AMAZING poetry from the great Fionajavascript:emoticonp(':joker:')

Inspiration from sound:

Sea

Sash….Sash….Sash….Sash…Sash
The silken folds of her dress
Shimmying up shore

She…..She…..She….She….She
Screeching gulls, scraping shale
Hiss and salty roar

Inspiration from form and structure:

Ode to a Cadbury’s Creme Egg

Oh How dost thou eat thine?
There is no correct way
Eater beware, despite all thy care
Onto cheeks some stickiness must stray

Some ladies demonstrate nibbles of natural delicacy
Some gentlemen find tongue insertion enhances felicity
No matter your method, enjoyment can’t be bettered in the chocolicious act of destroyment

But I am weak! You are strong.
From your open top what goodness throngs
I am hoard of bees and you are my honey
For you I will go round the corner shop and spend all my money

Inspiration from imagery:

Snow Day

The fields are white, trees white, white gardens too.
I smile to see the cat that walked across the blanket this morning
And back
Black are the roads that the gritters covered
Black tracks across the hills tell stories of de-icer, wet gloves and sharp-cold breath caught in morning lungs

There is always a snowman round bellied with hat or scarf
The Pheasants that hang on the fence outside The Somerset Inn
Snowy monument to life
And death
And forces beyond our control

Using rhyme to inspire:

Alfie

Alfie was a birthday present: my beautiful pet rat
When I went away to Uni, Alfie got really fat
Alfie missed me, he was feeling sad
So they fed him chocolate bars to cheer him up
Both my mum and dad

When I saw my huge pet rat
I discovered chocolate bars had made him fat
“But chocolate to dogs and rats is really bad”
(I cried)
“Then we will stop giving it to him when you’re gone”
(they lied)
Both my mum and dad

They both thought the other wasn’t doing it
But he was still munching dairy milk like mad
How was he getting it? Whodunit?
Both my mum and dad

Alfie is in Heaven eating Milky Way Magic Stars
Dairy milk’s a killer, he died of chocolate bars

Using non-fiction to inspire:

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has over 2,727,832 articles.
Each one is nonfiction.
Each one records what someone said
Or the size of a whale's head
Or the inventor of bread
Or the atomic number of lead.

If someone were to write an article called 'Wikipedia'
(Which we cannot feel
And which is not real
And which isn't formed of wood or steel)
It would search its own listings policy and in an existential crisis delete itself.



Inspiration from perspective:

Mole

When I stretch out my toes, my nose and my back I can feel the walls of my home
And I know that I am safe, I smile at the darkness

I will never know what that looks like: My tiny eyes screwed up and my big pink nose
But I bet that you have never heard a worm so loud that your brain tells your paws which way to move before you realise you are scrabbling.

Or tasted the juiciest beetle after it’s been raining and the earth is as wet and sticky as that treat in my claws (munching noises).

Poetry Reflections

I did not like my first poem about the sounds of the sea because I made the mistake of writing about a subject where I could only think of clichéd phrases. I do enjoy onomatopoeic poems and poems that have a lot of sounds in them like War poems and I should have been confident enough to try another subject that I do not feel has been done to death, like bird song.
I liked the Ode because it was fun and silly and it allowed me to let go of some of the self conscience feelings I had about not producing good poems (as an English student!) and also exposing myself to everyone to read through poems, poems are a personal thing (the one about Alfie is true and he was a much loved pet). The Ode also got me thinking about the language I was using and more extravagant or made up words that I could use. When working with a KS2 class I might try an Ode with them to encourage confidence and get them to realise poetry can be fun. One great thing about poetry is that you are allowed to make up your own words like “chocolicious,” I think that children would be excellent at this and really enjoy it.
Poems are very visual and children are too so I think that drawing pictures or story maps of poems is a great way for children to talk about images. Bringing in objects for a KS2 class to examine would really help them to be inspired. Children have great imaginations as I do but it really helped my imagination to write my poem “Snow” about what I could see in my village today after it had been snowing. A trip to visit the subject matter would be inspirational in the same way and on a recent trip to Bristol Zoo each enclosure had a poem displayed by a child from a local primary school, the children had been inspired by a school trip. The poems were very funny with a child’s honesty and some interesting takes on the familial relationships between the animals. You could tell that the children had been studying poetry by some of the devices that they had been trying out.
It would take longer then an hour, in fact it would take one lesson and a day trip but I would love to take a KS2 class to the zoo. The lesson before we would have looked at examples of animal poems like The Tyger by Blake and The Eagle by Tennyson and looked at how the authors use words both to: create images in the reader’s mind and also how the words used convince the reader of what sort of character the animal possesses. Armed with these new skills the children would go to the zoo, choose five animals and think about words that could evoke an image of the animal in the mind of someone reading a poem. The children would also write down what kind of character traits the animals looked like they might have and what habits they might possess. The children would jot as many as possible down as they went around the zoo looking at the animals. Back in the classroom the children would write five poems on different animals using the words that they had gathered during their trip and being imaginative with the characters of the animals.

i really like a lot of the ideas in your poems