The Ship Speaks

It felt good to come back to poetry this week, to pull a project off the back burner and fire it up with a little creative energy.

The Fram under sail, picture courtesy NOAA  in: "The South Pole," by Roald Amundsen. 

From the Fram's Standpoint

I am not handsome.
My bow is blunt,
my stern the same.
I do not move
with speed or grace,
but I am crafty.
My round hull slips
the grip of frozen waves,
evades the ice
like a cherry seed
when squeezed
between thumb and finger
pops into the air.
I rise above the ice.

They think they have
reason to boast--
Fridtjof Nansen,
Roadl Amundsen--
Norwegian names
laying claim
to farthest, fastest,
but most credit
comes to me.

Without me
they would be
crushed,
waiting for hull
to crack,
for polar water
to swallow them whole
like whaling ships
more comely than me,
but without
my cunning ways.

© 2014 Doraine Bennett

Laura Purdie Salas hosts Poetry Friday today at Writing the World for Kids.

Double Dactyl

It's Poetry Friday and Elizabeth Steinglass hosts the roundup today.

The double dactyl is one of the craziest forms of poetry I've every tried to write, but it's lots of fun.

Rules for writing a double dactyl:

1. Two stanzas of four lines each.

2. All lines except 4 and 8 are dactylic metrical feet. A dactyl has a stressed beat followed by two unstressed beats.

3. The first line is rhyming dactylic nonsense, like Higgledy, piggledy.

4. The second line introduces the topic of the poem, usually a person or a place. It helps if the name is naturally dactylic, like Hans Christian Anderson.

5. The second line of the second stanza is a six-syllable, double dactylic word, like parliamentarian.

6. Lines four and eight have one dactyl and one stressed syllable.

7. Lines four and eight rhyme.

Frontispiece portrait of Roald Amundsen, 1872-1928. In: "The South Pole", Volume II, Treasures of the NOAA Library Collection, by Mr. Steve Nicklas.

First to the Pole

Lickety splickety
Roald E. Amundsen
hitched up his huskies and
raced for the goal.

Finishing first, his team
celebratorily
raised Norway's flag as they
claimed the South Pole.

© Doraine Bennett

Cinquain for Stanley and Livingstone

"Recontre de Livingstone," from the French translation of 

How I Found Livingstone by Henry Morton Stanley, 1876

Stanley Remembers

It was

a foolish way

to greet the man I sought

across half the dark continent.

When I

wanted 

to dance and shout,

instead in quiet awe

I said, "Doctor Livingstone, I

presume."

Afraid

he would reject

any jubilation,

I hid in the formality

of words.

© Doraine Bennett

Poetry Friday and Celebrating

I'm doing a happy dance this week. My new book with Libraries Unlimited arrived.

Actually it arrived two days before Christmas, but life had to slow down long enough for me to enjoy the happy dance. It was fun sharing with my children and giving the first copy to my fourth-grade grandson. I'm only just now slowed and steady enough to share it with you.

The book contains 20 scripts and 10 monologues and covers 45 explorers throughout history. It was a lot of fun and and a lot of work. I'm thrilled to hold it in my hands. I hope to schedule a virtual book tour sometime in February. I'd love to stop in at your blog and talk about my book. Let me know if you're interested.

So for good reason, I'm back to explorer poems. There's plenty more Poetry Friday to be enjoyed at my good friend Irene Latham's blog, Live. Love. Explore! What a great place for today's post to land!

Of the many books I read a lot of books on explorers, some stand out more than others.

I, Matthew Henson: Polar Explorer by Author: Carole Boston Weatherford is a favorite. I love her use of preterition. Saying what she's not talking about to draw attention to that very thing. Beautiful illustrations by Eric Velasquez bring Henson's struggles and the journey to life.

Here is the beginning:

I did not walk forty miles

from the nation’s capital

to Baltimore’s busy harbor to eye

ships from a dock. Though just thirteen

I yearned for a taste of the adventures

that I had heard old sailors speak of,

to explore the seven seas

and somehow find my calling.

I did not start as a cabin boy, climb

the ranks to able-bodied seaman,

sail five continents, and learn

trades and foreign tongues to be shunned

by white crews who thought blacks

were not seaworthy. I did not chart

this course to drift in humdrum jobs

ashore. My dreams had sails.

I hope you are holding to your New Year's goals. May all your dreams have sails.

Poetry Friday: Explorers

This week my research for the reader's theater book on Explorers took me to the North Pole. I'm reading Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy Resolved by Robert M. Bryce. It was a story that caught the interest and ire of the entire country for years.

I've never been in a place that's extremely cold like the Poles. I don't like being cold, so it's hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to go there, especially more than once. But the explorers who once set foot in these frozen lands always wanted to go back. This poem by Mark Strand, captures the longing.

I Had Been a Polar Explorer
Mark Strand

I had been a polar explorer in my youth
and spent countless days and nights freezing
in one blank place and then another. Eventually,
I quit my travels and stayed at home,
and there grew within me a sudden excess of desire,
as if a brilliant stream of light of the sort one sees
within a diamond were passing through me.
I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed—
groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white
of icebergs. Then, with nothing more to say, I stopped
and turned my sights on what was near. Almost at once,
a man wearing a dark coat and broad-brimmed hat
appeared under the trees in front of my house.
The way he stared straight ahead and stood,
not shifting his weight, letting his arms hang down
at his side, made me think that I knew him.
But when I raised my hand to say hello,
he took a step back, turned away, and started to fade
as longing fades until nothing is left of it.

It's National Poetry Month

And I'm slow jumping on the band wagon. It's been the business of life and a book deadline that's making me irregular on the blog. I love poetry, and I've been reading some of the wonderful blog posts over the last week featuring poetry for children and adults. I've enjoyed the daily interviews with poets over at The Miss Rumphius Effect. Loved the reader's theater version of Love that Dog, one of my favorite novels in verse. Take a few minutes and view it here.

I've been reading, too. I just finished Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, a novel in verse by Ron Koertge. A perfect combination to the first Atlanta Braves baseball game this week. And I'm in the middle of Beanball, another baseball novel . Loving the way Gene Fehler handles such a tragic drama in verse.

Since the reader's theater book I'm working on is about explorers, I hunted down a few poems on the subject to share this month. I just finished a script on the Antarctic expeditions by Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen. This poem by Joseph Brodsky paints the polar experience in just a few short lines.

A Polar Explorer
by Joseph Brodsky

All the huskies are eaten. There is no space
left in the diary. And the beads of quick
words scatter over his wife's sepia-shaped face
adding the date in question like a mole to her lovely cheek.
Next, the snapshot of his sister. He doesn't spare his kin:
What's been reached is the highest possible latitude!
And, like the silk stocking of a burlesque half-nude
queen, it climbs up his thigh: gangrene.


Roald Amundsen, first explorer to reach the geographic South Pole.








Robert Falcon Scott, reached the South Pole a few weeks after Amundsen. He and his four companions died on the return journey, just 11 miles from their resupply station.