Writing an End of the School Year Poem

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Howdy--and happy Poetry Friday!

Ellen Hopkins, author of Young Adult novels in poems Fallout, Tricks, Identical, Glass, Impulse, Burned, and Crank, uses interesting alignment in her poems. They are often layered, allowing the poem to say more than one thing, as if she were writing two poems at once.

An example of this is the poem, I had to Explain, in her book Crank.  On the left side of this poem are stanzas; on the right side are a words pulled from each stanza to make a parallel poem.  The words down the right side are:

kiss

first kiss

best kiss

that kiss

kiss so tender

kiss me again

fused by kisses

Writing Workout ~
Writing an End of School Year Poem

I've wanted to play with this form for some time.  So let's write a poem about the end of the school year!

I don't know how Ellen Hopkins approaches her poems, but here’s what I did:
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1)    I flipped through my school year calendar, thinking about what happened each month.  Then I jotted down five events that brought up strong emotions.
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2)    I chose one of the memories.
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3)    I constructed a simple sentence (for the right side) that conveys some of what I wanted to say.
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4)    I wove the words of this short sentence into the stanzas on the left side.
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Here's a list of some of my memories from this past school year:
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1)    The pre-launch very first-in-the-entire-world reading of New Year at the Pier on the beach at sunset—I was scared, it was cold and there weren’t very many people at the event (Can you blame them?  It was freezing!)  See photo above.
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2)  Casting the three young actors for the launch of my book New Year at the Pier  (See a photo of them on the left side of my calendar page.)
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3)    Driving to the grocery store in Kauai when my agent called my cell to tell me she loved my novel (!)
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4)    Playing the tune Ashokan Farewell on my fiddle at the memorial service for my friend,  folk singer Fred Starner   
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5)    Writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month…then continuing to write one a day for (hopefully) forever.  (I send these new poems each day to my best friend, author Bruce Balan, who is sailing around the world.)
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So here’s my rough draft stab at this stucture—not a polished poem:
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MY BOOK LAUNCH AT THE BEACH
by April Halprin Wayland
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They told me, “You’ll really have to project.xxxxxxxxIt
will be a big crowd—the last onexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxwas
huge—at least a hundred people.
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There were maybe twelve people.  I wasxxxxxxxxxxxstill
a nervous wreck, wondering
if they could hear me over the waves.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxA beautiful
child with dark curls sat right in front. 
I focused on her.  I read the story as thexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxsun set.
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The next step would be to work on the words and the rhythm; to make it more lyrical.  (Lee Bennett Hopkins suggests taking out as many ands & thes as possible)
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When you have a poem you like--ta-dah!  Waving your poem in the air, run, don't walk to someone who loves you and ask him or her to read it. 
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And then?  Dive into summer!
 
poem and drawing (c) by April Halprin Wayland