Verselove is a community celebration of poetry in April—an invitation to write, read, and reflect together. You’re welcome to write a poem a day or to come and go as you need. Reading and leaving a brief note—a line you loved, an image that stayed, a feeling a poem stirred—is also a meaningful way to participate. This is a generous, low-pressure space. We’re glad you’re here.
Our Host: Ashey Valencia-Pate
Ashley lives in Titusville, Florida where she works as a high school English teacher. She believes in learning as a partnership between teachers and students. In her free time, she enjoys relaxing with her husband, three children, and three dogs.
Inspiration
When I discuss poetry with students, I highlight the importance of not only reading poems, but reading them aloud. Poems should be performed. The impact of an enjambed or end-stopped line, the rhyme scheme, and stressed words in each line come even more alive when they are spoken.
Poetry can be a cathartic space, and a place to reclaim the voice within us. It can be moving, witty, languid, or full of snark.
Process
Today, I invite you to write about a topic you feel like you need to speak about. Slam poems often include a performance piece at around 3 minutes, but instead of focusing on length, I invite you to focus on:
~using rich language and showing your emotions
~using line-breaks to emphasize your tone and shape the mood
~playing with length or adding a shift to highlight a call to action.
Ashley’s Poem
The Testing Cord
We’re in a literacy crisis
I’m preaching poetic devices
Think critically, fight the boxes
Chase them with wit of the foxes
Readers lost in a current
Someone cries, “Choice is abhorrent!”
Never read or write for joy
Just connect to the depth, employ
Those test-taking strategies
Little echo-chamber tragedies
One right choice. One right answer
Synchronized by puppet masters
Fall in line, click the choice
Forget you have a voice.
Or…
Fight against the machine
Reimagine this bleak scene
Slam a fist on the podium
Raining research before them
Bring back sliding glass doors
Cut the stifling
testing cord
Your Turn
Now, scroll to the comment section below to write your own poem. (This is a public space, so you may choose to use only your first name or initials depending on your privacy preferences.) Not ready? That’s okay. Read the poems already posted for more inspiration. Ponder your own throughout the day. Return later. And, if the prompt does not work for you, that is fine. All writing is welcome. Just write something. Oh, and a note about drafting: Since we are writing in short bursts, we all understand (and even welcome) the typos and partial poems that remind us we are human and that writing is always becoming. If you’d like to invite other teachers to write with us, tell them to subscribe. Also, please be sure to respond to at least three writers.
Ashley, thank you for hosting us today with a slam poetry invitation – – a whole new realm of enjambment and rhyme and passion. I love your call to action with literacy and your shift for the last stanza. I noticed on a couple of occasions recently where someone has told someone else to smile – doesn’t know their story or what they are dealing with – just flippantly tells them to smile. And maybe it’s the older female in me coming out, but I want to sit that grown-ass man down and remind him her mile isn’t his mile.
{{insert the fakest smile you can imagine, and that’s the title}}
don’t tell her to smile
through her grief-stricken mile
she showed up today
in her normal-face way
she’s not paid to make happy
her gums ain’t all flappy
don’t tell her to smile
fake just isn’t her style
she’s not a smile-baby
her no don’t mean maybe
she showed up to work
not to mouth-please a jerk
her face ain’t your eye candy
she ain’t paid to be dandy
don’t tell her to smile
she’s an encrypted file
she ain’t nothing like you
she thinks it all through
so don’t tell her to smile
go pound sand for a while
After Sarah Kay…
If I should have a daughter who writes,
I will not ask her when she learned
because she will not remember.
She will already be
scribbling in the margins of worksheets
naming characters in the notes app on a cracked phone
staying up too late to finish a scene
no one assigned.
She will build whole worlds
before anyone teaches her what a paragraph is.
This is writing.
She will write herself into corners
and then write a way out.
She will try on voices like jackets
leave some behind
grow into others.
This is writing,
and when she gets to school,
they will hand her a prompt–
tell her to stay focused
tell her to be clear
tell her to cut this part.
And she will learn
how to make her sentences smaller.
They will call it structure.
They will call it clarity
They will call it
rigor,
but this is not the crisis.
Not grammar.
Not effort.
Not ability.
The crisis is what we do not welcome:
the worlds she does not turn in
the stories she does not name
the pages she keeps to herself.
This is writing:
what will we tell her counts
what will we ask her to leave behind.
If I should have a daughter who writes,
she will still write
in notebooks we do not grade,
in forms we do not recognize,
in languages we do not ask for.
She will already be a writer.
We will just decide
whether we can see her.