Elissa Janine Hoole's Blog

Once again, I was reading Laura Purdie Salas on poetry Friday, and she wrote about acrostic poems. I haven’t written very many of these that weren’t aimed at defining vocabulary words for my students, but I was looking for a structure that would help me write about Hawthorne, our new baby African Pygmy Hedgehog — the first pet our family has been able to have beyond our three well-loved fish (“but you can’t SNUGGLE them!” –Avery).

It started with the surprise of going to get her two weeks before the boys thought she would be ready to go home. We told them we simply had a surprise for them. D told them to be “ready for anything.” We got in the car on a Tuesday evening and made the hour-long drive into Wisconsin. The whole time, the boys were curious, but both of them were pretty torn between wanting to guess and wanting to keep on being surprised. But when we were only a few miles away, I kept on saying the name of the town, talking about animals, giving them every kind of hint possible, and they did not guess. We drove into the breeder’s yard and saw the animals, so I turned on the video camera and recorded their response. I didn’t know exactly how they’d react, but the video shows me so much about their personalities — the way each of them sees the world and processes it. I can’t stop watching it, the moment El first realizes we’re there to pick up our hedgie, the way his excitement goes inward just as Av’s bursts outward!

Little Ms. Hawthorne is settling in pretty well. She’s curious — an explorer but also a snuggler, especially with David. El says she likes the size of his hands, the way they can hold her so securely. With the rest of us, she starts crawling around on us the minute we pick her up, but with D she turns around, settles in, and falls asleep. Have I mentioned she’s adorable???

So here’s my attempt at an acrostic poem, inspired by Laura’s page on acrostic poems.

Hawthorne

Hiss, hiccup–

Easy, little girl

Don’t be so

Grumpy. Your sweet

Ears emerge from spiny brow,

Head raised, wet nose wiggles

Oh, it’s only you. I

Guess you can hold me.

hauling kitchen garbage

in my Saturday ponytail

and my stretchiest pants

rain steady and cool and

a tricycle parked in my patch

of beloved lily-of-the-valley

calls me back to childhood

high-water overalls on my sandy

secret point, and the wind

off the lake tangles my hair

into knots that will make me

howl later but later doesn’t

mean a thing to the tiny bells of the

lilies or to the shady cedars, my

bare toes burrowing into cool water

I’ve been blogging a little more regularly lately, and I decided that I would use my photos on instagram as a jumping off point for my posts, and that I would go ahead and write some stress-free poetry or fiction starts — a way to do some writing for fun, to share, not to worry about publishing. I took this photo of the trike and the lily-of-the-valley this afternoon while taking the garbage out as a part of my frantic efforts to dig ourselves out of the detritus of one busy, stressful week after another. The end is in sight, summer vacation on the horizon, and the summer childhood memories were sweet and welcome. I remembered how those lilies popped up the first spring after we bought this house, how I took them as a happy sign of home.

I didn’t know I would write a poem when I opened this post, but I knew I wanted to write about that childhood memory and about the carefree feelings of summer. Right now we have one more stressful week, and then there’s this shining light at the end of the tunnel. I looked up lily-of-the-valley to give me inspiration for this poem, and I read that, in floriography, or the language of flowers, this flower signified a return of happiness, and that seemed to me a perfect message to send to the world right now.

It’s the end of the school year, and every three years it gets particularly emotional for me, having a graduating eighth grade homebase. These students (many of them) first walked into my classroom three years ago in late August, brand new middle schoolers with their nervous parents at a respectable middle school distance, ahead or behind. They looked around my classroom and set down their supplies, and read my posters (one immediately recognized the grammar poster from The Oatmeal), and told me about their favorite sports and their favorite subjects…and their least favorite parts of school, too. We became the Hoolecopters (a name that won out over the Hooters, which is an adorable name for a group of sixth graders and something else entirely when they are eighth graders).

On the first day of school, I marked their height on my wall, and even though I’ve moved to a new space this past year with my new job as reading interventionist, I was able to take our height tape with us and take their pictures this spring with a measure of their physical growth. The pictures can’t really show all the other growth that I’ve witnessed along their path from little kids to incredible teenagers.

Anyway, I’ve been working with trying out some new poetry formats, which I’ve been stealing from The Poetry Princesses, and this form, the raccontino, seemed perfect for saying goodbye to my eighth graders. The poem is written in couplets, with the even-numbered lines all rhyming. Immediately I thought of the word “years” because of the time we’ve spent together, and I quickly thought of a couple of rhymes — sure, they’re facing fears, crying tears, I can do this. Easy.

The next feature of the poem is that the title plus the final word in the odd-numbered lines tells a story or makes a statement. That was simple, I thought. The sentence will be, “You will go far!” Or something like that. Now I just had to write the poem, but every time I tried, it just ended up being this sentimental mess! Ha! That’s so not me, even if it’s true to life at this particular moment. I’ve restarted and rewritten every line in this poem at least five times, and I’m still not sure it says what I want it to say, but after all, that’s the whole question of the poem — what could I possibly say to these twenty-five young people heading off to high school except that I want them to hope.

(And that I hope they find someone at their new school to check in with them each day, and that maybe they would also BE that check in for someone else.)

So here’s a raccontino, possibly (there was also a syllable requirement, which I ignored, because words are difficult!), and we’ll call it a rough fifth draft.

I’m kind of curmudgeonly about spring, I admit it. I get hunkered down into the Minnesota winters, snug in my bunker of books and schoolwork, writing and dreaming — when the first few days of sunny, warm weather hit, I feel dazzled, blinded. I curl in like a hibernating thing, not ready. Not ready.

I don’t know what to wear anymore, and my body feels uncomfortable outside of the usual layers. My legs are not ready for spring wind ruffling up my skirt. They are used to fleece-lined leggings and tall, black boots — my winter armor. This picture I snapped this morning through the boards of my back deck reminds me of how I need to get used to spring slowly, one peek at a time. Four soft blue eggs, gently cradled in the nest. Robin’s egg blue. It’s this perfect spring moment, and it helps me uncurl, look around. I hope the mother bird will be patient with our comings-and-goings, but already Avery has played kickball against the lattice and gone stomping up the stairs on a mission to tattle on his older brother, so we’ll see. After an evening of the four of us playing catch in the backyard, I filmed a the bright red cardinal who often perches on our front porch railing and sings to me while I write in the early weeks of summer. There’s another little flex, uncurling of my spring.

This image of me curling and uncurling has me thinking of two other things that have been going on this weekend. One is the yearly professional growth plan that is due this week, a curling in to reflect on my year as a teacher. This year was the first year in my new position doing reading intervention full time in the junior academy, and all I can think of as I look back at my year is how much I want to do differently next year. I’ve learned so much, and I am really going to miss the students I’ve worked with this year. And my homebase, which will be graduating this year after being (mostly) with me for three years. Time keeps rolling along, and my former students become this giant net spreading out and away, occasionally catching me off guard in public by how mature and capable they look, adults in the making.

Of course there’s a much more literal connection to a curled-up hibernating creature, and that’s the fact that my family is getting a hedgehog baby in two weeks, and she’s SO CUTE. Av even learned how to use the sewing machine last week when he was home sick, and he made a little pillow and sleeping bag for her to snuggle in. Presenting Baby Hawthorne the Hedgie — isn’t she adorable?!?

So. Happy spring from someone who is finally starting to put her quills down about the change of seasons. I may even step out of the black boots and leggings into my fancy composition notebook shoes and…no…I’m keeping the leggings for a little while longer! (It was 47 degrees yesterday, after all!)

At my book launch recently for The Memory Jar, I collected memories in a large ceramic jar. The jar itself I got years ago as a Christmas present, and it has held all kinds of things on our kitchen counter. It has a picture of a Minnesota lake, an island, and a couple gathered around a fire. This scene is very relevant to my book.

So I’m back to hopping around poetry blogs, fitting my words into stanzas again.

I started with Laura Purdie Salas, who posted her Poetry Friday tritina and linked to the six other poets she blogs with and their own tritinas. My favorite  was this awesome poem about spiderlings ballooning away — what an entirely memorable image! Poet Tanita S. Davis captures joy and a sense of bursting up in the three stanzas, each featuring three of the six end words the group agreed to choose from: sweet, stone, hope, cold, mouth, thread. And Tanita S. Davis even wrote a second beautiful tritina with the remaining words, invoking spring. I also enjoyed the three tritinas offered by Liz Garton Scanlon. I loved the poem “Recipe,” and especially the final line — the envoi  that brings the poem to a hopeful close.

I’ve tried my hand writing a few sestinas, and this form is almost an abbreviated form of that. Several of the poet bloggers mentioned that this brevity makes the repetition a little more challenging, and I felt a bit intimidated after reading all of their poems before starting my own. Those six words rolled through my head in all directions, and what possible image could I call to mind that had not already been featured? Spiderlings in flight! Sweet words and hope!

My son has been home sick the last two days, and yesterday I took advantage of the Monday off to hand-wash some of my cotton dresses to get them ready to wear in the warmer weather. It was almost too windy to keep them from flying off the back deck, but they looked so happy flapping in the breeze, so I took this picture, and last night wrote a quick attempt at a tritina!

dresses, drying in the sun

the wind is gusting hard but smelling sweet

like spring. three cotton frocks, hand-washed in cold

flutter from the rail, and I hope

they stay content to billow, hopeful

pennants beckoning in sweet

invitation to the end of cold

weather, the end of dressing for cold

mornings, layered against the hidden hope

of warmer afternoons, bright colors, sunshine sweet

and in that sweetness a promise of the conquered cold, a summer hope.

I live at the bottom of a big hill rising up from Lake Superior, and every day on my way to work I get to drive (well, D drives, actually, most days) up this hill and admire the beautiful scenery. On one side you can catch a sunrise over the Lake — the reappearance of this sunrise from the dark, dark winter is one of the points each year when I think probably we’ll survive this frozen season, and spring will come again.

But the other side of the road is a thick forest of aspen trees, standing for much of the school year — at least as far as we can remember back, this far in — the trees rise up in stark slashes carved into the empty white sky. Each spring there’s a day (was it today? maybe yesterday?) when the trees start to glow in the morning with the slightest hint of color, and then, on the drive home, they have unfurled their proud, tiny leaves.

And every spring, on that day, I try to write this poem.

every spring I grapple with green

with the word that doesn’t quite exist

the word that means the green equivalent of a healthy blush

rising up across the thicket

of sticks that soon will wave and flutter

flags of softly rattling whispering shushing

green leaves growing lush

but the blush—what’s the word?

One of my favorite parts of being a language arts teacher has always been the part where I get to be a professional book pusher. Book encourager. Book wheedler. It’s always my favorite thing on earth pretty much to find the perfect book for a student, the book that makes reading something to look forward to, the book that makes the student into a reader. That’s a lot of pressure, and I fail at it awfully often, but if I can build up enough trust with the student, sometimes they’ll let me try again.

I like reading, and I like thinking about the books I read in terms of which student might get a kick out of reading them. One set of books I can’t keep on my shelves is Suzanne Young’s Program series, starting with the bleakness and romance of The Program and its sequel, The Treatment, and now complete with the perfect prequel duet, The Remedy and The Epidemic, which I just finished reading.

I am not usually a series reader, except when reading books with El. I have a couple of things that irritate me about reading series, and both of these issues were diminished in The Program series. So first there’s the weird backstory at the start of each book, where the author has to remind you of what happened in the previous book, which you may have read a year ago. It always feels awkward and clunky, sticking out in the narrative like a big reminder that this is a sequel, and don’t you remember, Reader, when that thing happened like this, and this, and this? It bugs me! It draws me out of the reading experience. And I didn’t feel any of that. Part of it might be that there were two sets in the series, two sets of storylines within the larger narrative. All four of the books have terrific pacing, page-turning plots that kept me wanting to read, but especially in the two prequels, there was a smoothness and coherence to the books that made the transition from one to the next easy.

My other issue with series is that I get tired of the same characters. I’m a big fan of books that leave me wanting more — more of the characters, more of the chemistry and dialogue and heart-wrenching emotions. By splitting the series up (into what feels to my poetry-immersed self like two couplets in one poem), I got that “I want more!” feeling about both Quinlan and Sloane (and Deacon and James!)

I think the whole series could get a little dark and hopeless for some readers, especially those sensitive to suicide, and I certainly want to follow this one up with a happy book, but the emotions hit hard with solid writing and fairly steady high-stakes to keep the tension high. I think The Epidemic was a really satisfying piece of the puzzle of The Program series.

(And thanks to Suzanne, for sending my class some signed goodies and posters! There are a lot of fans at my school!)

Av and I took a walk this evening, while D picked up El from his track meet. We ended up at our favorite neighborhood playground, where a lone boy about Av’s age was running about. We made a pretty straight line for the monkey bars — Avery’s natural habitat. (He was, after all, known as Monkey on my blog for years and years!) Playground Kid sidles up to us, kind of sizes us up a little, then decides we’re worth talking to.

“You might think I’m poor,” he says, by way of hello. “But I’m not. I’m definitely not.”

Avery notices nothing out of the ordinary, just whizzes past and throws over his shoulder a quick, “Hi! Can you skip a bar like this?” while swinging his lithe self across the playground equipment, over to the chin up bar, shimmying up a pole to touch the top, then swinging back over to the starting platform. “Whoa. That was a lot easier than last time I was here.”

Playground Kid hesitates, puts one hand on the first rung. “I’m not very good at this,” he says, and hangs for a moment before dropping to the sand. “Have you ever survived nearly getting killed?”

“Yeah! All the time,” shouts Av, and he takes a running start and leaps at the trunk of a nearby tree, scrambling up about six or seven feet before gravity takes over. “Whoa! You try!”

The two boys, strangers only moments ago, are soon laughing like mad, throwing themselves at the trees, howling and trading dangerous tales of death-defying deeds. And I am marveling, wondering if I have ever jumped into friendship with such easy abandon.

My boy, sticks and mud and hollering, takes off running.

We lingered in the poetry section today, jumping off from Laura Purdie Salas’ triolet to a post from Kelly Ramsdell Fineman, which I thought was lovely, but which we couldn’t view at school due to the school’s Internet filters blocking livejournal. So we went instead to her website and browsed some poetry and then looked elsewhere for a definition of yet another new-to-me traditional poetic form, the triolet.

I’ve been enjoying our foray into these traditional forms…it feels like poet acrobatics at times, but the most interesting stuff comes out when you stretch a little and maybe go into your writing without any expectations. It’s a bit like what I’m hoping to do with this blog, which seems to have quietly resurfaced in my writing life. I started an Instagram account a little over a year ago, as one of my 2015 resolutions, actually. (In fact, it was my last post here!) I’ve really fallen in love with this visual platform, and sometimes I thought maybe one of the pictures deserved a little extra space over on the blog — a story, a bit of myself that I haven’t found so easy to share publicly since the publication of my first book.

So here I am, in the middle of a no-expectations WIP that at first felt like a novel-in-verse contemporary retelling of a fairy tale and now feels somewhat like a performance piece with possibilities for artistic collaboration — full of potential but still playful. Still mine.

I’m not going to post my second triolet, which may make its way into a draft of the aforementioned WIP, but here’s my very first try, using the theme of Change/Beginnings and Endings that (I believe?) was part of the Poetry Friday project for the triolet (which was actually happening just when I was posting the same goals post originally…)

the sun is awfully bright today

I curl up bashful, spiral fern

stretch to meet the yellow ray

the sun is awfully bright today

the breeze is gentle, feather sway

spring susurrus, the seasons turn

the sun is awfully bright today

I curl up bashful, spiral fern