What is inside of us?

For our most recent sessions at Kozminski, we met on Monday because parent/teacher conferences were scheduled for Wednesday. Students practiced projecting their voices and paying attention to how a poem makes them feel energetically, by taking turns reading the poem “It’s Inside of Me!” by Adam Delevan. In the poem, the poet shows kinship with other living beings and things in nature with lines such as: “The movement of rivers is in me. / In my blood. / The smartness of Einstein is in me. / In my head. / The stillness of rocks is in me. / In my body. / The color of trees is in me. / In my skin. / The looseness of dirt is in me. / In my bones. / The fastness of rabbits is in me. / In my legs…..”

From there, we talked about a short poetry form: the five-line cinquain. We read and discussed three cinquains; and talked about not being afraid to set something down on paper, even when it doesn’t seem to match the feelings and ideas inside of us. Some students composed cinquains, and others used the exercise to get down words and phrases that can be turned into poems at a later date.