Daydreaming

How much time did you spend daydreaming as a child?

Most writers remember how challenging, if not impossible, it was to stay in the present when a word triggered their imagination to soar into the future or back to past.

It was our ability to daydream, I suppose, that helped us survive the early years of childhood, even when it might have gotten us into trouble at school or at home for not paying attention.

Thanks to Nikki Grimes and her new verse novel, Words With Wings, I’ve spent the past few days daydreaming and enjoying memories (sparked by her poems) of just how large a role daydreaming has played in my life.

Grimes, the recipient of the 2006 NCTE Award of Excellence in Poetry for Children and winner of the Coretta Scott King Award, reminds her readers of how daydreams, like magic carpets, can carry us away:

Words with Wings

Some words

sit still on the page

holding a story steady.

Those words

never get me into trouble.

But other words have wings

that wake my daydreams.

They fly in,

silent as sunrise,
tickle my imagination,

and carry my thoughts away.

I can’t help but buckle up

for the ride.

It’s easy to sympathize with Gabby, who “can’t help but buckle up for the ride,” as she shares the challenges and pleasures of being a daydreamer in these poems.

Daydreams fill her imagination, that’s for sure, and they get her into trouble with her mom and with her new teacher, Mr. Spicer, who are frustrated with her for not paying more attention at home or in class.

Only her dad seems to understand the pleasures of daydreaming. He’s like her—a daydreamer, too:

Stuck in Dreamland 

Maybe something

is wrong with me,

all this fancy dancing

in my mind.

Where I see red and purple

and bursts of blue,

everybody else sees

back and white.

Am I wrong?

Are they right?

Too bad

I can’t ask Dad.

But Gabby can’t turn to him after her parents separate and she moves across town.

Luckily, she finds a new friend to share dreams with at school. And once Mr. Spicer understands the family problems facing Gabby and devises a plan to help her and her classmates learn the true value of daydreaming, Gabby no longer has to worry about being an outcast in her new school.

And, eventually, Gabby’s mother, who disapproves of daydreaming, comes to envy her daughter’s talent as a writer, and, like Mr. Spicer, develops a newfound respect for the value and true worth of daydreams.

If you don’t remember the pleasures (or hardships) of daydreaming when you were younger, this book will remind you.

And if you’re a writer, it may inspire you to turn your daydreams into stories.

For more information about Grimes and her work, visit: http://www.nikkigrimes.com

For more about Words with Wings, visit: http://www.nikkigrimes.com/books/bkwordswithwings.html

Stepping Out From Behind Our Masks

One of the most compelling features of poetry–and a book like Nikki Grimes’ Bronx Masquerade which mixes poetry with longer prose–is how the voice of the poems creates an intimacy on the page between reader and narrator, offering a glimpse into interior lives that are usually hidden from view.

Using words and images that are direct and raw, Grimes’ poems come straight from the hearts of her eighteen teenage narrators, each offering us a view of their hearts so stunningly and heart-breakingly clear that it feels as if we’ve stepped magically into their skin for a few brief moments.

Take a look at this poem as an example:

Mirror, Mirror
by Janelle Battle

Sisters under the skin,
we meet in the mirror,
our images superimposed
for one split second.
Ready or not,
I peer into your soul
and dive deep,
splash-landing
in a pool of pain
as salty and familiar
as the tears on my cheek.
Your eyes don’t like
what I see.
You don’t want to be me.
So you curse
and smash the mirror,
which gets you what?
A bit of blood,
a handful of glass splinters,
another source of pain.
(p. 72)

From the first line’s words–sisters under the skin–Grimes points a reader to a world beneath the surface, suggesting there is more to each of us than meets the eye. Our reflections in the mirror may fool us into thinking that we’re different from one another, but, underneath, we share something of the same souls.

Janelle, the narrator of this poem, is just one of the characters in this book who find themselves exploring difficult issues in their young lives as they navigate their way through Mr. Ward’s high school English class.

As the students complete their weekly poetry assignments and read their work aloud each week at the class’ Open Mike session, the narrators begin to discover how much they share in common with classmates who may seem like strangers. Over the course of the year of writing poetry, they come to see one another, not as aliens from other planets or as potential threats, but, rather, as potential friends.

Grimes works her magic in prose, too, not just poetry.

Here’s an excerpt from the narrative that precedes "Mirror, Mirror":

“Look, I am nothing like you, okay?” she spit out. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re fat and I’m not. And you’re wrong about my poem. It was just words. It didn’t mean anything. You got that?” And she slammed out of the bathroom and left me there, stinging from the inside out.

I bit my lip to keep the tears back. I turned the faucet on and washed my hands a few times, staring at the sink until I heard Sheila step out into the hall. I glanced up at the mirror before I left. “You’re wrong, Judianne,” I said to the mirror. “They weren’t just words, and you know it.”

In this example, as in so many other passages in Bronx Masquerade, Grimes captures the subtle intonations of speech, the almost invisible emotional weight that words carry (often unbeknownst to their speakers), and succeeds in recreating, too, the pacing and timing of speech, conveying through words, both poetry and prose, how each speaker feels behind their words and behind the masks that they try to create with their words.

Life in the Bronx might require teens to play their roles as part of a masquerade to survive, and maybe that’s the way life is for teens no matter where they grow up today, whether it’s the south Bronx or suburban Houston or Sarasota or inner-city LA.

But no matter where teen readers (and writers) might live, they can open Grimes’ work and meet eighteen young teens who find the courage and strength to step out from behind their masks, to face the world as they truly are, and to tell the truth about themselves in the poems they share with us.

For more about Nikki Grimes and Bronx Masquerade, visit: http://www.nikkigrimes.com/