School Days, School Days -- in Poetry School

Although I've lived in the Green Mountain State for almost half a century (!), I didn't grow up in Vermont. 

My father, an industrial engineer, carried my New England mother off as his bride, and the work for engineers back then took them to New Jersey (north Jersey, I add quickly). But each summer, Mom brought us all back to where we belonged -- the mountains of Vermont, the farms of New Hampshire (one still in the family), the rocky coast of northern Maine. As soon as I could "get back here," I did, with a four-month-old baby and a husband who was determined to write serious sociology and willing to learn to split wood. I grew vegetables, made and canned applesauce, earned a living from home with my chemistry degree, and found that the Vermont house we'd moved into had been built for and by one of my mother's relatives back in the 1840s.

In the past 20 years there hasn't been much, other than brothers and their grown children's weddings, to draw me back to New Jersey, a far more industrial place than the interrupted farmland I'd known as a kid. Today, I learned that my "middle school" had a name change in 2015 to honor the town's astronaut, Buzz Aldrin. What a surprise!

Buzz Aldrin Middle School. Wow!

Still, it's September, so I'm back in school again: poetry school.

I spent much of my Labor Day weekend online in a three-day set of workshops led by strong poets with something worth saying. And I'm eager for the six-week class I'll attend that starts next week, with one of the best teachers I've learned from. (Proof: My poems reached publication FAR more often after each of her courses. I'm growing stronger and maybe even smarter in how and why and when I write them.)

Maybe you'd like to see a bit of how a poetry class operates? One session last weekend, taught by Alvy Carragher, focused on adding detail to poems. She showed us how -- but also pushed us to discover more through what these classes call a "prompt," a short assignment for writing something. I won't tell you her prompt because that could be unfair to all the work she put into it. But here are five things I paid attention to and scribbled as a result: 

• The blue ordinariness of a sunny sky.
• Up and down goes the zip on the sweatshirt as the day changes.
• Garlic baked into the bread! Such wealth!!
• Aliens adjusted my friend into enlightenment.
• Apples to process, pushing at my priorities.
• What can I recall about when my sons were teenagers? -- thirty years is a long time. 

I bet you can already see how each of those could lead into a poem. So can I. I have pages-and-pages-and-pages of notes from my classes.

Now I've got to get serious about the homework.