We celebrated poetry in my Advanced Writing Class Wednesday. Thirteen of the twenty-two students were in attendance, and we spent the better part of the class discussing synonym poems, limericks, and a unique book of poems titled, Consider the Lemming by Jeanne Steig and illustrated by William Steig. This collection of poems, published in 1998, was donated to my Little Free Library by persons unknown around Christmas. The book takes its name from one of the poems,”The Lemming”

“Consider the lemming:

No hawing or hemming

No dilly or dally

No shilly or shally

The whole lemming nation

In one wild migration

Is off to the sea.

He can’t swim, the lemming

And yet there’s no stemming

His rush to the water

A lem to the slaughter!

Don’t ask him, ‘Who sent ‘ya?’

It must be dementia–

Unless it’s ennui.”

I first asked who knew what a lemming was. Not a sound, blank faces. I told tnem to google it, and they took out their phones, and one told me it was an animal like a rat. I showed them the illustration of lemmings following one another off a cliff into the ocean, and asked if anyone knew what they were known for, what was the “buzz” about them. A very smart woman read from her phone that they blindly followed leadership, sometimes leadership of questionable nature. After a discussion of lemmings and the French word, ennui, as the ultimate boredom, I asked them to write a poem entitled “Consider the Student.” They did this in groups of four, and the one with the same young woman in it came up with the following:

“Consider the student

Tirelessly prudent

Working for something new

Never being truant,

Homework always due.”

by Shayla Tyler, Skyler Robinson, Keilie Velasquez, and Cesar Cardinas.

Shayla also wrote this limerick:

“There once was a lonely old book,

For years no one gave him a look.

Then one day the light

Hit his spine just right;

He smiled as he left the nook.”

I have remarkable students this semester!

POETRY IS FUN!