This week’s guest on “Poetry from Daily Life” is Matt Forrest Esenwine, who lives in Warner, New Hampshire. Matt is a award -winning author and poet for children who started writing poems at the age of 9. He says he likes to write for children on nature, families and our connectivity. Two books on which Matt loved to work was the anthology of the poetry of his children “A Universe of Rainbows” (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2025) and “I AM TODAY”, which received the literary prize for the state of the New Hampshire 2023 for the exceptional work of children’s literature. In addition to his writing, Matt spent 25 years on the radio on the radio to make morning shows, organizing concerts and interviewing people as diverse as Bernie Sanders, Alice Cooper and Jeff Foxworthy. ~ David L. Harrison
The unexpected importance of the most boring object of all time
Too often, when people think of poetry, they think: “Oh brilliant, another love poem”. Or another poem of nature, or another poem competing with socio-political comments.
Well, I’m here to tell you that there are a myriad of other subjects waiting for their own poems – and children write some of the best!
When I do school visits, I’m talking about a variety of things; A minute, it could be the process of an image book being created, the following could be dinosaurs and what we still learn about them. But I also do poetry workshops, and that’s where pleasure really happens.
I encourage students not to worry about rhyme, the meter, counts of syllables and all these other academic poetic devices that everyone wants them to learn. I rather focus on what I believe to be the most important aspect of writing poetry: understanding your subject.
This means asking questions. What is the subject? Why is he worthy of a poem? What could be the subject of others, literally or figuratively? What would happen if the subject was in a different place, or of a different size, or behaved differently? What if you were the subject?
These questions help a poet to understand what the story expects to be told, or what element of the subject needs a poem; Like the practice of mindfulness, the poet becomes more intimate with the subject and, hopefully, earns the point of view necessary to write.
This is where the MBOE comes into play!
The MBOE (AKA, the most boring object of all time) could be a dust rabbit, a rock, a twig – all that a student decides. This is my way of imposing students in a poem from the crowd, by which we ask questions on the subject, think about ideas and note the lines or sentences that we think we could be considered – then start filtering what we do not think.
For example, during a recent college poetry workshop, I asked students to offer what they believed to be the MBOE. We suggested a black tie that she drew from her ponytail, and we left and run!
I hired students to ask questions and note ideas about the white classboard: “black”, “dark”, stretch “,” round. “All reasonable descriptions. Boring, but reasonable.
Once we have exceeded the obvious, however, the imagination of children took over.
“You could stretch it like a weapon!”
“It’s round, like a mirror!”
“It’s infinite because it never ends!”
“It’s a hole to cross!”
“Like a black hole in space!”
“It could be a portal!”
“It leads to the universe!”
Now we were going somewhere.
Once they were all written, we screened the sentences and images, we thought we could connect.
Finally, we found this poem:
Black hair tie
In the infinite portal:
Reflection of the black hole.
I am the weapon
Universal chaos.
◆ Employment
Then we took a few other sentences, reorganized them and found this:
Black hole gate
In infinity, in glass in search
chaos.
I am the universal weapon.
◆ Employment
We took over these sentences and changed them to a third time:
Chaos weapon:
Reflection, endless
Black hole universe
◆ Employment
It turns out that the latter turned out to be a haiku – an unexpected treat, because I was able to show children how the structure sometimes finds its way in poems, whether we plan it or not.
And it might be difficult to believe that the class has found poems as daring and creative on an old dark hair tie, but we are there. And it only took 15-20 minutes!
So do not dismiss poetry as being solely on love, life, death and the current political climate. And do not reject these Mboes in your own life! Who knows what random and not very spectacular subject is waiting for.
After all, after discovering that Mboe means that you are the perfect person to write his poem!
Matt Forrest Esenwine’s images books include the “lamp lamp night lamp” (Astra Young Readers, Sept. 2017) and “Once a Time” (Beaming Books, 2021), that Ala’s list of books called “Add necessary for collections of image books”. His poetry is found in many anthologies such as “National Geographic Book of Nature Poetry” (National Geographic Kids, 2015) and “Except for Love: New England Poets inspired by Donald Hall” (Cross, 2019). Find more about him Mattforrest.com.