I am . . .

I love new words. Words that aren’t words at all but when you hear them you think, Yes, of course.

In the student writing groups, we collect words. Our favorite words line the walls to create a playground of possibility.

We write I am poems. This fun and easy form combines images and actions, punctuated with a declaration. In writing these poems we create and define ourselves anew, every line, every time. Youngsters (and adults, too) take to this form quickly. Most of us like to write about ourselves, and I am poems give us permission to play with our words.

Here, a few lines, from a nine-year-old poet:

I am loveful.
I am wind.
I am Mother Nature’s friend.
I am a secret.
I am a hoper.
I am a lover of pie.

When she asked me if loveful was a word, I hesitated. It could be, it should be, it’s such a sweet and, well, loving word. By the time she read I am a hoper, I was cheering along with her. Is it a word? I’m not sure. I don’t care. I want to be a hoper, too!

By chance, By poem

Some days I am asleep and slog through the weight of darkness, expecting and (no surprise!) finding no chance for change. But when I am wide awake, synchronicity is everywhere. I stumble into chance encounters and collide into unexpected joy.

Recently, a friend shared with me a lovely book of poems by Mari L'Esperance, who, it turns out, is a friend of a mutual friend. (We live in a Facebook world in which everyone is connected by the tenuous thread of knowing everything and nothing about those we claim as ‘friends’).

I was touched by the gift. I had just returned from a visit to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and still felt a glowing appreciation for the city’s hard-working history and rugged beauty. As I paged through the book, I landed on this poem — featuring the iconic rivers that run through Pittsburgh’s heart — first.

Synchronicity, it seems to me, made apparent by a poem.

As Told by Three Rivers

Eight a.m, up too late the night before
learning the nose and throat, the bones
of the hands. Rounding a corner
on the seventh floor of Eye & Ear, the view
from the window takes you by surprise:
the city of Pittsburgh fanned out before you,
its verdant wedge of land softened
by the arms of three rivers, their names alone
like music — Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio —
threading their slow eternal way home,
knowing. You think of Naipaul’s book, how
that distant mythic river in that distant
unnamed place reminds you somehow
of these three rivers meeting, the purpose
in their joined ambition as it should be,
how their journey tells the same story,
a story of becoming, of knowing one’s place
in the world. Standing there at the window
you see how everything that’s come before
has brought you here, how it all makes sense,
the three timeless rivers moving forward,
deliberate and without questions, telling the story
of the life you have chosen, of the life
you could not help but choose.

— Mari L'Esperance
from The Darkened Temple
Winner of the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

Pity the apostrophe

The apostrophe is a troublesome little bugger, but to eliminate it entirely?

Birmingham, England's second largest city, is leaving punctuation purists across the globe incredulous with a decision to drop all apostrophes. I like that grammar can cause such a stir, and I really appreciate the snappy writing by reporter Meera Selva:

LONDON – On the streets of Birmingham, the queen's English is now the queens English.

England's second-largest city has decided to drop apostrophes from all its street signs, saying they're confusing and old-fashioned.

But some purists are downright possessive about the punctuation mark.

It seems that Birmingham officials have been taking a hammer to grammar for years, quietly dropping apostrophes from street signs since the 1950s. Through the decades, residents have frequently launched spirited campaigns to restore the missing punctuation to signs denoting such places as "St. Pauls Square" or "Acocks Green."

This week, the council made it official, saying it was banning the punctuation mark from signs in a bid to end the dispute once and for all.

Councilor Martin Mullaney, who heads the city's transport scrutiny committee, said he decided to act after yet another interminable debate into whether "Kings Heath," a Birmingham suburb, should be rewritten with an apostrophe.

"I had to make a final decision on this," he said Friday. "We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do."

Mullaney hopes to stop public campaigns to restore the apostrophe that would tell passers-by that "Kings Heath" was once owned by the monarchy.

"Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed," he said. "More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don't want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it."

But grammarians say apostrophes enrich the English language.

"They are such sweet-looking things that play a crucial role in the English language," said Marie Clair of the Plain English Society, which campaigns for the use of simple English. "It's always worth taking the effort to understand them, instead of ignoring them."

Mullaney claimed apostrophes confuse GPS units, including those used by emergency services. But Jenny Hodge, a spokeswoman for satellite navigation equipment manufacturer TomTom, said most users of their systems navigate through Britain's sometime confusing streets by entering a postal code rather than a street address.

She said that if someone preferred to use a street name — with or without an apostrophe — punctuation wouldn't be an issue. By the time the first few letters of the street were entered, a list of matching choices would pop up and the user would choose the destination.

A test by The Associated Press backed this up. In a search for London street St. Mary's Road, the name popped up before the apostrophe had to be entered.

There is no national body responsible for regulating place names in Britain. Its main mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, which provides data for emergency services, takes its information from local governments and each one is free to decide how it uses punctuation.

"If councils decide to add or drop an apostrophe to a place name, we just update our data," said Ordnance Survey spokesman Paul Beauchamp. "We've never heard of any confusion arising from their existence."

To sticklers, a missing or misplaced apostrophe can be a major offense.

British grammarians have railed for decades against storekeepers' signs advertising the sale of "apple's and pear's," or pubs offering "chip's and pea's."

In her best-selling book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," Lynne Truss recorded her fury at the title of the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy "Two Weeks Notice," insisting it should be "Two Weeks' Notice."

"Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended," she wrote.

Off the wall, out of the book, into the world

. . . Poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them . . .

— Naomi Shihab Nye
from Valentine for Ernest Mann

Poetry isn’t hiding anymore. Isn’t gathering dust in tomes of required reading (all those heavy Norton Anthologies breaking the backs of beleaguered students). Isn’t sitting in the back row, waiting for National Poetry Month when it can, albeit briefly, dance and sing and mean more than iambic this-and-that.

Poetry has a new gig. It’s bold and creative and — gasp! — commercial. Poetry sells, and that’s not so bad.

I’m heartened by recent marketing efforts that play with words and invite poetry to the creative party.

• Microsoft’s newest ad campaign features bold Blackout Poems seen in two-page spreads in dozens of national magazines this month. The form (sometimes called ‘found poetry’) has recently gained a loyal following, due in large part to the work of Texas writer and designer Austin Kleon. See his work here.

• Grey Goose Vodka is getting a word groove, too, with a full-page ad presenting a poetic toast:

A Toast

To the future
To hope
To home
To family
To good friends
To peace
To love
To a great year
To good times
To mistletoe
To seeing you soon
To all of us
To the two of us
To tonight
To last night
To a few days off
To new beginnings
To memories
To 2008
To 2009

• Even Safeway is going poetic. In many stores, the floral department is now clearly marked with large letters declaring Poetry in Bloom.

Wallflower no more, poetry is out, loud and proud. Have you found poetry in unexpected places, from unexpected people? What poems are playing near you?

Moxie, pluck, grit

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

— e.e. cummings