Dakos, Kalli
Author

I gotcha,
I caughtcha,
I putcha in my poem,
I lockedcha forever
In a poetry zone.
- Don't Read This Book, Whatever You Do

I love capturing students and teachers and putting them inside my poems where I can keep them forever. Even when I have forgotten the stories of my own life, the poems will remember for me.

I taught fifth and sixth grades for many years and then I became a reading specialist. But, I wanted to be a writer, too, so I took a few years to study journalism and to write stories, articles, and poems for magazines and newspapers.

But writing is a solitary profession. Before long, I missed the excitement of the classroom world and decided to return to teaching. I was unprepared for the gold mine of stories I would soon discover in my own school. It was as if I was wearing magic glasses and magic ears that let me see and hear all the wonderful dramas that were embedded in the daily routines of classroom life. I wrote poems with titles like "Caleb's Desk Is a Mess," "There's a Cockroach Lurking Inside My Desk," "Ode to My Stress Ball," "Happy Hiccup to You," and "If You're Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand."

I didn't intend to write poems, but the stories seemed to fit best in poetry. My students began writing too, and before long we were all celebrating the stories of our lives through poetry.

Now I love to visit schools where I collect ideas for new poems. I have found worlds upon worlds in elementary school classrooms. I encourage students to write poems on every aspect of classroom life.

I have written over one hundred poems about the lowly pencil, and I have barely touched the surface of its endless writing possibilities. The elementary school bathroom has the saddest stories of all because many children go there to cry and to be alone when life is difficult. Now I'm working on a book of bathroom poems.

I grew up in Ottawa, Canada, and loved skating, skiing, tobogganing, hiking and riding my bicycle everywhere. I have three younger sisters and I always made them play "school" with me. I was the teacher and they were the students, and they would listen to my stories.

My father was a wonderful storyteller, and even though he died when I was twelve years old, his love of stories was already a wonderful, soft blanket of joy inside my soul.

I spent many hours reading sad good-bye poems when he died, and I realized the poems were helping me to say good-bye. Now I tell students that when a best friend moves away or a loved one dies, reading and writing poetry help.

I have lived in many different places but one of my favorites is the Canadian Arctic. My husband was a flying doctor and I was a teacher there, and I wrote poems like "Recess in the Dark" (the kids really do have recess in the dark up there). I lived in Reno, Nevada, and Syracuse, New York, before I moved to Virginia, where I still live part of the year. The rest of the time I live on the Rideau River in Ottawa, Canada, so I can be close to my family for the summers and holidays.

My daughter, Alicia, grew up editing my poems from the time she was a baby. I'd write a poem and say, "Do you like it? How can I make it better?" She has always been my favorite editor, and I'm quite certain that she will be a writer too.

I remember an old Inuit woman saying to me once that she didn't know how to read and write and it made her feel as if she was blind. A world without the magic of books and poetry would be a very dark world indeed, and I am so thankful for those wonderful gifts that I have been given.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day,
Use some of them for poetry,
And some of them to play.
(unpublished poem by Kalli Dakos)

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