Posts on poetry

What's with the proliferation of haiku picture books? And if we're going to have so dang many, can't we make them a little better? A little more, say, poetic?

Earlier today I read a review of an upcoming haiku picture book. The haiku quoted in the review was about as interesting, vivid, and emotional as this one I'm making up on the spot:

It's Sunday evening.
I made biscuits and gravy.
I'll go eat them now.

Except this author probably took more than ten seconds to write it. And got paid to do so.

Any idiot can write seventeen syllables and call it a haiku. But you better say something special in those seventeen syllables.

A haiku should have
more flavor than yesterday's
leftovers, you know?

As if that weren't enough, this week I've read another two reviews of "House That Jack Built" take-offs. Clearly, no one heard me the first time.

A few months back, Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect posted a suggestion to write "colorful" poetry based on Hailstones and Halibut Bones, by Mary O'Neill. I remembered that my own third grade teacher used that very book with us way back when, and I'd written several four-line verses on different colors. But I didn't step up to the challenge until this week, when I used O'Neill's book as part of my junior literary magazine's opening exercise. If I was asking them to write a colorful poem, shouldn't I do it, too?

So, here's the first non-doggerel poem I've written in... I have no idea how long... five hundred years? It's a rather sentimental ode on summer and the color pink. You have been warned. (Thanks to Jim Danielson for the encouragement last week. Jim, for the record, this took me considerably longer than 15 minutes.)

PINK SUMMER
Dawn smears pink fingers across the dark lake.
Fifty mosquito bites itch you awake.
The day is a strawberry, poised at your lips,
a wheel of melon without any pips.
Out to pick raspberries in the cool morn,
your legs tic-tac-toed by each saber-tooth thorn.
Now run to the beach, let the sun bake you sore.
Gobble a hotdog, then gobble two more.
A peppermint ice cream cone stickies your face
as pink sun melts away and pink moon takes its place.

Catch this week's Poetry Friday round-up at The Well-Read Child!

This slim and pretty volume showed up on our new book cart this morning. It's pretty on the inside, too! John Frank opens the world's junk drawers—the seashore, the attic, the flea market—and presents a poetic ode on each treasure he finds. The verses, written in formal rhyme and meter, are as spare, simple, and lovely as the items he considers.

In "Low Tide", the volume's opening verse, "...shells like broken lockets / Lie scattered on the sandy shore / Where the ocean empties its pockets." An abalone shell is "a melted rainbow cupped in pearl."

I enjoyed "A Trunk of Clothes," in which a child pawing through the attic discovers, initially disdains, and eventually delights in fashions of a bygone era:

Did people actually wear this stuff?
I ask myself as I pull out
a two-tone shoe, a fur-trimmed muff,

a hat that's so old fashioned
you would not be caught dead dressed in it...
but then, I glance behind me,
and...I wonder if...it just might fit.

Each poem is accompanied by a photograph by Ken Robbins. Some of them are sharp and detailed, but others appear to have been blown up too far, then blurred in Photoshop.

Overall, it's a tidy collection, particularly refreshing in its notion that poetry for kids doesn't have to be all wacky, all the time.

Find this week's Poetry Friday round-up at A Year of Reading!

I’ve decided I like my poetry the way I like my movies. Imagery and abstractions are fine, but I need something concrete to grasp, too. Humor is great, but only if it’s clever and not the same joke over and over. I like to think, but I don’t want to leave wondering what the heck just happened.

These things all sound obvious when I read them over, but too often when I read poetry I find myself bored, confused, and/or generally wondering what the fuss is about. So it’s a great pleasure when I find poetry that speaks to me.

I initially picked up Black Stars in a White Night Sky, by JonArno Lawson, because I liked the cover. Sherwin Tija’s graphic novel-ish illustrations are sprinkled throughout, too. (However, I'm ambivalent on what, if anything, they add to the reading experience.)

Once I opened it, I was hooked from the very first poem, “An Adventure Begins.” It does for this collection what Shel Silverstein’s lovely “Invitation” does for Where the Sidewalk Ends. It thrillingly beckons the reader onward, deeper into the book.

…When the smooth surface pops up with circling fins,
when soft drums surrender to bold violins,
when the light of the moon starts to shine on our skins,

an adventure begins.

Lawson’s poems are rife with word play: distinctive rhymes, phrases that turn back on themselves, tongue twisters. They demand to be read aloud. Many of the poems seem to have been written for the express purpose of delighting the ear, but the ones I liked most had thoughtful, sometimes serious, undercurrents touching on identity and the trials of growing up.

There’s “Water Waltz,” about a moment of elation before a dive, self-consciousness forgotten, and “There’s a Worm,” about the insecurities that eat at us from the inside out. “In the Time That It Takes” muses how quickly and devastatingly life can change. I love “The Old Man’s Lie,” with its supposition that even the most outrageous story can light us inside with belief, perhaps inspiration, and “Deer,” about—well, I should stop saying what these poems are “about.” I like too many of them to list, and it’s best left to the reader to decide their meaning.

Lawson also just sticks in some plain old jokes. I felt about eight years old laughing over “Eat a Duck,” which needs only a catchy tune to make it the perfect commercial jingle for, well, eating ducks. (It’s still in my head.) “Handsome Prince” turns the trope of the handsome prince kissing the sleeping princess firmly, delightfully on its head. “Humpty Dumpty” imagines a far different fate for our old egg friend than the usual.

As a collection, Black Stars in a White Night Sky succeeds because of its variety. It doesn’t stick strictly to the word play or strictly to imagery, to humor or seriousness. Audience-wise, I’d suggest it for upper middle grade readers. Many of the silly poems will appeal to younger readers, and some will speak to adults, but over all the content and sophistication puts it around fifth grade and up, for readers who have “graduated” from Jack Prelutsky.

Catch this week's Poetry Friday round-up at Semicolon!

(What is Poetry Friday, you ask? Start your discovery here.)

I've finally found the perfect poetry book for my attention span! It's Splinters: A Book of Very Short Poems, edited by Michael Harrison (Oxford, 1988). Here's a lovely verse for us now, on the verge of the Winter Solstice:

Season Song

Spring stirs slowly, shuffles, hops;
Summer dances close behind.
Autumn is a jostling crowd
but Winter creeps into your mind.

– Judith Nicholls

It does, doesn't it? Winter feels to my brain like that cold air seeping through the gap in the window frame. I don't know it's there until I'm chilled to the core. Brr, ugh, and brr again.

At the same time, I'm touched by winter's beauty. Walking around the neighborhood, blanketed with snow, there's such a hush. Except for the steady roar of the lake churning against the beach, turning to ice.

My favorite winter book is The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper. It captures winter's dichotomy - the sinister chill of the atmosphere and the gaiety of the holidays - so perfectly.

Catch the rest of this week's Poetry Friday Round-Up at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

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!

Browsing our poetry shelves for something to post about today, I made an unfortunate (though far from scientific) discovery. Several humorous poetry books I picked up didn’t hold up well for cover-to-cover reading. Taken alone, the poems were, for the most part, funny, cute, and clever. But reading one after another, they quickly lost their freshness. There’s only so many poems you can read that have the exact same form and the exact same meter and the exact same rhyme scheme and the exact same flavor of punch line.

So that’s why I’m not going to talk about any of those books. Instead, let’s take a look at some books of poetry and art by Calef Brown, namely Flamingos on the Roof, Polkabats and Octopus Slacks, and Dutch Sneakers and Flea-Keepers.

First of all, these books are visually stunning, from cover to cover. Not a page goes by without a painting or line drawing by Brown. His paintings are lush affairs: bold colors and shapes with folk art sensibility.

And they’re weird. The poems are unapologetically oddball, filled with surreal suppositions and quirky conclusions, and the paintings complement them perfectly. Insects with human faces, scowling unicorns, Poseidon in a kelp toupee – all par for the course.

The form, length, meter, and rhyme scheme vary from poem to poem – essential, as I noted, for cover-to-cover reading. While I think every poem does generally rhyme, Brown isn't afraid of ending a poem with a line that doesn't. This only adds to the whimsy; the poems do not end with an answer, but rather with another question.

And Brown doesn’t seek to explain the bizarre scenarios he posits. Why do two children hear flamingos on the roof, the night of December twenty-third? Why does Grandmother Pennybaker sketch a dozen Martian men at eleven o’clock? Why do Polkabats scare off birds by "Loudly screeching nasty words like 'Stroganoff'"? Stop asking questions and enjoy the flight of fancy!

Brown’s works are the poetic and artistic parallel of a Daniel Pinkwater story. It’s hardly surprising that Brown was the cover artist for Pinkwater’s latest novel, The Neddiad. The more literal-minded kids and adults among us may find these books perplexing. For kids who are willing to relax and enjoy pure absurdity, however, there’s a lot here to enjoy.

I'll leave you with some lines from one of my favorites, though it's one of the most straighforward poems in these books and therefore not the most representative. But it's funny. From "Ten-Cent Haiku", from Flamingos on the Roof:

Shiny silver friend.
I will never let you go.
Look! An ice cream truck!

Find more poetry picks at this week's Poetry Friday round-up at A Wrung Sponge!

Polkabats and Octopus Slacks: 14 Stories, Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Dutch Sneakers and Flea-Keepers: 14 More Stories, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Flamingos on the Roof: Poems and Paintings, Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Like a lot of kids, I was never big into poetry. Like a lot of adults, I’m still not. So when I find a book of poetry that not only do I like, but I think kids would like, too? It’s a special occasion.

This isn’t to say there isn’t lots of great poetry for kids out there – poetry kids would enjoy if they gave it half a chance. But when it’s all crowded together on our massive 811 shelves, it’s harder to find. Often I’ll end up steering kids toward Shel Silverstein or Jack Prelutsky when, let’s face it, they already know about those guys.

So I’m planning to participate in Poetry Fridays to actively seek out poetry with kid appeal, especially boy appeal.

Now, on to this week’s selection, remarkable because the poems are:
1) Short
2) Easy to understand
3) Visually interesting
4) Laugh-out-loud funny

I’m talking about Technically, It’s Not My Fault: Concrete Poems, by John Grandits.

Eleven-year-old Robert is the kind of boy who purposefully gives the “you-must-not-have-the-brains-God-gave-a-chicken” answer on multiple choice tests. Who talks backward just to confound his social studies teacher. Whose idea of an amazing roller coaster involves shooting flames, poisonous killer spiders, and a cannon, and is called the “Spew Machine.” Who imagines the autobiography of a fart. He’s a little off-beat, and a lot hilarious.

From the front cover, we’re sucked in, as Robert explains to his parents why there is a concrete block sticking out of the roof of the family car. “See, I was reading about Galileo, a guy who made all these great discoveries and did cool experiments…” This slim volume continues with 27 more concrete poems, recounting Robert’s snarky observations and (mis)adventures.

With the exception of the first poem, “concrete” refers to the poems’ form, not their subject matter. In a concrete poem, the visual layout contributes to the poem’s meaning. For example, “My Stupid Day” evokes the day-in, day-out tedium of school by wrapping Robert’s routine around a clock; he goes to bed at night, only to wake up the next morning and begin again. In “Robert’s Four At-Bats”, each line traces the path of the ball (and, finally, Robert as he runs the bases). The clever forms make the poems memorable and especially appealing to visual learners.

I’m not a person who often laughs out loud at books, so when I do, it’s a sign of true hilarity. Probably my favorite poem in this collection is “Where New Words Come From,” written in a series of cartoon panels and speech balloons. It traces the journey of “snarpy” as a flub from Robert’s irate mother, to school gossip, to the Style Network, to a presidential press conference on U.S. foreign policy, with not a bit of confusion along the way. (“Snarpy? Is that some sort of new slang? Well, it’s what the kids are saying.”)

Another of my favorites is “TyrannosaurBus Rex”, in which Robert envisions the school bus as a vicious dinosaur that hunts children (whose parents have delivered them to the bus stop as human sacrifices) and eventually vomits them onto school grounds. I was also tickled by “The Thank You Letter with Footnotes”, an annotated note to Aunt Hildegard whose footnotes express Robert’s true feelings about her atrocious birthday gift.

These aren’t your typical poems. They aren’t overflowing with figurative language. They don’t rhyme. Most of them read like conversational prose. And being highly visual, they aren’t made to read aloud in class. But for a consistently entertaining sit-down read, Technically, It’s Not My Fault is hard to beat. It’s the kind of book I’d hope middle grade kids would read even when they don’t have a poetry assignment for school. It’s just too bad it’ll stay hidden in the poetry section unless you pull it out and talk it up!

(Readers may also want to check out Grandits’ slightly longer companion book, Blue Lipstick: Concrete Poems, narrated by Robert’s high school age sister Lisa. Again, hilarious.)

You can find this week's Poetry Friday round-up at Mentor Texts, Read Alouds, & More.