An Alternative to the "Where I'm From Poem" - Inspired by Acevedo and CLAP WHEN YOU LAND. #WriteOut

Following yesterday's post, this morning I'm thinking about last night's graduate class. I can't help it. By the time we're all out of the room it's 9:30 and it isn't until 11 p.m. when I finally get my mind off teaching. I wake up thinking about it, too. 

Anyway, as part of the class activities, I had students look at 3 distinct poetic styles used by Elizabeth Acevedo in Clap When You Land and, as thieves, we discussed what we could steal for our own writing if we chose to. 

Because it's #WriteOut and because I'm also in love with Ann Burg's Flooded, I thought poetic narrative might be fun to explore. Although we looked at several poems, I highlight only this one here because of its environmental theme and influence (there are several in both texts). Acevedo's first poem, from Camino, p. 1, is a location poem...on place. It begins, 

I know too much of mud.

I know that when a street doesn’t have sidewalks

& water rises to flood the tile floors of your home,

learning mud is learning the language of survival.

I know too much of mud. 

How Tia will snap at you with a dishrag if you track it inside.

How you need to raise the bed during hurricane season.

as it continues to set up a story from the Dominican Republic. I wanted my students to think about what they might steal for their own writing and they named multiple areas, from which I wrote a variation myself,

I know the cold real well.

I know the plows that scrape roads

& the salt thrown at tires,

because snow is the way we breathe.

When will it melt?        April, May-be

never, packed in 6 foot piles that line

Childhood streets. Wind chills burn.

Cold bites the skin with razorblades,

stabbings of 4-feet icicles 

through snowmobile suits.      Hoodies

& a cold with its own soul. Wants to burn

your toes through wool socks & boots.

Runs its fingers along the neck & back.

“Remember hot cocoa,” mom said,

before sending us out to play. The finger-

prints all over us.

I couldn’t wait to throw wet socks

into the dryer, before reaching the hot

shower to thaw my bones.

Defrost the bloodlines, purify the lungs:

They say no two snowflakes are alike.

I know my home, though, is CNY cold.

Blowing ice-cubes.     Skating rinks.

Air-conditioned frigidity. And I long 

for a beach             in another state. 

Here's what we did. We thought of our childhood homes. We thought of a natural tendency in these locations. We brainstormed that tendency with memories of our childhood (e.g., winds, rains, hurricanes, humidity, floods). We noticed how Acevedo used line breaks and stanza. One student named that there's a dialogue piece, but only slight. And we wrote. 

Where are your from? How's the story begin?

The students had several other models, too, and could choose what they were into for the evening, but I took pride when one student who said, 'I HATE poetry," read a childhood piece to us all that was actually beautiful. Not bad for a chemist. She admitted this herself.

And with this, my day begins. #WriteOut