The RhyPiBoMo Golden Quill Poetry Contest is accepting entries! The guidelines are under the tab above. The deadline for submissions is April 26th at Midnight. As all of you are busy writing poems every day, you should have a hard time deciding which poem to submit! = ) There are three awesome prizes for this contest…
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First Place
Scholarship for The Craft and Pleasures of Writing Poetry for Kids
Donated by Mira Reisberg and Sudipta Bardhan Quallan
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Second Place
Scholarship for The Lyrical Language Lab: Punching up Prose with Poetry
Donated by Renee La Tulippe
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Third Place
Scholarship for a spot in Picture Book Magic Course
Donated by Susanna Leonard Hill
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You may only submit one poem for this contest. Please paste your poem in the body of your email and submit it by using the comment form for the contest entry. You must follow all the requirements for the contest or it will be disqualified. I must have your first and last name. I have received several poems already and am looking forward to reading more. Thanks to our esteemed judges Renee La Tulippe, Jill Esbaum, Tiffany Strelitz Haber!
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http://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/
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I was fortunate enough to meet today’s guest blogger at a SCBWI luncheon for Indiana authors last fall. I had just begun my search for RhyPiBoMo guest bloggers and she graciously agreed to join the list. She has access to the latest and greatest of children’s books and I’m honored that she is sharing an interview she did with Deborah Underwood, another RhyPiBoMo guest blogger, about her new book BAD BYE, GOOD BYE. It was completely coincidental that Deborah and Betsy were scheduled to blog the same week so we will get to hear more about this wonderful book and about Deborah’s creative process.
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So, without further ado, I’m honored to present today’s
Golden Quill Guest Blogger
Betsy Bird!
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What is the best possible time to rhyme in a picture book? Anytime at all? Only for specific reasons and specific moments? In my search to come up with the best possible interview for RhyPiBoMo I scanned through every possible picture book I knew of coming out in 2014. As a Youth Materials Specialist with NYPL, I get to see a lot of books early. After much head scratching and wonder, I finally hit on my favorite rhyming picture book of the year. Bad Bye, Good Bye, by Deobrah Underwood, illustrated by Jonathan Bean is the touching story of a boy coming to terms with a big move, almost in spite of himself. Told with spare words and gorgeous imagery, Underwood (best known for cranking out such contemporary classics as The Quiet Book) manages to tell a complete story with a gentle, simple rhyme. With a release date of April 1st, Ms. Underwood was kind enough to answer some of my questions about her proces
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Betsy Bird: First off, I absolutely adore Bad Bye, Good Bye. One of my favorite books of the year thus far. My question to you is what the impetus was to write it in the first place?
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Deborah Underwood: Oh, thank you so much! I don’t remember the precise moment the story idea formed. I think I was just playing around with words, as I often do, and I liked the sound of “bad bye.” The idea of a moving story evolved organically from that. I scribbled down eight words and a few other snippets, including the ending. Then I stuck it in my idea folder, where it languished for a long time. Often I sift through the folder in desperation when I have a critique group meeting coming up and nothing to bring, and I’m pretty sure that’s what happened here.
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Deborah’s notes
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BB: Were you familiar with the work of illustrator Jonathan Bean before he was paired with this project or was it just an entirely lovely surprise?
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DU: He was new to me back then, but given that my genius editor Kate O’Sullivan chose him, I knew he’d be amazing. Of course I immediately looked him up and fell in love with his work, especially One Starry Night. And seeing his initial sketches for Bad Bye was another lovely surprise, because the style he used for this book was so different. He perfectly captures what it feels like to move: all those moments in time frozen and sometimes overlapping. The illustrations are just stunning. And I was profoundly impressed by his decision to go in this direction. Breaking away from what people might expect requires courage, and I love it when I see other creative people forging new territory; it really inspires me.
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BB: Rhyming picture books that aren’t awful are hard, to say the least. At their worst that sound like poor Dr. Seuss imitations. At their best they’re sublime. Your book falls into the latter category. Why did you want to make it rhyme at all?
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DU: It just started coming to me in rhyme. And truly, whenever a book starts coming to me in rhyme, there is a part of me that shrieks, “No no no no no no no!” and mentally reaches for an icepack and some Tylenol and a whole lot of chocolate and possibly whiskey. Because writing rhyme is so hard, and I know I’m in for weeks of pacing around my apartment muttering to myself and lunging for my Oxford Rhyming Dictionary.
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There is nothing like the misery of seeing a page with a few decent lines of rhyme at the top and the bottom and a whole lot of empty space in the middle where the rest of the story somehow has to materialize. But there’s also nothing like the satisfaction of having completed a rhyming manuscript that works. It’s like a combination of writing and doing a really difficult crossword puzzle.
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BB: Was there ever a temptation to make this a long and wordy book or was it always as incredibly simple as it stands right now?
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DU: Nope; the staccato rhythm and spare text was a fundamental part of the story to me. And I liked the challenge of telling a satisfying story in 80 words. When I started writing picture books in 2001, the conventional wisdom was that you needed to keep them under 1,000 words; times have changed!
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Deborah’s notes
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BB: Are you new to rhyming picture books or is this old hat for you?
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DU: I’ve written a number over the years, but this was the first one to sell. I’m happy to say that two others are under contract: Interstellar Cinderella (Chronicle, 2015) and Goodnight, Baddies (Beach Lane, 2016).
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BB: What was the editorial process like? Did you sit down with your editor and scrupulously consider and reconsider every sparse word, or is this pretty much what you handed in at the start?
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DU: Astonishingly, I think what was published is what I initially turned in! I did plenty of revising beforehand, of course. And there were several things that Kate and I revisited in the editing process. But after playing with alternatives and bouncing ideas back and forth, we went back to the original.
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I remember struggling because I liked the idea of “pancakes” as one of the lines. I loved the possibility of having a scene in a diner, because when I was a kid, eating breakfast out was so novel and great–I mean, pitchers of syrup! different flavors!! But having a two-syllable word would have broken the pattern of two one-syllable words per line, so we ultimately left it alone.
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BB: So, what are you working on next?
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DU: I’m working on the third Cat book–Here Comes Santa Cat! publishes this fall and is all wrapped up, but book three will be out next year. I’m flirting with the idea of getting back to my middle-grade novel. I’m doing work for a few educational publishers. And I need to dig through my idea folder and start something new!
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Bio:
Betsy Bird is currently New York Public Library’s Youth Materials Collections Specialist. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, and has done other lovely little things that she’d love to tell you about but that she’s sure you’d find more interesting to hear of in person. Betsy is the creator of the School Library Journal blog A Fuse #8 Production. She is also the author of the (not rhyming) picture book Giant Dance Party and co-author with fellow bloggers Jules Danielson and Peter Sieruta of the upcoming Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature, coming out with Candlewick in August 2014. Follow her on Twitter: @fuseeight.
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Youth Materials Specialist
New York Public Library
Branch Collection Department
31-11 Thomson Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101
http://blog.schoollibraryjournal.com/afuse8production
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Check out Betsy’s debut picture book Giant Dance Party!
Giant Dance Party by Betsy Bird (Spring 2013)
Thank you Betsy Bird!
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RhyPiBoMo Daily Lesson: Thursday, April 10th
By Angie Karcher © 2014
Lesson 12
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Consonance
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Consonance is often confused with assonance and alliteration. These three poetic devices are the building blocks of verse. The differences are slight but the effects are similar in their powerful ability to grab a reader.
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Consonance – is a poetic device where the repetition of a consonant sound; more specifically, the repetition of the final consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words. (write this down)
For Example:
First and Last
Odds and Ends
Short and Sweet
Stroke of Luck
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Consonance is one of the most common techniques used by writers. It adds a cadence to most sentences and can also be used to emphasize the importance of certain words in a poem.
For Example:
Pitter-patter,pitter-patter
In this line, the repetitive use of ‘p’, ‘tt’ and ‘r’ gives a unique rhythm to it, thereby enhancing its rhythmic appeal.
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One genre of contemporary poetry that has many examples of consonance is hip-hop music. In this example, there is a repetition of the sound ile, and ays.
For Example:
Zealots by Fugees
Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile
Whether Jew or Gentile, I rank top percentile,
Many styles, More powerful than gamma rays
My grammar pays, like Carlos Santana plays
(This is also internal rhyme)
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Sometimes the initial and final consonant sounds are repeated.
For example:
Blade and Blood
Flash and Flesh
Wide and World
Lash and Leash
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This is an adorable poem by Kenn Nesbitt titled That Explains It! and it’s an awesome example of how consonance can really embellish a poem!
That Explains It!
I went to the doctor. He x-rayed my head.
He stared for a moment and here’s what he said.
“It looks like you’ve got a banana in there,
an apple, an orange, a peach, and a pear.
I also see something that looks like a shoe,
a plate of spaghetti, some fake doggy doo,
an airplane, an arrow, a barrel, a chair,
a salmon, a camera, some old underwear,
a penny, a pickle, a pencil, a pen,
a hairy canary, a hammer, a hen,
a whistle, a thistle, a missile, a duck,
an icicle, bicycle, tricycle, truck.
With all of the junk that you have in your head
it’s kind of amazing you got out of bed.
The good news, at least, is you shouldn’t feel pain.
From what I can see here you don’t have a brain.”
http://www.consonanceexamples.com/
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Assonance
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Assonance – (also called vowel rhyme) is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyme within a phrase or sentence. It is used to reinforce the meanings of words or to set the mood. (write this down)
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For Example:
Penitent and Reticence.
“on a proud round cloud in white high night”
The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
The early bird catches the worm.
“Hear the mellow wedding bells” by Edgar Allen Poe
“I lie down by the side of my bride”/”Fleet feet sweep by sleeping geese”/”Hear the lark and harden to the barking of the dark fox gone to ground” by Pink Floyd
“It’s hot and it’s monotonous.” by Sondheim
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Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia – is the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named. It is the use of imitative and naturally suggestive words for rhetorical, dramatic, or poetic effect. Onomatopoeic words produce strong images that can both delight and amuse kids when listening to their parents read poetry. (write this down)
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For example:
Hiccup
Zoom
Bang
Beep
Moo
Splashbang
beep
burp
chirp
clash
crunch
drip
grunt
hiccup
hoot
knock
plop
quack
rattle
sizzle
stomp
thud
toot
varoom
whack
whir
zap
zoom
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Onomatopoeia used in poetry:
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“The burning wood hissed and crackled.”
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I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles. (from “The Brook” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
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“How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
in the icy air of night!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour. ” (from The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe)
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Onomatopoeia is also used in jokes:
Knock-knock ,Who’s there?
Boo
Boo who?
Don’t cry, I was only joking!
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Onomatopoeia used in Nursery Rhymes:
Baa Baa Black Sheep
Old McDonald had a Farm
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Onomatopoeia used in music for a dramatic effect:
Poetry by Langston Hughes – The Weary Blues
Mississippi John Hurt Richland Woman Blues
Resources:
http://examples-of-onomatopoeia.com/
http://examples.yourdictionary.com/5-examples-of-onomatopoeia.html
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Writing Prompt: Write a poem using all three poetic devices; Consonance, Assonance and Onomatopoeia.
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Angie Karcher 
