From: Jane E Kurtz <jkurtz>
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 11:35:36 -0500 (CDT)

As I've been signing copies of my new book about the 1997 Red River flood--which is a story told through poems--I've had any number of people say, "I had no idea you wrote poetry." I'm always slightly taken aback because the first things I ever published were poems in literary journals and I've written poetry with kids, first as a teacher and now in writing residencies, for my whole adult life. (In fact, RIVER FRIENDLY RIVER WILD came to be because my roommate at IRA right after the flood, Deborah Hopkinson, heard me talk in my workshop about kids writing poems about their own lives and said, "What if you did that same kind of writing about what happened to you in the flood?")

My old standby is A GIFT OF WATERMELON PICKLE with its delightful collection of poems, many of which can spark great student writing. I, too, often use ALL THE SMALL THINGS. I've read her pigeon poem out loud hundreds of times to illustrate using the five senses and specific details. An anthology I love to use is THIS SAME SKY by Naomi Shihab Nye to show how people write about their lives all over the world. Not all the poems are accessible to elementary students, but I've found some that illustrate something we're working on in class or can be a model for some technique or approach I want us all to try. A few years ago I happened to be writing poems with high school students on Valentine's Day and used a picture book with wry, unusual love poems, interestingly shaped. Now I can't remember the title or author, which is too bad because it inspired such great ya poems. Can anyone help me out, here? Maybe it will come back...after I get over lingering jet lag from my recent trip to Kenya.

Jane Kurtz

On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Laurie Holmquist wrote:
Received on Thu 06 Apr 2000 11:35:36 AM CDT