Poetry Friday: Monsters! Raaaaa!

h1 October 26th, 2007 by jules

{Note: Please see the post below this one for today’s Robert’s Snow schedule —
and Amiko Hirao’s ’07 snowflake}

Eisha and I are about to complete our month-long guest-blogging gig for ForeWord Magazine. This week, I wrote a picture book round-up and it’s entitled, “Size Matters -– And So Do Your Friends and Neighbors” (and we’ll be writing for them next week as well). Lately, I’ve had my mind on picture books whose illustrators, in one way or another, play around with the notions of size and perspective, as well as the abundant number of books out and about now which focus on one’s community and circle of friends. So, I chose eight of them to review. It’s posted this morning over at “Shelf Space,” ForeWord’s column where we are guest-blogging until the end of this month (I’ll have to plan on a Monday post with all the great book cover images).

One of the books I reviewed is the fabulous Monster Hug! by David Ezra Stein, whose snowflake is also being featured today at HipWriterMama’s site. I began my review of that book thusly: “I think an up-and-coming picture book illustrator we all can get most excited about this year, other than the obscenely talented Jonathan Bean, is David Ezra Stein.” Yes, my love for Stein’s art work is strong (and fortunately for us and all our readers, he agreed to let us feature some of his illustrations on a Sunday in November. Swoon! Swoon!).

And for this Poetry Friday, since my mind is on monsters and it’s nearly Halloween and since Eisha and I have been doing some writing for the Poetry Foundation and playing around in their archive of children’s poems, I am going to share this Halloween monster poem by Kenn Nesbitt:

When the musical contest for monsters convened,
the Wolfman was howling and played like a fiend.
Then Dracula jammed, but flew into a rage
when Frankenstein’s torch singing lit up the stage.

The Mummy, he rapped with the aid of a band,
but stopped when The Blob ate his microphone stand.
The Blob, by the way, also swallowed The Fly.
(I don’t know why he swallowed The Fly.)

Heh. You can read the rest here. And for another laugh, here’s another Nesbitt poem, “Halloween Party,” at the aforementioned Poetry Foundation site.

Don’t you just want to read those aloud to some late elementary/early middle school students? Enjoy. And happy Poetry Friday (and almost-Halloween)!





3 comments to “Poetry Friday: Monsters! Raaaaa!”

  1. Funny!


  2. This is almost as funny as the Frankenstein book. …and I KNEW there was something more to Igor!


  3. […] Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast has Kenn Nesbitt monster poetry that I guarantee you’ll want to read out loud. (and that made me want to look at my copy of Maurice Sendak’s Mommy!) […]


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