Bobbi Katz

How can elementary school students celebrate National Poetry Month and enter a contest where everyone wins? Start by reading Once Around the Sun! It's a year in poems with a poem for each month. And in each poem I try to capture the essence of an experience I had during a particular month that made a lasting impression on me. As our precious planet travels along its path through the year, what affects the things we see, taste, touch, and hear the most? Place! It's both our place on Earth and Earth's place in space relative to our star, the sun. My wonderful editor at Harcourt Books is a gifted matchmaker. She chose Le Uyen Pham to illustrate my poems. My editor explained that LeUyen's nickname is Uyen and is pronounced "you-win." I think "You-win" is a perfect name for her. She has captured the magic interplay between the sun and Earth and people with exuberant paintings that follow a particular boy all through the year. Uyen has won my appreciation.

I think EVERYONE is going to like this book, but the contest is only open to kids. Teachers and librarians, however, can use the contest as a way of inviting kids to focus on reading and writing, and they can help get students' work to me by January 15, 2008 at 82 Riverview, Port Ewen, NY 12466 by snail mail. No e-mail entries are eligible.

Me! I will spend a day at the winning student's school or library, giving workshops, writing, and reading with students. My usual fee for a full day in a school is $1,200. I will not charge any fee, but I will need to have travel expenses paid. THE NEXT FIVE WINNERS will receive signed copies of one of my books. REMEMBER: Everyone who enters the contest will be a winner. You will be richer for capturing the ordinary with words. Like a miner who discovers a diamond, you will have something precious: a memory you will never lose.

GETTING STARTED: I'm inviting all students to read Once Around the Sun to get the feeling for how someone can write poems that express the spirit of a month. Then use your words to paint particular pictures. Begin to think of what you might remember about each month. Take time to reread and revise what you observe. Capture the spirit of the month you wish and try to make it so real that whoever reads it can share what you have chosen. I grew up in a little city along the Hudson River in New York State. Naturally, the choices in my world may be quite different than those of someone growing up in Arizona or Minnesota or Hawaii or wherever you are!

Have you noticed how many people are reading, writing, and listening to poetry? Poetry Festivals featuring day after day of verse draw huge crowds. Why? Maybe we're so flooded by language, by endless sound-bites trying to sell everything from soap to politicians, that we're trying to give words new meaning. But imagine...

A Scarcity of Words

What if words were suddenly endangered
like cheetahs and pandas and elephants?
What if words became scarce,
the supply suddenly limited?
Would people panic, hurrying to say things
just to get them said
or would they hoard their thoughts like misers?
What if words were being used up so fast
that they had to be rationed
and you could only have a certain amount?
Which fifty, which twenty, which ten words
would you choose
to recycle, respect, repeat, replay,
write or say
if words were suddenly endangered... and precious?

Copyright c1995 by Bobbi Katz

Kids often ask me how a poem begins or where I get my ideas. Their questions gave me this answer.

Spider Work

I didn't mean to write a poem.
  A tingling starts a single spinneret
   I cast
     a
     line
       that
         may
     or may not rhyme
       but
       d
        a
         n
        g
         l
        e
       s
    trembling,
  beckoning me
   to weave
  a web of words:
a poem to house my spiderling.

Copyright c2006 by Bobbi Katz