Teeny Tiny Press by Amanda Laughtland

Thanks to everyone who helped me get the word out about my summer poetry class. I have 11 students, and class started yesterday. The first assignment involves writing an ode/praise song. I'm looking forward to reading the poems that the students submit! Meanwhile, the weather here in Seattle has turned chilly, which isn't unusual for June. So in order to feel a little warmed up, I'm posting a photo I took earlier this month when we visited Dry Falls in Eastern Washington.

To borrow a phrase from William Carlos Williams, "This is just to say" that I have four open spots remaining for the month-long poetry writing class which begins this Friday, June 21, the first day of summer. The class runs through July 21. It's a 100% online class, facilitated through the Canvas learning management system. It's also a totally independent class, operated by me and not through a school or any other program. For more info, please check out this link , and feel free to comment here or email me if you have any questions!

This is my favorite "group photo" I've taken so far of some Fisher Price toys. We are looking into doing some resale of vintage toys and possibly making and selling some vintage-inspired items. At first I was biased and only liked the Fisher Price I remembered from the 1970s and 1980s, but now I have to say I like some of the newer Little People stuff, too. I mean, how cute are these farm animals? The trouble with even thinking about selling toys is that even when they aren't "yours" from your childhood, it is still hard to part with something so cute.

Well, maybe not "real" men, but the coolest Fisher Price men... Am I having too much fun photographing some of the vintage toys we've picked up at the thrift store? Yes, yes I am.

Have you ever read any poems by Robert Francis? Here are a few on the Poetry Foundation website. I've been meaning for years to assign his work to my composition students, and finally I assigned a pair of his poems in English 101 this quarter. The other two poets the students can write about are Jane Kenyon and Cornelius Eady; I've assigned work by these poets before, and they are pretty popular with my students. I think Mr. Francis is running a distant third so far, but I also notice that the students who are writing about his poems are really enjoying them, so I think I found some of his kindred spirits (as Anne of Green Gables would say). What have you been reading lately?

I've been meaning to post to this blog, but I've been very tired. Turns out that the iron stores in my body are very low. By 5pm or so, I'm pretty much done for the day lately. Well, I'm taking iron supplements and trying to eat more iron-rich foods, and hopefully I'll have rebuilt my iron supply soon; I'm being conservatively optimistic in my hopes because I've read that this can take several months! On that note, here's a poem I drafted recently about taking vitamins. Unseen Needs of the Whole Family To grow taller, to resist sickness, to miss less school, to have stronger bones and more endurance, to feel tip-top, to have good appetite and digestion, to prolong your useful years, to meet the stress and strain of life, to help build good red blood, to prevent deposits of fat in the liver, to prevent fragility of the capillaries, to promote sound nerves, to have lots of energy, to feel less depressed and lonely, to meet the dietary needs of t...

A couple weeks ago, in putting together a little zine on writing poems which use found/borrowed text, I happened upon some fun writing exercises. Here's one on writing "found or headline poems" by William Stafford and Stephen Dunning. Here's a list of 93 poetic experiments to try , compiled by Charles Bernstein. And here's a "word mover" tool from ReadWriteThink which uses Flash to let you move found words around to create your own poems; it lets you save/export the poems you create, too. I need to take some photos of my zine--it's called Found It! --and list it on my Etsy shop . Well, I need to do about a zillion other things, too, starting with catching up on the grading (I'm teaching one English 100 class and two English 101 classes this quarter) that I promised myself I'd catch up on this morning...