Poet of the Day: George Ella Lyon
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George Ella Lyon has published award-winning books for readers of all ages, and her poem, “Where I’m From,” has been used as a model by teachers around the world. She was recently inducted as Kentucky’s poet laureate for 2015-16. The appointing governor, Steve Beshear, said of her body of work, “From her immense collection of poetry to her work as a teacher, George Ella Lyon's work is a portrait of Kentucky heritage and tradition."
Recent titles include
She Let Herself Go
(poems) and the following picture books:
“Which Side Are You On?”, The Story of a Song, and All the Water in the World
(both CCBC Choices),
The Pirate of Kindergarten
(Schneider Award) and
You and Me and Home Sweet Home
(Jane Addams Honor). Originally from the mountains of Kentucky, Lyon works as a freelance writer and teacher based in Lexington, where she lives with her husband, writer and musician Steve Lyon. They have two grown sons.
Photo of poet used with permission granted on her website.
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This poet belongs in our classrooms because…
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her work inspires students to engage with poetry in a nonintimidating way and helps them to think outside the box. Her picture books can be used as mentor texts for the upper grades to creatively consider elements of expository essays. The classic poem “Where I’m From” can be used for students to examine characters’ perspectives in any short story or novel. Students will have to read closely to support why a character would claim where he or she is “from” given the context. Moreover, the poem is a talisman for creative writing. It’s a great idea to pair the famous poem with two mentor texts from Linda Rief’s latest,
The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students’ Thinking and Writing
(Heinemann, 2018). Both poems, one by Rief and another by one of Rief’s students, were inspired by the original Lyon poem and offer students the opportunity to feel empowered about wherever they are from, taking into account, their good and bad experiences, especially the ones not in their control, like where they are born or the dynamics of their neighborhood or family.
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A Poem by George Ella Lyon
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"Where I'm From"
I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back porch.
(Black, glistening,
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush
the Dutch elm
whose long-gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.
I'm from fudge and eyeglasses,
from Imogene and Alafair.
I'm from the know-it-alls
and the pass-it-ons,
from Perk up! and Pipe down!
I'm from He restoreth my soul
with a cottonball lamb
and ten verses I can say myself.
I'm from Artemus and Billie's Branch,
fried corn and strong coffee.
From the finger my grandfather lost
to the auger,
the eye my father shut to keep his sight.
Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments—
snapped before I budded—
leaf-fall from the family tree.
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Other Poems or Books by George Ella Lyon
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A personal favorite is
Many-Storied House
published by The University Press of Kentucky; it is a deeply moving memoir in poems. Although it is for adults, several of the poems can be utilized for students, elementary through secondary alike. The poems tell the sixty-eight-year-long story of George Ella Lyon’s house, the one constructed by Lyon’s grandfather. "Moving, provocative, and heartfelt, Lyon's poetic excavations evoke more than just stock and stone; they explore the nature of memory and relationships, as well as the innermost architecture of love, family, and community."
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Advice from George Ella Lyon:
Where to Go with "Where I'm From"
"While you can revise (edit, extend, rearrange) your 'Where I'm From' list into a poem, you can also see it as a corridor of doors opening onto further knowledge and other kinds of writing. The key is to let yourself explore these rooms. Don't rush to decide what kind of writing you're going to do or to revise or finish a piece. Let your goal be the writing itself. Learn to let it lead you. This will help you lead students, both in their own writing and in their response as readers. Look for these elements in your WIF poem and see where else they might take you:
- a place could open into a piece of descriptive writing or a scene from memory.
- your parents' work could open into a memory of going with them, helping, being in the way. Could be a remembered dialogue between your parents about work. Could be a poem made from a litany of tools they used.
- an important event could open into freewriting all the memories of that experience, then writing it as a scene, with description and dialogue. It's also possible to let the description become setting and directions and let the dialogue turn into a play.
- food could open into a scene at the table, a character sketch of the person who prepared the food, a litany of different experiences with it, a process essay of how to make it.
- music could take you to a scene where the music is playing; could provide you the chance to interleave the words of the song and words you might have said (or a narrative of what you were thinking and feeling at the time the song was first important to you (“Where I'm Singing From”).
- something someone said to you could open into a scene or a poem which captures that moment; could be what you wanted to say back but never did.
- a significant object could open into a sensory exploration of the object-what it felt, sounded, smelled, looked, and tasted like; then where it came from, what happened to it, a memory of your connection with it. Is there a secret or a longing connected with this object? A message? If you could go back to yourself when this object was important to you, what would you ask, tell, or give yourself?
Remember, you are the expert on you. No one else sees the world as you do; no one else has your material to draw on. You don't have to know where to begin. Just start. Let it flow. Trust the work to find its own form."
My experience:
In the past, I have used this poem to have students understand the varying perspectives of the characters in the Civil War novel,
Across Five Aprils
, because the characters "come from" the same place and yet have very different notions about the events during that time period. This year, we read the poem and the mentor poems from Linda Rief’s book, and, after talking about what’s going on in the poems, we wrote our own. Volunteers shared their poems in entirety or just a sentence/ couplet/ stanza, depending on their comfort level. This year I had one class share one word about what they were thinking and feeling after they all shared. I came up with this idea on the spot because I was so moved by their bravery to share, yes, but primarily to show up every single day despite very difficult circumstances and to find beauty in what feels like very bleak times in their own lives and our current society. The words gave me and them chills: determined, focused, confused, questioning, free, strong, brave, etc. Reading the poems, writing where they come from,
owning
where they come from, had transformed them and they knew it. Now, that’s poetry.
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Annie Q. Syed is a writer-teacher and loves learning. She has been a passionate educator for a little over a decade. She received her training in New York City via a Master’s in English Education from City College of New York. Then she went on to study law at CUNY School of Law. In 2015 she was accepted into the Bread Loaf School of Education for a Master’s in Literature. In the summer of 2019 she is graduating from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English program at their Oxford campus thanks to a generous grant. In the summer of 2017, she was awarded a "Literature for Life" award and attended their home campus in Vermont. In the summer of 2018 she attended their St. John’s campus in Santa Fe, where she was awarded the Kathleen Downey Memorial Scholarship. She is filled with gratitude for Bread Loaf School of English due to their continued support in helping her grow as a writer and educator. She is a firm believer that for a real educator the learning never ceases and that a writer is a reader first.
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