Poetry Friday: F E G: Ridiculous [Stupid] Poems for Intelligent Children

I suppose one could say that all poetry is, on some level, a celebration of language – figurative language, compression of language, blah, blah, blah. But F E G: Ridiculous Stupid Poems for Intelligent Children, by Robin Hirsch, art by Ha (Little, Brown, 2002), goes to extremes.

Read strictly for meaning, these poems are nothing special; in fact, many of them do no more than serve as vehicles for a punny punch line. But that’s not the point. Rather than dress up the English language with frilly similes, Hirsch gleefully shows its underpants. These poems express the sheer joy of playing with language, exploiting its every eccentricity (or, dare I say, X N TR C T?).

Treating letters of the alphabet as phonemes rather than merely symbols is just one form of word play you’ll find in F E G. You’ll find visual word play in palindromes and anagrams, and aural word play in spoonerisms, puns, and onomatopoeia. Then there’s all the other stuff that doesn’t fit under a tidy linguistic label.

One of my favorite pairs of poems contrasts conventional “ear rhyme” with “eye rhyme.” Bough, cough, dough, and enough are all spelled alike, yet ough makes a different sound in each! In contrast, “Ewe Rhyme” collects words that rhyme with ewe but are spelled very different. Here’s the first stanza:

There once was a man whose name was Lou
Whose favorite dish was lamb ragout
He liked nothing better than a stew
Thickened with a tasty roux

The footnotes are as much or more fun to read than the poems. In them, Hirsch explains the various types of word play, including the etymology of their names. (For example, I now finally know the difference between homographs, homophones, and homonyms.) Hirsch also waxes humorous on various historical and literary tidbits alluded to in the poems.

The collection’s subtitle is fitting. F E G assumes the reader is intelligent and inquisitive – delighted by knowledge in general, and language in particular, for its own sake. Suggest it to upper elementary and middle school readers who are bright, love puzzles and arcane knowledge, and like a good dose of silly with their poetry.

Find this week's Poetry Friday round-up at Susan Writes!