | A Conversation with Richard Blanco about Poetry
I was recently in Miami where I had a chance to catch up with Richard Blanco. We’ve been friends for over twenty-five years. Our shared Cuban heritage created a strong bond as well as our love of literature. Coming from immigrant families, we felt pressure to choose practical professions, so we both have double careers, Richard as an engineer and poet, and I as an anthropologist and writer of children’s books.
Love Letters to Poetry | “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways”
Marilyn Nelson reads “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich.
Love Letters to Poetry | The Poetry of Love
Most of my recent verse novels are young adult love stories. They are also STEM books. Your Heart, My Sky, Wings in the Wild, and Wild Dreamers (scheduled for 2024 publication by Atheneum) are both romantic and scientific. I don’t know if anyone else is writing YA verse novels that combine biology, climate action, and romance, but I hope young readers can find something to love in this unusual hybrid form.
Love Letters to Poetry | Growing A Theme: From A SEED IN THE SUN
I chose the poem "Seeds" from my verse novel A SEED IN THE SUN because it, more than any other poem, encapsulates the theme of the book through poetry. Themes in a verse novel can be fertile ground from which to grow the novel. Because this story is about a farm working child, and because I used the Mexican proverb, "They tried to bury us, but the they didn't know we were seeds" as a springboard, I took the liberty to use the metaphor of a seed to tease out its multiple meanings.
Love Letters to Poetry | Finding Poetry
One of my favorite poetry anthologies is In Search of Color Everywhere, edited by E. Ethelbert Miller. As a poet, I search for poetry everywhere. And sometimes I find it.
Love Letters to Poetry | Thirteen Ways of Surprising Yourself and Your Reader
One thing about writing poetry that I especially love is that it teaches me to see the world with fresh eyes. Wallace Stevens certainly did this when he wrote “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” which is an excellent study in observation. A wonderful way to develop one’s poetic eye is to study something—anything!—and write about it in thirteen—or more—different ways. I have found this exercise to be very useful, especially when I don’t know what to write about (which happens more often than I’d care to admit).
Love Letters to Poetry | How to Build a Poem in Four Easy Steps
HOW TO BUILD A POEM IN FOUR EASY STEPS
One Lesson Plan for Teachers & Educators to Use for POETRY MONTH
Ages 9-17
Love Letters to Poetry | Different Kinds of Silence
Silence can be peaceful. Silence can make us feel calm. Silence can give us the space to dream, to love, to reach out compassionately to another person. Silence can be a spiritual space.
But there is also another kind of silence – one that destroys, instead of creating. The type of silence that can be cowardly. Silence which, in its worst form, might result in criminal negligence.
Love Letters to Poetry | Advocating for Poetry All Year Long
Carl Lennertz, Executive Director of The Children’s Book Council (CBC), recently asked me to write a short piece to celebrate a brand-new award, the Eloise Greenfield Children’s Poetry Advocate of the Year Prize, an award created by CBC and HarperCollins with the support of Steve and Monica Greenfield (children of Eloise Greenfield).
Love Letters to Poetry | Reflection on SINGING WITH ELEPHANTS
This first page by @margaritapoet is beautiful. It tells us immediately what poetry means to the main character. It evokes a sense of time and place, a magical summer with a famous poet and a family of musical elephants. Through whimsical verse, the first page has hooked us in! Who can put this book down after the first page?
Love Letters to Poetry | Art & Abolition
When I first heard about prison abolition, I had a fairly common, knee-jerk reaction: “No prisons? What about all the rapists? What about all the pedophiles?” Black feminist icon Angela Davis has been a hero of mine for decades but even her leadership role within the movement didn’t immediately convince me of its legitimacy. It has taken several years and more reading of Davis and other abolitionists for me to understand what a prison-free society could look like in the United States.
Love Letters to Poetry | “Who Needs Poetry?”
Carole Boston Weatherford shares her poem “Who Needs Poetry?”
Love Letters to Poetry | Personal Anthologies
In poetry school, one of my professors asked us to make personal poetry anthologies. He carried his with him when he traveled. That way, he said, he always had something good to read.
Love Letters to Poetry | “Where Am I From?”
My title comes from growing up being asked “Where are you from?” If I answered Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Most people would continue with, “Where are you really from?”
That question made me think about where I’m from. It is a question immigrants are often asked over and over again. Even those who are born here.
Love Letters to Poetry | Couplets from The Tirukkural
Hello everyone! Happy National Poetry Month! Today, I'm sharing with you a few lines from the Tirukkural, also known as Kural. It is an ancient Tamil language poetic text that is more than 2000 years old. The Kural was composed by Tiruvalluvar. It's consists of 1330 short couplets which are called Kurals.
Love Letters to Poetry | “The Little Mermaid”
In May 2023, Disney will release the live-action version of its 1989 animated movie, The Little Mermaid. When the decision was announced four years ago that Black actress and singer Halle Bailey would play the iconic role of Ariel, many on social media erupted in celebration but others spewed racist comments and claimed “mermaids can’t be Black.”
Love Letters to Poetry | Tameka Fryer Brown on Poetry and Picture Books
We celebrate National Poetry Month with Tameka Fryer Brown who shares her thoughts on poetry and picture books with DiverseVerse member, Valerie Bolling.
Love Letters to Poetry | Poetry of the Senses: From LAND OF THE CRANES
The poem I selected from my verse novel, Land of the Cranes, is a poem that takes place in the moment when the main character, Betita, and her pregnant mother enter a family immigration detention prison also called "la hielera" or "the ice box".