April 2019 Bookshelf
April is Poetry Month!
We turn not older with years but newer every day. ~Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
Called “The Belle of Amherst,” Emily Dickinson is considered one of America’s best 19th century poets
Emily Dickinson lived quietly in Amherst, Massachusetts and wrote poetry for most of her adult life. Her verses were short but inventive, and her themes universal: love, death, and her relationship with God and nature.
Dickinson was not famous during her lifetime; she rarely left Amherst and according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “after the late 1860s she never left the boundaries of the family’s property.”
Enjoy this springtime poem by Emily Dickinson.
Bee! I’m expecting you!
Bee! I’m expecting you!
Was saying Yesterday
To Somebody you know
That you were due—
The Frogs got Home last Week—
Are settled, and at work—
Birds, mostly back—
The Clover warm and thick—
You’ll get my Letter by
The seventeenth; Reply
Or better, be with me—
Yours, Fly.
If you are looking for something to do over April vacation consider the Emily Dickinson museum in Amherst.
A few poetry books for you to consider...
Here is an activity for you to try at home, Found Poetry. Found Poetry is created by taking existing texts and refashioning them, reordering them, and presenting them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, pages from a tired book, or even other poems.
Turning Junk into Poetry from Kenn Nesbitt
Find a piece of junk mail, an article from a newspaper or magazine, or a page from a book that is falling apart with a lot of words printed on it.
Use a bright yellow marker to highlight the most interesting words or phrases that are already printed on the page. Look for words that you like because of how they are spelled, what they mean, or how they sound when you speak them aloud.
Now switch to a dark colored marker, such as black or purple. Fill in all of the spaces between the highlighted words. When you do this, you will even color over the non-highlighted words with the dark marker.
You should now have a solid black or purple page except for a few bright yellow words, which will form a poem.
4th and 5th graders participated in the Massachusetts Children's Book Award Contest. And the winner is:
