Amanda West Lewis
A Planet is a Poem
Writing Non-Fiction Poetry:
I’m not a scientist and I didn’t do very well in science at school. But I am fascinated by the things that make up this wonderful world of ours.
To quote Bill Bryson: “When you start looking into it … there isn’t anything that is out there in the world around us, the universe beyond us, that isn’t amazing and worth examining and considering…”
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One of the things about getting older is that I find I am more and more curious about the natural world. I listen to the CBC program Quirks and Quarks all the time. I love hearing how passionate scientists are about their discoveries. I was listening to Quirks and Quarks in 2015 when they were reporting on the exciting images that the New Horizon space probe was sending back from Pluto. The thrill in the scientists’ voices was infectious. The whole world was suddenly seeing Pluto in a whole new light. There’s a plateau shaped like a heart that seems to pulse as the gasses flow between Pluto and Charon! There’s a mountain larger than Mount Everest in a moat on Charon! The atmosphere is filled with tiny particles that make the sky look bright blue!
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Coincidentally, while I was learning about Pluto and Charon I was on a quest to learn about different kinds of verse poems.
Poetry has been an important part of my life. In my work in theatre, I did a lot of performance poetry. As a professional calligrapher, I created a lot of poetry art on the page. Then, as part of my MFA I read a book called The Ode Less Travelled, by Stephen Fry. Fry showed me that poetry can be a fun kind of puzzle. I was experimenting with villanelles, sestinas, tankas, and odes. I was listening hard for beats and rhythms.
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On the Quirks and Quarks show about Pluto, one of the scientists said the phrase “volcanoes of slow-moving nitrogen mud.” That is perfect iambic hexameter (4 stressed/unstressed beats in a line). I wondered if some of the other great facts about Pluto could be put into iambic rhythms.
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It’s such a surprise that the skies are bright blue
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Ice water on mountains the color of blood.
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A plateau melds and joins, and looks like a heart
Creating A Planet is a Poem with The Ottawa Children's Theatre, 2025. Music by Jack Hurd
​Then I discovered a pantoum. A pantoum is a complicated verse form that involves specific rhyming scheme and repetition. It has four-line stanzas where the second and fourth lines are repeated as the first and third of the next stanza. It is “seriously nerdy” as Stephen Fry says.
My nerdy self decided to try a Pantoum for Pluto, if only because of the alliteration. I got totally hooked. I loved the game of writing in a strict verse form. I wanted more!
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Soon I was researching all of the planets and thinking about how to pair them with the perfect verse form. I researched and wrote and lived with a Thesaurus beside my bed.
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Each planet became a different character. Each has its own rhythms, styles, colours, tones, and speeds, just the way a character in any book does. Thinking about each planet as a character helped to dictate which poetic form to use to “tell their story.” I think of a poem as being like a container, and of course each container also has its own characteristics. So, the pairing of the poem container with the planet character became like creating a play – the play of our solar system.
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Incidentally, don’t go looking for my Pantoum for Pluto in the book. In the end, that poem didn’t make the cut. My editor, Kathleen Keenan, suggested a companion poem for Pluto and Charon, which actually makes a lot more sense and made for a much better pairing of style and character.
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I’m not sure I would have tackled this book had I known just how hard it was going to be! It took many conversations and coffee dates with Katie Scott at Kids Can Press before they could see that there was a manuscript there. Even after KCP purchased the book it took two years to bring all of the elements together. But now that it is out there in the world, I couldn’t be happier!