Where are the Sunset Poets?

Last year at this time I had probably three people who read this website. And I was one of them. During April of last year I posted loads of poems, many about Brooklyn or by Brooklyn poets. This year, I'm hoping to get some participation from actual Sunset Park residents or people who work, play, pass through Sunset Park. Okay, so basically, I'm hoping for ANY participation. What can I say, I'm an optimistic yet realistic public high school teacher.

In my classes, I can bully people into participating with grades and promises of glowing phone calls home. Here, I can only offer you a brief moment of glory on the fleeting electronic tightrope of Blogger's whimsy.

So here is my proposition: Send your original poems (preferably about Sunset Park) to bestviewinbrooklyn@yahoo.com, or put them in a comment. Feel free to take part in the Poets.org free verse project (which looks very cool) with Sunset Park as its focus; you can add photos to the Best View in Brooklyn photo pool. Even if you've never written a poem before, just try it. You'll like it. Attempt a haiku, or challenge your syllabic skills with a Petrarchan Sonnet or a Shakespearean Sonnet (student favorite due to its simplicity and ease at being amusing/raunchy). You could even try a limerick, what the heck.

Schoolmarm Alert: Most people think that anything goes in poetry, and that may be true on your website. However, I've been teaching too long and love language too much to go with that flow. Salty language is fine if it's not gratuitous. I say this not because I'm shocked or offended by naughty words (have you walked the halls of a Brooklyn high school lately?), but because it lacks in creativity and effort. As I tell my toddler, "Use your words." (I have to remind myself of that sometimes as well.)

Anyway, let's see what comes of it. My naive hope of hundreds of submissions won't be crushed if it's not a reality by Thursday. But it would be great to see what people create.

I Love April; it's National Poetry Month

I'm on leave from work now, but at school we'd always do "Poem in Your Pocket Day" to celebrate April's status as National Poetry Month. Most of the students ended up shuffling through the motions to get the class credit, but some really presented their favorite poems. Sometimes the poetry would be famous (Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise" showed up at least twice in any class), other times obscure, and occasionally it would be the student's own poetry.

I usually tried to choose something on the lighter side. Something that would demonstrate how to read a poem for an audience. Marge Piercy usually worked well. Shakespeare's sonnets, especially some of the more naughty bits, were popular. Langston Hughes reads consistently well. And anything satirical (seen as "in your face") was especially fun for the kids who got it.

Since I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to re-print poems in their entirety, I'm going to attempt to present a poem a day - just a stanza - and provide the link to the rest of the poem. That way, those who wish to read more can do so at a leisurely pace.

If anyone out there wants her/his poetry to be the choice of the day, just email it to me (Spell-check it and line it up, please. I'll print it as I got it.)

So, Happy National Poetry Month!

Here's my first offering. I can print the whole darn thing because I wrote it. Granted, I wrote it in the 5th grade. Then I won a poetry contest with it in the 7th grade. By the way, the prize I chose was Rick Springfield's LP Working Class Dog. Yeah! It was wicked good. The LP, I mean. The poem is pretty ridiculous. Here's my 5th grade poem:

Shadows dark and lonely
Drifting through the night
Quietly, quickly they move
Never a sound they make
In their moonlit passages.

copyright kdw, 1979