Students chose which poems Turchin recited by plucking them off his "PoetTree"--a colorful cardboard creation bearing "fruit" not found in nature.

"Poems grow a lot like trees," Turchin told the students, likening inspiration to a seed. "If you give them some space in your life, these seeds will grow. My goal is to make you want to plant one of these seeds yourself."

Turchin turned the seeds of his creativity into poems about how to count to 10 like a space alien and what a hammer and a nail might say to each other. The poet assigned the students plenty of sound effects to keep them involved.

He admitted that most of his poems have no deep meaning, although some do have a message. "A Dog's Tale" ends with the lines, "Life sometimes will leave us with a hole to fill/but if you're open and you heed/life will offer what you need."

For Turchin, writing fulfills a need for a creative outlet.

"It's such an important part of your life if you can express yourself with words," he told the students. "You're already born with poetry seeds inside you. You don't need mine; you've got plenty of your own."

Turchin did provide students with "seed words" such as "cinnamon" and "invisible," along with his email address so they could share anything they wrote with him. He said after the assembly that many students take him up on his offer.

"If I'm going to get something, I get it the next day" after making a presentation, he added. "Sometimes they're just notes, sometimes they're poems and sometimes they make no sense at all. They just want to get in touch with me."

Turchin has been presenting his "PoetTree" at schools throughout the state for about seven years. He made his appearance at Los Alamitos through Young Audiences of Northern California, a nonprofit group that brings performing and visual artists into schools.

While he also writes adult verse, Turchin is more focused on his poems for children.

"I've been writing these sorts of poems for 25 years," he said. "I don't write them all the time, but I come back to them. They're like jigsaw puzzles in my mind."

While rhyming verse might seem like child's play, Turchin said his young audiences sometimes have difficulty putting the pieces together.

"When I teach kids, I don't teach them to write in rhyme because I find it constricts them," he added. "I want them to worry about expressing themselves."