Poem envy

Today our school played host to a brief visit by prolific poet Steven Herrick, this year's patron of National Literacy and Numeracy Week. The students (and teachers) were enthralled by his deceptively easy style of almost-conversational refrains, often based on keen, real-world experiences that flow as a series of pithy and/or wry observations of the human condition - and not a stereotypical rhyming word in sight.

I came away from the session feeling like I wanted to reach for a pad and pencil and just let the ideas flow. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the students felt just as inspired. Unfortunately, we were all back to work all too soon.

Steven Herrick says he wanted to be a professional soccer player, wasn't good enough to make it in that chosen field, but started writing poetry at age 18, earning his first $5 after sending a quirky poem to a magazine.

Interestingly, I was working at "Scan" (the professional journal for teacher-librarians) when a bit of a debate broke out about how SCIS was cataloguing Steven Herrick works. Some of his volumes are actually novels, even though they might appear, at first glance, to be thematic poetry anthologies. Because he doesn't want students thinking that individual poems in those books could be read in any order, not to mention that the books might languish unnoticed and unread in the poetry section, Steven Herrick requested the cataloguers to reconsider some of his his books as novels.

In another example of an effective use of Youtube, here's Steven Herrick with the delightful Ten things your parents will never say, from "Poetry to the rescue":

The longest title

Today I gave up an afternoon of my vacation to be part of committee for the Department of Education & Training's COGs (Connected Outcomes Groups) project. We are investigating the list of potential literary texts that will be included in the units of work being developed for teachers. Fascinating stuff - and a good way to prepare for, and ease into, the daily grind when school starts back next week!

As the meeting wasn't going to take up the whole day, I was able to organise morning tea and lunch with my wonderful colleagues still working at SCIS/Scan. It was rather nostalgic heading off for a peak hour train (in the rain, but who's complaining?), with a Star Trek novel to read on the long commute to Ryde. Just like old times...

I took the SCIS cataloguers something a bit unique; a children's anthology of short stories I found at Galaxy Bookshop a few months ago, with surely one of the longest titles ever:

Noisy outlaws, unfriendly blobs, and some other things that aren't scary, maybe, depending on how you feel about lost lands, stray cellphones, creatures from the sky, parents who disappear in Peru, a man named Lars Farf, and one other story we couldn't quite finish, so maybe you could help us out, edited by Ted Thompson with Eli Horowitz, with an introduction & almost half a story by Lemony Snicket (McSweeney's, 2005).

Sadly, it was already on the SCIS database. Beaten by New Zealand. Drat. (I hadn't actually noticed that it was a 2005 book, and the writing contest printed on the inside of the bizarre dustjacket had already expired.) Oh well, it was a fun thought.