River of Words

Author's Bio:

Pamela Michael, co-founder and executive director of River of Words, is the creator of the Watershed Explorer curriculum, which has been used to train thousands of teachers, park rangers, and youth leaders how to connect kids to their watersheds and their imaginations. Michael lives in northern California.
Robert Hass, US Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997 and a cofounder of River of Words, is the author of Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes,  Sun Under Wood, Twentieth Century Pleasures, and Time and Materials, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2007. In 1997 he was named Educator of the Year by the North American Association on Environmental Education. Hass is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Quotes:

“Young minds, in poems and paintings, freely playing creatively, conceptually, physically, with water. Kids showing us canebrakes, ducks, frogs, clouds, streams, and friends, all forms of water, through their fresh eyes. These selections of the best of the best give us pleasure and hope.” Gary Snyder

“Spend some pleasant time with the blithe and irrepressible spirits reflected in these poems and paintings created by young minds.” Wayne Thiebaud

“To turn these pages—to gaze and peruse here—is to discover an unfamiliar joy. These young people offer transcendence, enchantment, and the experience of human attainment—sensations adults too often, now, lose track of. What an antidote to dejection about our species’ potential mounts up in these poems and images.” Barry Lopez

“Sad Sun”

Oh sun. Oh sun
Oh sun. How does
it feel to be
blocked by the
dark dark clouds?

Oh child
it doesn’t really
feel bad at all
not at all not at
all not at all.

Nicholas Sanz-Gould, age 6