Today’s piece came from working with our Blue Day students with the strike line strategy. It looks like we are doing this strategy quite a bit this month, but we are on Block 8 scheduling, so I get to demo the strategy six times. I don’t always keep the pieces I do in class to take away a sense that every piece is so precious, so valuable, that to move on to another is hindered by the holding on to the prior. I hope that this makes sense and doesn’t send everyone running away. I think this is one of the ways in which I model fun in the process of writing poetry vs. a focus on the product. That something has to be finished. That something has to be submitted.

So, for fun yesterday, I asked a student in the room to give me a “strike line” from a poetry book in the room. A student reading Mary O’Neill’s 1961 classic, HAILSTONES AND HALIBUT BONES gave me this line:

“Brown is the color of a country road.”

Then, to ramp up the fun a bit, I asked another student to give me a subject. A student raised their hand and sensing my aversion to (if not inhibition of) math, said, “Math.”

I think one way to reduce the perceived expertise in the poetics of the lead learner is take away any notion that I am rehearsed before having come into the writing experience. There were hundreds–if not thousands–of lines of poetry in the room yesterday. I got a line from a classic piece of poetic text. I got one subject of the 32 possible subjects that could have come out. Friends, this is the beginning of approximation. Let the students see you think it through. Before you start setting down lines.

Here is the piece we got from the strike line and the subject. I have put the original strike line in bold so that you can see it, but what I also want you to see today is that we bent the rules of the strategy just a bit to take two words that create a kind of “turn” or “distraction” within this manufactured “word problem”:

 

“Subdivision Mathematics”

 

The dirt covering our 3/4 acre space is ready and brown.

But the real question of the day–the tough one– is:

not whether we can fit the necessary circle into the

square of our yard; we haven’t determined the color

of the liner–x? or y?–an important consideration

of a

pool cut into a property in the country

or to what degree we’ll be the envy of our neighbors down the road.