This week, Hale’s 6-8th poetry club students ventured into the world of nonsense in poetry. One of the coolest things about writing poems is the ability to create new words, phrases, or even languages to capture what’s hard to put into plain language. We have spent the past few months together reading poets who play with language and the senses in interesting ways, and this week was no different. On Tuesday, we read local Chicago poet Jose Olivarez’s work “Hecky Naw” and chatted about how the title phrase wore several different hats in the poem. After a quick “Armani Suit” Google search detour, poets wrote drafts based on words or phrases that were considered to be made up. Check out a poem based on a student’s word, mophy.
Mophy
By Yeya R.
The weather today was mophy
The calm, lonely feeling filling my heart
Unfortunately though, the color gray seeped into every little corner of my room
Leaving me to be the only color left
Mophy
Mophy spreading my brain like a disease
Filling my lungs
To my stomach
Until I am mophy itself
Until the notification on my phone
The person
Is mophy
My bed
Giving me multiple different emotions
But the current
Mophy
Swallowing me whole into a pit I’m all too familiar with
On Wednesday, we learned the meaning of synesthesia with the help of the poem “Synesthesia in Orange” by Cathy Carlisi. We talked about how the poem spoke to our different senses in new ways, and many agreed that birthdays do feel like the color orange. Poets then wrote about their own favorite colors and combined the senses to describe their love for their favorite hues.
Sounds of Brown
Ash S.
Nightingale brown
the simple sound of the old chest in your attic
the feeling like copper rubbing against you
the rust scratches you
it looks like the sting of a cold shower
water turns red
tastes like the screaming down the hallway
the feeling of eyes
sound of sobs
Nightingale brown
