[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.
Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
Spring is the season of whimsy, and this week’s writer Janet McIntosh Barkdoll doesn’t hold herself back. While the inspiration for “Quadratic Formula Poem” came from an attempt to meet the challenge of “writing a poem containing the quadratic formula,” there is nothing mathematical or rigid about it. In fact, it’s with bouncy alliteration and a nod to Lewis Carroll that she offers us her observations of the natural world.
Quadratic Formula Poem
By Janet McIntosh Barkdoll
[X] marks the spot
where,
if you pessimistically encounter a bee,
you should contribute something to its existence.
Or, perhaps,
take the same something.
I’ve heard,
you know,
that bees
on their birthdays
appreciate a gift that is square in shape
but rooted in thoughtfulness.
Yes,
a gift containing bubbles or bobbles or babbles or blubber,
nibbles or cobbles or pebbles or rubber,
from which you have removed a quadruplet of aces.
This,
my dear friends,
is how to cover your bases.
Go,
enter every best-birthday-gift-for-a-bee competition.
I promise,
you’ll be boasting first places.
