Fictional Favorites, part one

This series of posts considers What would fictional characters' favorite poets/poems be?

Mary Lee and I will kick this off today with some poetic possibilities and then over the weeks, we'll hear from a plethora of perceptive poetic bloggers. If you'd like to join in, feel free to leave your ideas in the comments or email them to me.


We'll start BIG with Hagrid from the Harry Potter series... As a man with a deep connection to animals, he might be drawn to Mario Milosevic's When I Was:

Excerpt from When I Was

When I was a bear
I filled the world.
My paws were wide,
and I walked large.
I ate all summer
and slept all winter,
dreaming of the time
when I was a dragonfly
and I wove the world...

read the rest here

~~~~~~~



What would Hobbes from the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes read? He's a bit of a romantic, so maybe he would like You Are The Wind by Olav Hauge.

You Are The Wind

I am a boat
without wind.
You were the wind.
Was that the direction I wanted to go?
Who cares about directions
with a wind like that!

~~~~~~~

Calvin seems like more of a This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams kind of a guy. Or Invitation by Shel Silverstein.

INVITATION

If you are a dreamer, come in.
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer . . .
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire,
For we have some flax golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!

~~~~~~~


Mary Lee Hahn talked about this question with her fourth graders, and they came up with poems for the main characters from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

Mary Lee says:

Here's what my students picked for Meg because she's struggling so hard with her feelings right now (she is angry with her father for tessering away from Camazotz without taking Charles Wallace):

From Sara Holbrook's collection WEIRD? (ME, TOO!) LET'S BE FRIENDS

FEELINGS MAKE ME REAL

You are not the boss of me
and what I feel inside.
Please don't say,
"Let's see a smile,"
or tell me not to cry.

I am not too sensitive.
You think my inside's steel?
You can't tell me how to be.
Feelings make me real.

~~~~~~~

For Calvin (because he's not so good at math):

From THE BILL MARTIN JR. BIG BOOK OF POETRY

SOS
by Beverly McLoughland

Sammy's head is pounding--
Sammy's in pain--
A long division's got
Stuck in his brain--
Call for the locksmith
Call the engineer
Call for the plumber
To suck out his ear
Call the brain surgeon
To pry out the mess,
Call out the Coast Guard
SOS,
Because--
Sammy's head is pounding--
Sammy's in pain--
A long division's got
Stuck in his brain.

~~~~~~~

And for Charles Wallace, because this is how he initially kept IT from taking control of his brain, these Mother Goose rhymes, taken from memory (Mary) and from TOMIE dePAOLA'S MOTHER GOOSE:

Mary had a little lamb
It's fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.

~~~~~~~

Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her;
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.

~~~~~~~

We'll continue with Fictional Favorites next Friday!

Mary Lee has our Poetry Friday round-up today.