Cookie Butter (Slice 13 of 31)

This post is a part of the Slice of Life challenge which is hosted on the Two Writing Teachers blog.  The month of March the challenge is to write a blog post a day.

Today for my writing time I decided to try an ode to a common thing.  I am trying to introduce my students to more poetry forms and came across the lesson on odes in my copy of Lessons that Change Writers by Nancie Atwell.  She uses some of Pablo Nerudas poems to have students try this form and write poems about ordinary things.

My poem is really rough.  I was just trying this out and wanted to play with the ode.  It is by no means finished and will be a work in progress for a while to come.  I am glad I tried this because it is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Ode to Cookie Butter

You tantalize me with
your gingery excellence.
One swipe of you on my bread
and I am rapturous with delight.
How can I ever have lived
without this amazing spread.
As your flavor sticks
to the roof of my mouth,
I contemplate how best
to use you next.
An apple, perhaps
will be the receptacle
to receive your velvety
delicious
sugar taste.
You hail from Trader Joe’s
What magnificent creature
first dreamt of you
and worked
to make your sweet perfection?
As I bite into your luscious
goodness my mind starts to wander
and I wonder
how it was possible
that I never bought you before.

Obviously, as I said before, this poem is still very rough.  I think I will bring this in to my classroom and show students my first attempts and then work on revising it in front of them.  I am envisioning a class shared writing experience: Ode to Takis.

We had such fun with false apology poems.  I hope we can play with this form and have fun also.

Author: Andrea

I am an instructional technology coach in a middle school in Milwaukee, WI. I have been teaching for over 20 years in many grade levels ranging from first through eighth grade. I am a lifelong book nerd.

5 thoughts on “Cookie Butter (Slice 13 of 31)”

  1. I love that you're bringing this to the class. That's something I need to do more of–share my writing with my high school students.

    I have the false apologies poems book, too. I think that might be a fun April lesson for in-between books. Our standardized writing testing will be done in the next week, and I think it would be fun to do something creative with my standard 11th grade students.

    Thanks for sharing!

  3. Thank you for trusting us with your poetry. 😉 I'm intrigued by cookie butter — I've never even heard of it. I think, just maybe, your ode changed my life. 😉
    Ruth

  4. I now wish we had a Trader Joe's nearby so I could snatch up some cookie butter. It sounds delicious. I see the Neruda influence in your draft. I haven't tried writing one myself, but you've inspired me!

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