How Noah Knew What To Do
Author: Karen Moore
Illustrations by Pete Kerston

How Noah Knew What To Do is a wonderfully written children’s book by Karen Moore with bright vivid colorful illustrations by Pete Kerston. It is the story of Noah, which is easily understandable, as well as sensible biblical life lesson geared for toddlers and younger children. The story is written in rhyme which my grandson absolutely loved, it is also an easy ready. This children’s book can be enjoyed by the entire family, or may be enjoyed from the younger child that is reading on their own. Between the rhyming of words and the beautiful illustrations your child will be delighted with this one.

Wake up later then usual, it’s Day Two,
of Unemployment, trying to see my way through
A maze of paperwork, technicalities -
HR sending checks, it ain’t ended yet? -
But in reality…

I should be job hunting, not rhyming and blogging
Minute by minute document and cataloging
the events as the unfold
but i gotta get my truth told, so who knows

I got plenty friends that lost plenty ends, when
their jobs stopped paying em
when off they started laying em
we might end up a lost generation

Like tech college graduates in the late 70’s
whose skills were obselete soon as they got their degrees
So they started rigging sound systems up to street lights
There skills brought the party out, put sound in the night

So i’ll swing a downturn upside down
untie my tie, write something up right now
Use my skills to pay the bills,
even if i got a miss a few meals

That’s all for now, I gotta run quick
to toss back a few, knock pins over at Brunzwick

Oh joy! For people who love The Owl and the Pussycat here is a picture of a real Runcible spoon! Fancy that!

Have you ever been laid off?
Feel like you got ripped off by Bernie Madoff?
Boss calls you in tells you, “take the rest of the day off”
Your like “f**k that!” I’m eating my chicken in the fridge
Going on-line and playing a game of cribbage
Taking a dump in the stall, rip a cig in the kitchen
After all this time, yall will remember Vision

Next day wake up sign up for unemployment
I love filling out forms i do it for my enjoyment
Waiting in lines is my kind of a good time
It gives me time to think of what I should rhyme

Should I use this line to talk about the recession?
About how I’m going to avoid my own depression?
Should I use this space to space out and just ramble?
Should I bet my future on a musical gamble?

I guess I’ll just let the opportunity pass
And write something about signing up for classes
Networking for a job and sending in resumes
Having early-in night and get-busy days
Stop going to movies, find new ways to save
Who knows, I still got writing skills, i still got my age

So this could be a second blessing in disguise,
gimme a second first, let me use my third eye
I see a bright lights and trumpets sounding in the distance
Looks like the future’s still bright for Vision

It’s practically blinding, So I will be reminded
of all that I have, and stop whining
Thanks to Ed, Chris, Andy and Derek
Yall will be missed this is apparent
And all the good dudes at my last company
I won’t say the name, but thanks for all ya done for me
Vision will be good, yall knew that I would
But just for good luck I’m a knock on some wood

Friday hit the highway
Headed to Oshkosh
Oh my B’gosh
Rock on stage, crowd started to mosh

First Caption started the Rapping
Max on drums relaxing
Had the whole crowd captivated, glad they waited
Then Fik and Nov got the crowd hype with their flows
Passed it back and forth, like Ali and Frazier going blow for blow

With no PA system, we barely made it
Delta Routine showed up for the day and saved it
The Hot Box took the stage, ripped out a new page
Sweat and sage burned as the night turned

Delta Routine turned on and turned it up
Stepped on stage and burned it up
Nick picking guitar with a Beer bottle!
hot ladies out no need for beer goggles
No time to oggle
Off to Balls house, he smoked us all out

2 am comes around, of course we head to Perkins
Fik and Nov out somewhere in the night flirting
Chicken Gravy Biscuit
thought I would risk it

Woke up – call me Zack G – I was hungover
Thanks to Soup and his rents for letting us come over

Got back to the Minn
it was time for some din-din
Ate thanksgiving food, got dressed up
til Netz spilled hot cider and my fit got messed up
I said fuck it,
pulled out the sweatpants
Broke a glass table when I tried to drunk dance
Said fuck it again, went to bed at ten

Said “today failed, i’ll try again tomorrow world”
then peaced out, passed out with my girl

Friday

I come thru Like Kung Fu
Humble your whole 1,2 1,2
Mic check, rap you like a jumpsuit
on the beat like a gumshoe

Old enough to be your uncle
Still find a way to punk you
The shit you been spitting is uncouth
I bruise you like plum fruit

Your dumb dude
I do what you can’t un do
Make art out of war, come at you with Sun Tzu
Beat me? i know you’d love to

But I’m deep in the chest
like the game of chess
heart beat to the beat of the art that i’ve been blessed
with
eccentric yes but
electric like Tesla
knock a jock off his fucking Vespa
order spaghetti then rob the whole Rest-
raunt
Vision The Kid Ridiculous, what else ya want?

Suggestion Fail

Picture by: Jake Submitted by: yougotfail via Fail Uploader

To many visions, to many illusions, to many opinions, to many confusions brought by my own idealism founded trough mechanism or dualism. To many voices of choices invading my mind of emotion in this blistering storm of synapsonical devotions. To many hopes crumbling down in rustling noises. To many measures turning into high voltage pressure. Growing like hungry herds of swirling words making my head spin around, 400 miles a hour. Devour my thoughts of childhood innocence. To many questions is the essence of the mind blowing violence. To many guidance, to many transience which defines my actions. And all these words make it worse of course. To many ideas, to many wishes, to many bridges to cross. I nearly feel lost and then it’s happening. My mind is pitching, twitching…twitches……twitch….switch to total meltdown…………………………

Well, my head is clear now. That’s the positive thing about having a total meltdown.

Fated to be a white canvas. Waiting to  be painted.

I was first introduced to Jan Slepian and Ann Seidler’s The Hungry Thing at a workshop on phonemic/phonological awareness (learn more about that here).  So, obviously, this book and activity are great for building those critical prereading skills.  In this story, the Hungry Thing shows up in a town, asking for food.  The people can’t figure out what he wants.  When he requests “shmancakes” they each have a different idea about what “shmancakes” actually are.  One boy makes sense of it all, reminding them that “shmancakes” sound like “pancakes”.  So they give the Hungry Thing some and he eats them all up!  This continues on to include “feetloaf” and “gollipops”, “boop with a smacker” and “tickles”.  As I read this story, I always pause a bit, allowing the children to chime in with the appropriate rhyming word.

Afterward, I introduce my Hungry Thing puppet.  Mine is just a fuzzy, monster-like puppet.  You could make your own out of fabric or a paper bag, improvise with one you have, or create a cardboard picture with the mouth cut out, similar to what I did in the dinosaur activity here.  It doesn’t matter which one you use, the Thing is so hungry!  Can the children help feed it?   Arrange some play food on the floor, or give one piece to each child.  Be sure to say the name of each piece of food as you set it down or hand it out so that the children are sure to know what they’re called. 

“FEED ME!” the Hungry Thing says, just as it did in the book.   The children respond as the townspeople did in the book, “What would you like to eat?”   With much expression, the Hungry Thing asks for each food, substituting the first sound in each word as he did in the story.   (You can certainly use nonesense words, “felery” for celery, but some of the children’s favorites are also when it ends up being a real word – hair for pear, sneeze for cheese.  Do it any way you want, it just needs to rhyme.)  The children place the food in the hungry thing’s mouth.  My kids’ favorite part with my puppet is when the Thing munches voraciously on the food and then burps loudly with the food flying back out (so that I can clear the way for the next item).  Think of Cookie Monster as your motivation.

Reading this book and participating in this activity helps to build rhyming skills, which are a fundamental pre-reading skill.  Your children will love this activity!  I often leave the book, puppet, and a bowl of food out in the reading area after doing this activity with a group of children so that they can continue the activity on their own!

For more food-themed activities, click here!

What a quiet blog it’s been lately!  Time for some more pedantry and rhyme.

A definition, from the OED Concise online:

RHYME

• noun 1 correspondence of sound between words or the endings of words, especially when used in poetry.

This means that all words rhyme with themselves, and I won’t stand for that.  So here’s mine:

RHYME

• noun 1 correspondence in word endings of all terminal sounds after a differing, stressed consonant sound.

This prevents words from rhyming with themselves, and it also prevents identities from masquerading as rhymes.  Some identities for your delectation:

Everybody say “Amen” (Amen!)
These are the dreams of ordinary men
Dragon, Dreams of Ordinary Men

“Amen” doesn’t rhyme with “men”. Properly speaking, it identifies with it.

I saw her today at the reception
In her glass was a bleeding man
She was practiced at the art of deception …
Rolling Stones, You Can’t Always Get What You Want

If the stressed syllables were “re” and “de”, these two words would rhyme. But this is an attempt to rhyme “sepshun” with “sepshun”, and that ain’t a rhyme.

I will listen hard to your tuition
You will see it come to its fruition
The Police, Wrapped Around Your Finger

Same again, a rhyme of “wishin” with “wishin”. I’m surprised Sting didn’t plump for “nuclear fission”; that would have rhymed.

Anyway, once you start listening for this stuff, you’ll hear it everywhere, and I can’t abide it in my own work.  Identities are quite nice within lines, but they can’t do the heavy lifting at the end of a line. They sound, and are, lazy.

My scrupulous avoidance of near-rhymes and identities in places where perfect rhymes are needed is what makes me sound old-fashioned and, in pop and rock terms, prissy.  But I think I am more to be pitied than despised.

Associates,

I have tapped a new creative vein (id est, learned the language of my muse).

If a skill or mastery in writing is achieved, it will henceforth by supplemented by a verbal voracity unmatched in this galaxial cluster – or supercluster, if you will.

Delivering doses of the most viral, grassroots politics, all the while planted the seeds of truth that will continue to assist in the advance and evolution of our human-shaped landscape.

This thing is growing like a redwood.  It lives in Green.

Truly yours,

Rice Cutgrass

Hey again, everyone. I’m back again today to talking about poetry. I want to talk about different types of rhyme. I think that most people think that when poetry rhymes it has to be “moon and june” or “love and above”. These are valid rhymes. But, let’s break them down to see what they are made of. The rhyme moon and june is a set of different consenants, followed the same vowel sound, followed by the same consenant sound. They are also the same amount of syllables. The rhyme love and above are the same way except for the fact that they differ in the number of syllables. But, the thing I want to tell you today is:

Rhyme is not just about grammar.

Rhyme is not just vowels that are the same, or words that have the same number of syllables. Rhyme, like the rest of poetry, is about feeling. I have a friend who commented on my last poetry post. She said that she was more of a free verse sort of girl. But (and here is the neat part) when she posted a post that contained a poem, I found some beautiful rhyme in it. She rhymed thought and cross as the last words of the first two lines in every verse. She also used “us” as the last word in the last two or three lines in each verse. Rhyme is not just about the rhyme of vowels. I think that if words fit together, it doesn’t matter if they “rhyme”. My friend used the phrase “littered with your reminders” in her poem. I feel that “littered” and “reminders” fit together well enough that it doesn’t matter that they don’t have the same vowel sounds. Here, read this:

Things were black, were dark, were gray,

And the statues stood tall, stood grim.

But things are not always as they seem,

For in the darkness, the single light shines bright.

Did that poem “rhyme”? Not if you think that rhyme is just vowel sounds and same consenants after. The closest I came to “rhyme” in that poem, if we use that definition, is “light” and “bright”. To me, though, there is a lot of rhyme in that poem. “Were black, were dark, were grey” rhymes to me. The slight repetition of were is enough to make it rhyme to me. To me, “grim” and “seem” rhyme as well. So, today I leave you with this question.

What do you think rhymes?

If you want to read my friends poem click here.

As always, I look forward to your comments, answers, and questions.

Until next time,

Luke

This was one of my first ever spoken word pieces….enjoy

I vibe off a thought try to write a little poetry
Wont put my name on it but still you know it’s me
Subject, flow, timing, vocabulary
Hints of emotion, lo and behold you know it’s me

The plain and simple
The unspectacular
Till I fight into your senses
With adjectives to back me up
Against a wall of truth
I survive on the unseen eternal fruits

You see I have an underground vineyard
Everything I produce connoisseurs wanna sample the
Laboured for fruits of my youth
In a quake off the Richter scale my roots wouldn’t move
And I have nothing to prove for I’m that deep

Reluctantly fashionable I only work for big companies yet its not big company I keep
And I hold real not prototyped hyped new age beliefs

I am the topside of a chocolate digestive
Provoking gluttonous lusts yet the most resisted
So I take calculated risks if victory exists
And at the site of beauty I just lick my lips
For its just its…
The don king of moments
The little bit of crazy that everyone goes with

The versatile black that flows with any outfit
Make gold look good
Softly spoken realist
Spiritual apprentice
I was bought by love
Will never be rented
I AM

My aim, when spitting
That mouth mixed minty

Broth, concocted each
time teeth are scrubbed
has been perfected after
My grandmother, told
me off for missing the plug
And not rinsing the sink.
Now, I can aim a jet of water
Like a vegas fountain with
Accuracy that’d make her
Proud.

Julio, pronounced ‘Hoolio’

Is slouched at the only table seat
In this fluorescent catacomb.

Now and again he takes a
Phone Call. With great statement
He reels off his matinee,
Directing darlings, just some
Actors learning scripts.
Loudly he strokes a kempt
Designer beard as his jawline
Rests quietly on an ego
Three metres diameter.

His pseudo self, strutted
And popped off dagger shot
Eye-glares at people, witnessing
The freak show in his tiny
Bit-piece First Great Western
Theatre.  Phone a microphone,
Life is one great play.

A great deal of 19^th century verse is wretched—exposure to poorly written rhyme will naturally push the educated poetry lover from the vales of tortured song to the stairwells of sober speech.

Verse was abandoned by educated poets in the 20^th century because the versifiers fell out of tune—not because poetry evolved into something higher.   

Frazzled, goaded and tuckered out by Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, with no more heart for Bret Harte, audiences everywhere cried Geez! and So Long! to George Santayana and the other thousand rhyming and chiming poetasters, tossing the simpering, milk & water verse out the window.   (Santayana was T.S. Eliot’s professor at Harvard).  

Throwing off rhyme was not a revolution. 

It was a revulsion.

The yellowish face of Imagism’s moon was not a sign of mystical glory; it was a sign of illness and disgust.

Music coming from instruments only a little out of tune will soon convince hearers to give up all music.

Imagism was a retreat, not an advance. 

Poetry in the 20^th century did not add image—it subtracted music. 

The great poets of verse featured imagery and music, skillfully blended into a natural, pleasing speech so that neither speech, imagery, nor music was perceived as such–the elements were blended and lost in the poetry. 

Lost so that no ‘close reading’ can get it out. 

Criticism finds the elements when they are not blended; if they are, criticism cannot see them, for the work succeeds and doesn’t require criticism. 

 The close reading of the New Critics was mistaken from the start, since it confused desultory, over-elaborated praise with criticism.  New Criticism finally ends in the Prozac Criticism of the Helen Vendlers and the Stephen Burts.

Too much focus on any part—image, language, irony, etc—is a sure sign poetry is in decline.

We’re not sure why–after the renaissance of verse in English from the 16^th century sonnet mastery to the 17^th century of Milton, Donne, Marvel, to the 18^th of Pope, and then Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, with writers like Poe bringing Baconic science (with a Platonic sheen) to the art, and Tennyson carrying the flame–why the whole art sickened and died sometime during the middle or latter part of the 19^th century. 

It may have been for a very simple reason. 

In the 19^th century more people began to write and publish poetry.

There was a glut, and gluts will destroy whatever style currently exists.   

Those who complain contemporary poetry is prosy and dull usually champion the 19^th century and its rhyme.  

But the issue is not a stylistic one.  It is simpler than that.   A glut destroyed poetry as it currently existed—first in the 19^th century, when poetry rhymed, and then in the 20^th century, when poetry didn’t.  The Quarterly didn’t kill Keats.  Sidney Lanier did. 

Those who could not write like Keats eventually decided no one should write like Keats—or none should try, because one more Sidney Lanier would be the death of poetry itself.   William Carlos Williams—when he reached middle-age and stopped rhyming—suddenly became vastly preferable to Sidney Lanier, at least among educated readers. 

Poetry–the art–could not handle one more failed Keats.  William Carlos Williams did not conquer Keats.   He was simply a sobering balm to the intoxicating pain of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman.  The 20^th century stopped rhyming, not out of evolution, but from embarrassment. 

Rather than fail at Keats, it was necessary for the pride of the poet in the 20^th century to partially succeed at haiku—and the whole history of modernism is nothing but extended haiku: even modern long poems are nothing but haiku patched together and embellished with flotsam and dialogue–breaking haiku’s rules, but not the rules of poetry—in any significant way. 

Our idea is supported by the following:  From the beginnings of poetry in English to the first confirmed glut in the early 19^th century, a good poem was never a theoretical specimen; it was good in a way that was socially recognized by everyone: A 16^th century Shakespeare song, a 19^th century Keats ballad.   Then came the glut, and millions of would-be Shakespeares and Keats’s made rhyme come to seem the playing of an out-of-tune violin.  

The public gradually fled from the poem–not because the novel took them away, but because the public ran from the art of poetry holding its ears.   The modern novel was not an improvement so much as a refuge, and fortunately for that genre, poetry, by mishandling verse, was at that very moment chasing away readers as it had never done before. 

And bad rhyme did not end after Modernism–one can find it in Richard Aldington’s 1941 anthology: Allen Tate, William Carlos Williams’ only poem represented is a rhyming poem; there’s bad rhyme galore.  

Fashions die hard, but when they die, it’s sometimes not the fashion that’s at fault, but the mediocrities practicing it.

The Wind whispers in my ear,

Cold, and dark, and very clear,

It said, “Get up, and follow me.

Get up, and you will see.”

So I got up, and looked around,

And do you know what I’d found?

The Wind who was talking to me

Was standing right in front of me.

Not as a cloud, or a creature, or a spirit,

But as a living breathing person, I’d swear it.

With thin frail hands, she motioned to me

to come with her, to learn, and to be,

a poet, a writer, and a Wind to be.

Hey, everybody, I’m back again today. Today I want to to talk a little bit about rhyme in poetry. Above this is a piece of poetry I wrote some time back. In it, there is a clear rhyming scheme or pattern as some may call it. Two line sets until the last three lines in which it is a three line set. My questions for you today are …

What kind of feeling does the rhyme itself bring about in you? and …

What kinds of ways would the feeling change if I had rhymed it differently?

Well, as always, please give me your comments and hopefully some answers to my questions, and I’m always open for questions of yours.

Unitl next time,

Luke

Fill me cold water, let it chill my entrails before I slash my belly cos I’ve lived in hell. Sailed in a well of blood of my self as it wailed for a chance to express, tears are red, this the pool I get.
Looking fore and rear, side, no one’s there, those I thought dear, no longer near. Steal another destiny, don’t fit my identity cos in extremity WHAT IS IDENTITY?
Look in books, the sea, a brook, no luck, stuck in the faith forsook. No direction, if John’s true, I have no exemption from the eternal cook.
Now look at me, vision my mouth, nothing left in-house, so it stays shut while my hand reaches out to grab some meaning, then some creature tells me find yourself and then I ask
Why? Where? When? How? What? Is the self?

Lost in the storm of words,
The screaming wind I hardly heard
Trashing, tossing, crumbling within
My calm demeanor, a mere front I spin.

The seasons have changed, the clock hands whirl
Towards the future, our lives they constantly swirl
We take in the beauty, the euphoria of our current state
Lost in the whirlwind of new, fresh and exciting of late.

The torrent of tears, they runneth over
Unleashing the fury, frustration – better take cover
Anguish grips and clenches its angry knuckle
I wince for your pain, while I choke up a chuckle.

On bended knees, a prayer whispered
Dear God, of inner strength and peace
Of loving nearness, of continued faith
The miracle of healing in Jesus name.

Amen.