Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

I’m a big advocate of reading poetry to children. At home and at work — when I was in a school library, that is. One of my favorite school librarians, under whom I once interned, would open up his time with his middle-school students by simply reading a poem to them each time they visited the library. No analysis, no quizzes. Just hear and enjoy and savor. And I fervently hope my girls grow up to enjoy and read poetry on their own. Instilling an appreciation for poetry in young children is really quite simple, too — and very fun. Read it to them. Read read read poems. Play with the rhymes. Emphasize the sounds of words. Poetry celebrates the rhythms and sounds of language and word play, so if you read it a lot—outloud—and dance and snap and clap and play, they’re gonna get it. And they’ll likely enjoy it.

I’ve been reading Favorite Poems: Old and New, originally published in 1957 by Doubleday/Random House. The poems were selected by Helen Ferris, and it was illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. It includes over seven-hundred poems divided into eighteen categories—from silly to somber, from story poems to scary poems to Bible prose, from Mother Goose to Walter de la Mare, from Shakespeare and Dickinson and Tolkien to Carl Sandburg and Lewis Carroll and T.S. Eliot (and JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING in between)—and is quite the comprehensive introduction to poetry. Visiting its home at Amazon, one can see that it inspires such user-review statements as, this is “PURE nostalgia!!!” and “the ONLY children’s anthology you’ll need.”

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It’s hard for me to admit this out loud, but here it is: I’m terribly vain. Not in the usual sense of the word. I mean I am preoccupied with my appearance and with others’ perception of me, but I tend to see and expect the worst of myself. And I hate it. I hate that I even care what I look like, that I actually get depressed that I don’t look like Gwyneth Paltrow or Angelina Jolie or whatever impossible standard of physical attractiveness the media are currently obsessed with. Shouldn’t it be enough that I’m decently healthy, that I have a husband and family and friends that I love, a job that I enjoy, a nice place to live, and that people keep writing great books for me to read? Do I really have to be conventionally pretty, too, to call myself happy?

Sometimes it’s nice to have a reminder that there really is more than one definition of beauty. So here’s “Saint Francis and the Sow” by Galway Kinnell:

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

(Click here to read the rest.)

The lovely Susan Taylor Brown is on Poetry Friday Round-Up duty this week at her blog, Susan Writes. Enjoy some true beauty over there.

I’ve been reading Container Gardening, the latest collection of poetry from journalist, poet, and playwright Ellen Steinbaum (published last year by CustomWords). Ellen also, until very recently and for almost a decade, was a columnist for the Boston Globe, writing at “City Type,” conversations with Boston-area writers and poets. (Those columns are archived, for those interested, at her site.)

Ellen’s poetry is new to me, but I ripped right through this collection and I’m even currently re-reading it. I find many of these poems—whose themes often swirl around life’s most perplexing elements, memory, the rush of time, loss, and hope—to be moving. At her site, she writes, “I think of my new book, Container Gardening, as a collection of poems about what is perishable, what endures, and what makes us who we are. After my first book, Afterwords {pictured below}, which dealt very specifically with loss, these speak of how we pick up the pieces and go on to create the private and public worlds we inhabit.”

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Well. It’s the last day of April, folks. Though I’m a big believer in poetry every day of the year, I’ll miss National Poetry Month 2009. I thought we’d say goodbye to it with the one and only matron of children’s literature, Mother Goose.

There are a whole slew, to be precise, of Mother Goose collections out there. And, by all means, if you want to know the weird and wonderful stories behind how these weird and wonderful rhymes came about, pick up a copy of Chris Roberts’ entertaining Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme (first published in 2004 by Granta Books). I blogged about it here, back in the Dark, Dark Times When Our Images Were Lamentably Small.

As I mentioned back then: Heavy Words Lightly Thrown is a raucous and very fun read. And you gotta love a book that takes its title from a Smiths’ song anyway. Who knew that the lullaby “Rock-a-bye, baby” (pictured left as British author and illustrator Tony Ross illustrated it) could be a warning about hubris? And that “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” above, is all about taxation? And that one saucy explanation for “Jack and Jill” is:

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Meet Bean. She’s tried so hard to get the attention of her best friend, Bella, who is a poet — and busy writing. “‘Yoo-hoo, Bella,’ said Bean. ‘See my new hat?’ ‘I don’t have time for hats, Bean,’ said Bella. ‘I’m writing new poems…I can’t think about rivers and moons when you are talking about hats,’ said Bella.” Bean really wants to go for a walk with her friend, and—even though Bella figures a walk to the pond would be lovely, indeed—she simply wants to finish her poems.

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I hate it when that happens. Remind me not to vacation in the outer reaches of the solar system again.

I’m here today, during this last week of National Poetry Month 2009, to share some poems from new picture book poetry collections. That opening poem is from Jack Prelutsky (with art from Jimmy Pickering), but I’ll get back to that in a moment. I’m here to talk just a bit about each title, but I’d rather let some art from each book—as well as some poetry, of course—do most of the talking.

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If you’ve known me for very long, then you probably know that I have a very… let’s call it “complicated” relationship with organized religion. What you may not know about me is that, in spite of it, I do still love the Bible. At least, I love parts of it, as mythology, and as literature. For example, I think Song of Solomon has some of the most beautiful passages of any love poem ever written. I mean, how great is this: “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.” Wouldn’t you swear that was Sappho?

I also love the first chapter of Genesis. That line about the holy spirit moving upon the waters always gave me chills. So of course the first time I heard “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson I was totally blown away. Such a powerful retelling, with such rich imagery… but that’s a post for another day.

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I’m happy to welcome author/poet/blogger Laura Purdie Salas this morning, a big cup of strong, pipin’ hot coffee extended as we get ready for a 7-Imp chat. I’ve wanted to interview Laura for a while, though some folks may remember that she stopped by exactly one year and one day ago with the rest of the Poetry Seven for a group interview. Today, though, she’s goin’ it solo, and she’s here to talk a bit about her new book, Stampede!: Poems to Celebrate the Wild Side of School, published this month by Clarion and illustrated by Steven Salerno, as well as discuss her blogging and other writing.

Laura is a former teacher and has written over fifty books for kids and teens. She writes nonfiction titles, as well as poetry, including 2008’s Write Your Own Poetry, geared at upper-elementary and middle-grade students. Last year, she also published ten poetry titles with Capstone Press, a set of books in which she incorporated a number of poetic forms. Her web site has lots of information about her titles and also includes information about her writing presentations and school visits. For Stampede, Laura’s first trade picture book, she conducted an online launch party, an intriguing idea for us wallflowers of the world. I asked her about it, and she discusses that a bit below. Laura also blogs over at her LiveJournal home, often presenting writing challenges and ideas for other writers and poets, such as this recent example, and always sharing the results with her readers.

I thank Laura for stopping by. Let’s get right to it . . .

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Jules: In a continued celebration of National Poetry Month, this morning 7-Imp welcomes author and poet Jane Yolen and freelance photographer Jason Stemple, who happens to be Jane’s son. Jason’s photography has illustrated over ten of Jane’s previous titles, and their latest artistic collaboration is the beautifully (and cleverly) designed, A Mirror to Nature: Poems About Reflection, released this month by Wordsong. The book features twelve poems, along with Jason’s nature photography, which reflect upon (excuse the bad pun) the doubled images and patterns created by the reflective nature of water. “The first mirror was water: puddles, pools, lakes, quiet rivers,” Jane writes in the opening author’s note.

Pictured here are some wood storks, the only stork species, the book notes, that breeds in North America, and a bird on the endangered species list. Below is Jane’s poem about the wood stork, followed by one more poem-photo pairing from the title, as well as the book’s cover image (a blue heron):

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(Photo: “First Snow” by Andrew Ross Phoenix.)

Hey. I’m keeping it very simple this week. I’m sharing a lovely little haiku that perfectly expresses my mood as I start to see little hints of green peeking out in the pauses between slushy snow showers. I hadn’t realized how starved my eyes have been for GREEN.

Here’s Kobayashi Issa, translated by Robert Hass:

The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.

This week’s Poetry Friday Round-Up is being brought to you by the letter G, the number 4, and by Carol at Carol’s Corner.