{"id":1690,"date":"2009-05-28T09:14:51","date_gmt":"2009-05-28T15:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=1690"},"modified":"2009-05-29T12:01:21","modified_gmt":"2009-05-29T18:01:21","slug":"poetry-friday-a-bit-earlythe-fairies-made-me-do-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=1690","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Friday — A Bit Early
(The Fairies Made Me Do It)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. <\/p>\n

I’ve been reading Favorite Poems: Old and New<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, originally published in 1957 by Doubleday\/Random House. The poems were selected by Helen Ferris, and it was illustrated by Leonard Weisgard<\/strong><\/a>. 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<\/em> comprehensive introduction to poetry. Visiting its home at Amazon<\/strong><\/a>, one can see that it inspires such user-review statements as, this is “PURE nostalgia!!!” and “the ONLY children’s anthology you’ll need.” <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And, back to the subject of poetry-reading with children, in her introduction to the anthology, written in 1957, Helen writes,
“{t]his book had its beginning years ago when two parents, loving poetry, made it as much a part of their children’s every day as getting up in the morning, eating breakfast, going to school, playing outdoors until suppertime…to have Mama read them aloud gives us a warm feeling of the day ending as it should end. And to our profound satisfaction in hearing the familiar words over and over again is added our pleasure in the cadence of her voice…It did not matter, {Mama} was convinced, if we could not understand all the words. We could enjoy the beautiful sound of them. So it was that for Fred and me Mother Goose flowed easefully into Alfred Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow into Shakespeare.”<\/em><\/p>\n

So, to celebrate those poems begging to be read aloud, those poems whose rhythms are irresistible, I chose one of my favorites from this anthology. This isn’t a deeply thought-provoking Poetry Friday submission. This falls into the category of: Just Try Not to Read This One Aloud. And clap and do a little dance. I’ve read this one so much to my own girls, we’ve probably got our own little jig down. I see at the poet’s Wikipedia entry<\/strong><\/a> that the poem was set to music by English composer Liza Lehmann. Not surprising. <\/p>\n

Children will also truly dig the humor in this one. I mean, rabbits holding lights for the fairies made me<\/em> laugh outloud. And the grandiloquent image of the Fairy Queen and King floating down in the fairy-car? I love it. <\/p>\n

I try to limit posting pics of my children (they are arguably only interesting, after all, to the parents or doting grandparents), but I just had<\/em> to include this one above of my oldest when she was younger. If you read the poem, you’ll see why. (Instead of being at the “bottom of a garden,” she’s feeding the slightly cross-eyed Cat #1 in our home, who is a few sandwiches shy of a picnic, bless his heart. But the photo still basically<\/em> works.)<\/p>\n

This is “The Fairies” by Rose Fyleman<\/strong><\/a>, who was evidently noted for her writing on fairy folk. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’ll come back tomorrow to edit this post to indicate tomorrow’s Poetry Friday host, if you’re so inclined to read the ol’ round-up. ‘Til then…<\/p>\n

* * * * * * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Edited to Add on Friday: The Poetry Friday Round-Up today is at Irene Latham’s Live. Love. Explore!<\/strong><\/em><\/a> Enjoy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry-friday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}