Joanne Durham
Joanne Durham teaching poetry in 1994
It all started when I was Five
By Joanne Durham
I started writing poetry as a kid. No one in my family was particularly literary, but someone bought me Louis Untermeyer’s anthology, The Golden Treasury of Children’s Poetry, and I was hooked. My first poem was “Me and My Mommy” that I wrote when I was about 5. Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened to it. The oldest poem I still have is “My Imagination,” written in third grade.
My Imagination (1958)
Every night I imagine
I was a big lady,
A model maybe.
I would dress up in
Fashionable clothes
And wear pretty shoes
In a fashion show.
I would wear lipstick
Of the color red,
And a hat upon
My very pretty head.
I would be the most
Fashionable lady in town
In my brand new
Evening gown.
That’s what I imagine
Every night
Until the sun
Shines so bright.
In high school I had some poems in the school literary magazine. One was:
Bring Me a Cool Green Leaf (Binnacle – Northwestern High School Literary Magazine, 1966)
Bring me a cool green leaf
And we shall sit in the shade of myself
And watch a thought
Idling within
Grow and evolve.
Bring me a warm and flickering fire,
And chaos with rage in the sun of myself,
And a love
That smoldered alone
Will blaze, scourging the ground beside us.
Then the air,
With the scent and soul of wistful leaves
Consumed in smoke and left in ashes
Will be purged
As we breathe the pure and subtle bond
That conquers the suffocation.
I kept writing, but I really didn’t consider publishing. I was happy teaching poetry to third to sixth graders as an elementary school teacher. I wrote a few poems about my kids and teaching that were published in the 1990s in Language Arts, the Journal of the National Council of Teachers of English. Two of those, “Learning,” and “Poetry Lesson, Grade 6,” wound up in my poetry collection published in 2021, To Drink from a Wider Bowl.
What happens to the sun at night?
I ask the four-year-olds
cross-legged on the carpet.
Marcos confidently explains,
It goes to New Jersey.
April, whose Mom has read her books
about everything,
helpfully chirps,
The earth tilts and you
can’t see it anymore.
Darnell with raised arm churning the air
counters, The sun breaks up
into little pieces and fills the sky
with stars. In the morning
they come back together
and make another sun.
Science and poetry
poised on the edge of cosmic battle,
until my smiling voice
intervenes, celebrates
how children’s minds tilt
on their own axes.
You are creators of stories,
to explain the world.
You carry on
an ancient tradition.
On my way home, I ponder
if we could learn
to live this way:
Each in the darkness
illuminating
one small stretch of sky,
and then together making
a brilliant, focused energy,
from all we’ve seen,
from all we’ve learned.
Who says your poem
has to sound like mine?
Who says yours
can’t be as long as your earrings
hooping easily towards
your shoulders,
or short as your answers
to your mom’s questions.
Who says your poem
has to rhyme?
Maybe it finds itself
back again another way,
like the scrawling heart patterns
that lace the edges of your
class notes.
Who says your poem
has to show off?
Maybe it’s quiet, like
the waiting inside you,
the ticking off
of the days of childhood
while you grow.
Who says
anything about your poem,
except that it takes you
from who you were
a long, old minute ago
to who you are
now.
One of many poems I wrote to use in modeling for student writing, probably 1993
June in Our Unairconditioned School was:
I don’t want to bake
like a chocolate chip
cookie in the oven.
I don’t want my brain
to fry like potatoes
sizzling in the pot.
Quiet,
Calm,
Easy,
PLEASE
I’m too HOT!
I shared poetry all the time with my students. I had a poetry shelf with lots of kids’ poetry books that they could read whenever they wanted to. They would put a slip in a box for a poem they wanted to share at the end of the day, while we were waiting for buses to be called. So we spent the last twenty minutes every day with poetry.
Every year for about 6 years, in October or November, some child would come to school and say, “Ms. Durham, I wrote a poem last night. Can I share it at poetry time?” And of course, I’d say yes, and pretty soon lots of kids were writing their own poems. One year a child created a class poetry collection titled Take a Look! with poems by many kids in the class. And of course we made many poetry books as a class. I wrote some poems as models for them (one is attached), but mostly the models were the wonderful poems by Eloise Greenfield, Lucille Clifton, Naomi Shihab Nye and other poets writing for children.
But life happened and while I kept writing in journals, I didn’t get serious about my poetry – making it better and publishing it – until about 2018. My first poems published in a literary journal were in Flying South, journal of the Winston Salem Writers, in 2019. I was tiptoeing into the idea I could get my poems published when I heard about this journal from an NC Writers Network conference I attended, so I gave it a try. They accepted two of my poems, both of which I later included in my poetry book, To Drink from a Wider Bowl. That acceptance gave me the confidence I needed to think my work might resonate with others.
My poetry really got going during the pandemic, after I took a workshop with Ellen Bass, got my work critiqued by her, and met other women who formed a poetry group together. One of my first publications after that was in Love in the Time of COVID Chronicles, March 2021. I loved this journal! Published from New Zealand, it connected English-speaking writers across the globe throughout the pandemic.
Another early journal that supported my work and continues to do so is Yellow Arrow. A small publication of diverse women’s writing, Yellow Arrow published my poem, “Baby” in 2021in a beautiful issue with the theme of “Renascence.” They sponsored a reading I participated in, and I loved the work of the other writers so much I bought multiple copies of that issue as holiday gifts for friends. Yellow Arrow is very generous with support of their authors. They published an interview with me, an article I wrote about revision, and for the past two years I’ve been teaching poetry workshops through them.
I’d be remiss not to mention Third Wednesday Magazine, which also published two of my poems in 2021. I won my first poetry prize for one of those poems! Third Wednesday is also generous with their support, posting a reading of me from both my book and chapbook when they were published.
And then there was Evening Street Press, and its wonderful editor, Barbara Bergmann. Barbara has stopped publishing Evening Street Review and their yearly poetry book contests, but I got in under the wire to win the 2021 Sinclair Poetry Prize and have my book published in 2022. Barbara was wonderful to work with. She promptly answered all my questions as a first-time poetry book author, posted all the interviews, reviews, and readings I did on my author page on the Evening Street website as they happened, and was a great resource. After she stopped publishing, she even had a second edition of my book published through Amazon. I served as an Associate Editor for Evening Street for a couple of years and found that to be a terrific experience in learning what submissions are like from the other side. We still keep in touch as
Friends.
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