CYCLOPS WEARING FLIP FLOPS

Poetry Tag continues with a book review of a new book of poetry connected to yesterday's book review.

Today’s tagline: Getting the poetry out there

Guest Reviewer: Tina Shands

Featured Book: Simon, John Oliver. 2011. Cyclops Wearing Flip Flops; The Best of Poetry Inside Out. San Francisco: The Center for the Art of Translation.

Tina writes: Cyclops Wearing Flip Flops is the eighth book of poetry published by the Center for the Art of Translation’s program known as Poetry Inside Out. Poetry Inside Out (PIO) is a 16-session school program where students are taught poetry through the translation of foreign poems. It began in 2000, “bringing the poetries of Spain and Latin America to Spanish bilingual and immersion classrooms.” It has now expanded into 19 languages and is taught to elementary, middle and high school students.

The book contains the poetry of the PIO students in a session-by-session look at how the PIO program works. The information given about each session is fascinating and provides just enough guidance to make an educator want more. Specifically, the book leaves the reader wanting to see the Translator’s Glossaries, referred to throughout the book as being integral to the program. If the Translator’s Glossaries were readily available, a teacher could re-create the project without the need of the PIO professionals. Instead, it appears the only way to get the information necessary to teach the program would be bring the PIO residency program to your school or attend Professional Development and/or workshops presented by PIO.

This book is different from the other books I have reviewed. This is not a book I would recommend for reading among the general student population. I see this book as being on the “Professional” shelf in a school library for teachers to use as part of their own professional development. Even without the benefit of the Translator’s Glossaries, the book contains ideas that a teacher would find very useful. If it were to be read by the general student population, I believe it could be used as a good example of how student’s poetry writing can evolve over the course of time.

Before talking further about the great qualities of this book, I must comment on one area that I found disappointing; that is the book’s table of contents. The table of contents is broken up into five sections. While these five sections are designated in the book, it is the session-by-session concept that I noticed most. The table of contents lists these sessions, but does not identify them as such. For example, Session 6 is titled “A Nest Built of Lines”. It is in the second section of the book titled “Building a House of Words”. The entry in the table of contents is:

II. Building a House of Words
A nest built of Lines: Quatrains 46
El nido 48
Alfredo Espino (Spanish)

I believe it would be an improvement if the table of contents stated:

II. Building a House of Words
Session 6: A Nest Built of Lines: Quatrains 46
El nido 48
Alfredo Espino (Spanish)

I realize this is a minor change, but in my opinion the session information is so important to the book that the lack of the information in the table of contents is a major drawback. I believe such an addition would make the book more user friendly.

Except for the table of contents, I found this book to be of good quality. There is so much information about poetry and how to help children evolve in their writing of poetry. It also gives great definitions of different types of poetry as well as examples of ways to engage children in the poetry writing experience.

One example I particularly liked is found in Session 9: “Renga Round the World” which has students writing a “collaborative series of tanka” known as renga. In doing so, one student writes a traditional haiku 5-7-5 syllable poem then passes his or her paper to another student. That student then adds two seven-syllable lines to finish the tanka and then starts another new tanka (by writing a 5-7-5 haiku). This new tanka is then passed along to another student . This renga can go on and on this way. Prior to reading this, I had never heard of the poetic forms of tanka and renga. Even if I had known about this type of poetry, I would not have thought about using it in this round the world format. This type of information is a perfect example of why this book should be on school libraries' professional shelf.

The poetry itself is very appealing. Since the translated poems are all written by children, the language contained in them is very child friendly and speaks to things children know. The book also provides a good example to teachers as to how students can transform their work over the course of a semester. Teachers could certainly share this poetry with their students to provide them with examples of how capable students at their grade level can be if they work at their poetry week after week. For example, an original student poem in Session One of PIO is very much a translation of the original poem, Ciudad de cielo, a las cuatro by Maria Luisa Artecona de Thompson:

Fire and Water
Translated by the Author, Luana Cardenas, 4th grade
(who wrote the original in Spanish)

For a minute, I am fire
For an instant, I am water
For a second, I am no one’s
If they shut me down, if they turn me on
For a moment, I am air
For a moment, I am dirt
For a moment, I am no one’s
If they leave me, if they free me
For a second, I save in my memory
The forgotten dream, if it passes
Through the inferno while the sky
Waits for me impatient.

By Session 16, the students are translating the Sonnets of William Shakespeare and are writing wonderful sonnets of their own, such as this one:

Cold Breezy Nights
Stacy Hu, 4th grade

Cold breezy nights are abandoned
Trees are lazily blowing in the crisp breeze
Branches are breaking off of oaks
Tsunamis are swimming to shore
Nature is in the bearing cold world
Winds are forming up in the pretty sky
Suns are beaming bright rays on earth
Imagination is swirling everywhere in your mind
Ships are bringing goods to places you’ve never visited
People are in lost forests, like being in mazes
Plants are growing in the Autumn
Rivers are ending at endless waterfalls
Clouds are raining puddles
But last, nothing is doing nothing at all

Tomorrow’s tagline: Poems to tear out

[It's almost the end of National Poetry Month—last chance to get your copy of the e-book, PoetryTagTime, an e-book with 30 poems, all connected, by 30 poets, downloadable at Amazon for your Kindle or Kindle app for your computer, iPad or phone for only 99 cents. Grab it now.]

Image credit: Photo Source: Center for the Art of Translation Blog.

Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell and students © 2011. All rights reserved.

LBH at the Kerlan

Earlier this fall, I had the opportunity to return to my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, and spend a day at the fantastic Kerlan Collection (part of the Children’s Literature Research Collections, CLRC), one of the nation’s premiere special collections in the field of children’s literature. It houses thousands of manuscripts, galleys, art, correspondence and more surrounding the creation of at least a century’s worth of children’s books. I had spent many happy hours there as a graduate student and even done some research on the German writer and illustrator Wilhelm Busch, but I hadn’t been back in many years. What a treat it was to see their new building, complete with new spaces for display, study, and storage. The staff was lovely and helpful and I caught up with a Karen Nelson Hoyle, the marvelous curator of the Kerlan, too. (Thank you, all!)

My time was very limited, but I did want to dig a bit into the poetry-related holdings of the Kerlan. I chose to study one set of materials for one book—City Talk, an unusual poetry anthology by Lee Bennett Hopkins. I say “unusual,” because I thought I knew Hopkins’s oeuvre fairly well—the breadth and variety of his collections published since the early 1970s. I also knew that he had been a teacher, editor, and frequent speaker in schools and libraries. What I didn’t know was that this had resulted in his publishing a book of poetry written BY children, based on a huge writing project he conducted in several schools across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There were 6 folders of materials related to this book and I went through each item in each folder carefully examining what they all revealed about the creation of this book. Because I find the back-stories behind the creation of children’s books fascinating (how does the magician do that trick? I always marvel), I offer here a step-by-step examination of the available materials for one book. I think kids find this process interesting, too, and I believe it helps demystify the process a bit so they see that writers WORK to write the books kids love. Please join me in my research-walk through these snippets of how one book came to be.

The first file folder for City Talk (labeled “M.F. 459”) contains a 5 page handwritten draft on a yellow pad, possibly of a preface for City Talk and a list of colleagues for an acknowledgements page. There is also a 44 page typescript, with corrections noted on it. I learn that the book is entitled City Talk, and is made up of cinquains written by 40+ children living in and around urban areas, writing through “the city’s seasons.” Hopkins writes, “It’s neither children writing for themselves nor for their peers; it is children writing freely for us all.”

The second folder contains another typescript, also with corrections, and this one is 50 pages long.

A third folder contains yet another corrected typescript, now 43 pages long, and carbon copies (carbon!) and photocopies of 6 page of miscellaneous front matter. Here, we learn that the cinquain poems are created by fourth to sixth graders from Detroit, Hartford, New York’s Harlem and other areas in and around cities. We also learn the cinquain is a “newly popularized form, a simple five-line verse originated here in America by Adelaide Crapsie (sic).”

In his draft of “City Talk; An Introduction,” Hopkins writes, “In Carl Sandburg’s Cornhuskers, published in 1918, he wrote a poem about Adelaide Crapsey. One of the lines states, ‘I read your heart in a book.’ Small wonder that one of America’s greatest poets recognized the majesty of this woman. Born in Brooklyn Heights, New York, her short, tragic life produced a vehicle which lives on in the words and thoughts of youngsters who have helped to perpetuate her versatile and imaginative discovery.” This note is dated November 4, 1969.

Where are these “junior poets” now, I wonder? I note some of their names:
Rodney Starr, Lewis Jackson, Dougal Douglas, Renee Smalls, Deborah Dore, Miriam Gent, Leon Bowman, Hattie Lile from Evanston, Illinois, Sandra Johnson, Willie Robinson, Maria Levant, Nancy Burns, Janet Binnie, Teresa Jastrzebski, Joe Donahue, Gretchen Winters, Peachie Moore, Marilyn Kruth and the whole crew from Wildwood, Pennsylvania.

If they were about 10 years old in about 1970, they’d be about 50 now, right? Do they remember having a poem published in a collection compiled by Lee Bennett Hopkins way back when?

In the next folder, I find a 67p. version of the typed pages including photocopies of the interleaved illustrations which are black and white photographs of kids playing in the city. They have a surprisingly contemporary feel. Kids are kids when it comes to sliding down slides and swinging a bat.

Woo hoo! The next folder includes 9 pages of a galley and a 47-page “page proof.” Here it really starts to look like a finished book. We have a print out of the pages as if they were ready to be bound. It’s crisp white paper and bold black print. We also have a table of contents, a revised introduction, and a list of the children by name who are depicted in the photographs (although the art is not included among these pages). The introduction is far more elaborated and goes on to describe the cinquain form (along with the previous tribute to creator Adelaide Crapsey), “The cinquain is a delicately-compressed, five-line, unrhyming stanza containing twenty-two syllables broken into a 2-4-6-8-2 pattern. The sophisticated reader may note that some of the poems in this volume do not entirely conform to this formula. I have intentionally permitted children to over-step the structured boundaries and some formal grammatical rules in order to encourage them to write. They have!”

Here we also see the page of acknowledgements of the teachers who helped gather the poems. My favorite nugget appears at the end of this acknowledgement page:

“We regret that a cinquain by each child who wrote one for the project could not appear on the pages of this collection. Special thanks to these silent poets.”

Silent poets.

Lovely!

In the last folder, we have a 10 p. page proof photocopy, corrected, and 16 pages of a corrected dummy. There is also some correspondence (10 pages) with the publisher. There are careful notes (5 pages) and lists and correspondence regarding tracking down and accounting for the permissions for each of these young poets. Even in 1969 this was important.

A letter from the Juvenile department reads, “Dear Mr. Hopkins: Please find enclosed the dead matter for City Talk—manuscript, galleys, repros and blues—for your files.”

“Dead matter.”
Ouch. What a phrase. And yet here I am studying it some 40 years later!

There’s also the first copy of what really looks like a book, complete with illustrations and a cover, all in blue. It’s labeled “2nd blueprint” and now we would call that a blueline. It’s not yet bound and pages are out of order, but it feels like a book! Of course, after all this, I just had to find the finished book, which I bought (“used” on Amazon). It was published by Knopf in 1970 and has a smallish trim size (about 7 x 9) and the black and white photographs I noted appear throughout. It may seem dated at first glance, but the poems hold up, as do the photographs of kids at play or pensive—all reflecting timeless moments and thoughts that ring true now as they did then. As a teacher, I always liked to have a few books featuring children’s writing in my classroom library. I think it’s very empowering for kids to see that possibility. It’s also a great example of what you can produce yourself with kids, paper and a camera.

And here’s the finished book and a sampling of two of the kids’ cinquain poems from it:

Rain clouds
Think of the rain.
Rain looks blue and dark grey.
It splashes hard on sidewalks, and,
On me!

Robert Harding, Julesburg, Colorado

It’s fall.
Leaves falling
Breezes showing signs of
Winter. Things settle down for a
Long nap.

Myrna Campbell, New York, New York

FYI: Use the search function to see other postings about poetry by children. In previous entries, I’ve mentioned other collections by Naomi Nye, Betsy Franco, Sanford Lyne, and others.

* * * * *
And if you’re attending the upcoming convention of the National Council of Teachers of English in Philadelphia, please join us on Friday (Nov. 20) at session A.18, for a “Poetry Party,” celebrating Lee Bennett Hopkins receiving the 2009 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. It will be Friday morning, 9:30-10:45am in Convention Center Room 201A on Level 2. Lee will be speaking, of course, and we’ll also have a crew of poets toasting and roasting him, including Jane Yolen, Janet Wong, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, J. Patrick Lewis, Georgia Heard, and Walter Dean Myers, among others. It is not-to-be-missed. In addition, Lee will officially receive his poetry award at the Books for Children luncheon on Saturday. If you can’t make the conference, look for the “Profile” article about Lee in the September 2009 (v. 87, n.1) issue of Language Arts by Janet Wong and Rebecca Kai Dotlich.

Look for more on the Poetry Friday front at Gottabook hosted by Gregory K.

Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2009. All rights reserved.

Image credit: SV at the CLRC

Poetry Trailer Contest for Kids

Author and poet Susan Taylor Brown has a contest for kids to check out. She has teamed up with a local non-profit organization to offer a $1,000 scholarship for kids ages 13-18 who create a book trailer for her novel-in-verse, Hugging the Rock (Tricycle Press, 2006). You’ll find the details here.

Rules

• Create a video book trailer
• U.S resident only between 13 and 18 years of age (as of the close of the contest)
• 30 seconds to 2 minutes in length and in a standard video format (.wmv, .mov, .avi, .mp4)
• Your own creation, NO copyrighted material
• Include a brief description of the process you followed

The judging will be completed by Susan (the author), Laura Mancuso (Marketing & Publicity Manager, Tricycle Press, a division of Random House) and Naomi Bates (Northwest High School Library). Judging will be based on the following criteria.

• Creativity (50%)
• Consistency with the book (25%)
  
• Fit and finish (25%)

The deadline is Dec. 15, 2009, so get rolling… The award will be announced in January.

Hugging the Rock was an ALA Notable children’s book (2007) and is a powerful story of a young girl and her father coping with the mental illness and departure of their mother and wife. Like Sonya Sones’s verse novel Stop Pretending, What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy (HarperCollins, 1999), Brown doesn’t shy away from sharing difficult emotions in spare and gripping poems. Fellow blogger Jen Robinson wrote (at Jen Robinson's Book Page), “This book packs a lot into relatively few words. Susan Taylor Brown offers insights into life with a mentally ill parent, how fathers parent differently from mothers, how personally kids take any parental rejection, how 'sometimes dads are better moms than moms are,' and how, ultimately, people adapt to changing circumstances. Hugging the Rock is beautifully written, and I give it my highest recommendation."

I know that making book trailers is a HUGE trend right now, but I'm not aware of too many created for books of poetry, so I love that KIDS have this opportunity to dig into poetry and technology. I hope their entries will be posted and shared somewhere, so we can all enjoy them!

Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2009. All rights reserved.

Image credit: cleanreads.blogspot.com

Kid poetry and BOOK LINKS

Please allow me to plug my "Everyday Poetry" column in the May issue of Book Links. In this issue, I focus on celebrating poetry written by young people themselves in "Sharing the Poetry of Children and Teens" (pages 40-41). Here's an excerpt.

As the school year draws to a close, now is a good time to invite children to create or compile class or individual books that can become keepsakes for them to take home to remember the year. Poetry, in particular, can be a lovely form for expressing their growing up feelings.

Generally, my goal in sharing poetry with children is to focus on reading, performing, and discussing it, rather than on writing it; on the experience of poetry rather than the production of it. After all, everyone can enjoy poems, but not everyone will grow up to be a poet. Children shouldn’t be expected to write poetry until they’ve had some experience reading or listening to it, but many children will naturally experiment with writing poetry when they are immersed in reading and talking about it. Sharing published poetry written BY kids can be especially appealing because it inspires children to think of themselves as possible creators of poetry.

Poetry By Children
Several poets who have worked in schools, libraries, and with other youth projects have gathered anthologies of poetry written by children of all ages. Collections such as Salting the Ocean edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, vibrantly illustrated by Ashley Bryan, or Ten-Second Rain Showers and Soft Hay Will Catch You both edited by Sanford Lyne, show the range of thought and feeling that children can express in writing. Invite children to choose a favorite poem by an age-mate to read aloud, recopy and remember, or respond to.

Bring a camera to school to capture kids at work and play (you may already have photos of the year’s activities handy). Invite students to compose poems to accompany the photos and create a class book. For a wonderful example, look for teacher Ayana Lowe’s Come and Play; Children of Our World Having Fun. If you take digital photos, you can even “publish” simple books using commercial tools from photoprocessing sources (like Kinko’s or Snapfish.com).

Poetry by Teens
There are even more examples of published poetry by teen writers, including two volumes from the WritersCorps: Paint Me Like I Am and Tell the World and two other pocket-sized graphic poetry collections, Movin’: Teen Poets Take Voice compiled by Dave Johnson and Angst! Teen Verses from the Edge edited by Karen Tom, Matt Frost, and Kiki. Poet Betsy Franco has assembled several notable collections of poetry written by teens including Things I Have to Tell You (by girls) and You Hear Me? (by boys), plus the recent Falling Hard: 100 Love Poems by Teenagers, and Night is Gone, Day is Still Coming; Stories and Poems by American Indian Teens and Young Adults, compiled with Annette Piña Ochoa and Traci L. Gourdine-- all books full of unsentimental and authentic young voices.

I also write about poetry contests and about helping young people submit their original poems for possible publication. Be sure to help aspiring poets become familiar with the protocol for submitting manuscripts (style, format, etc.) and prepare them for the competitive process and for possible rejection. Outlets for their writing are also suggested. I also mention "Poetry Writing Resources" written specifically for young writers, including:

Inside Out: Children's Poets Discuss Their Work by JonArno Lawson and Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry; How to Write a Poem by Jack Prelutsky. Older students will enjoy Kathi Appelt’s Poems From Homeroom: A Writer's Place To Start or Ralph Fletcher’s Poetry Matters: Writing A Poem From The Inside Out.

As the school year ends, let’s share the words of children and teens—either in published works of young people’s writing or by creating homemade books to cherish or to add to the library for others to enjoy.

Once again, I'm thrilled that Book Links is featuring a previously unpublished poem to accompany the column. This month's poem features a fresh voice in Donna Marie Merritt. This poem challenges readers to step into a secret world and dream big. As a culminating activity for the school year, students can express their dreams in poems, writing individually or with a friend. Then compile them all into a time capsule to be opened at the end of the following year.

The Open Door
by Donna Marie Merritt

Truth sails across great spaces
Of invitations,
Offering images, which before,
Have only been mine in dreams…
The chance to be everywhere, anywhere, nowhere
At once.

Who else knows of this wonder?
Has it popped up like a mushroom,
Stirring the silent earth
In the quiet of the night?
Where does this enchantment begin?
Do its delights ever end?

I step through
The open door
As other seekers appear, then
Disappear along myriad, marvelous paths
Into that secret world of possibilities…
The library.

Image credits: http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklinks/index.cfm

Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2009. All rights reserved.

April in Review + Kid Poetry

It’s May 1! Woo hoo! I promised a book-review-a-day for National Poetry Month and I can’t believe I delivered! That was exhausting and rewarding. And if you’re looking for info on new poetry for kids, here’s a summary of the poetry books I reviewed last month (followed by a poem by a nine-year-old from Poland!). Of course, I'll keep reviewing as I get my grubby paws on more new poetry books, but in the meantime, here's April in review(s):

April 30, 2009— Wright, Danielle (Ed). 2008. My Village; Rhymes from Around the World. Wellington, NZ: Gecko Press.
April 29, 2009— Katz, Bobbi. 2009. More Pocket Poems. Ill. by Deborah Zemke. New York: Dutton.
April 28, 2009— Carter, James and Denton, Graham. 2009. Wild! Rhymes That Roar. Ill. by Jane Eccles. London: Macmillan.
April 27, 2009— Myers, Walter Dean. 2009. Amiri & Odette: A Love Story. Ill. by Javaka Steptoe. New York: Scholastic.
April 26, 2009— Salas, Laura Purdie. 2009. Stampede! Poems to Celebrate the Wild Side of School! Ill. by Steven Salerno. New York: Clarion, p. 4-5.
April 25, 2009— Luján, Jorge. 2008. Colors! Colores! Translated by John Oliver Simon and Rebecca Parfitt. Ill. by Piet Grobler. Toronto: Groundwood.
April 24, 2009— Schmidt, Amy. 2009. Loose Leashes. Ill. by Ron Schmidt. New York: Random House.
April 23, 2009-- Salinger, Michael. 2009. Well Defined; Vocabulary in Rhyme. Ill. by Sam Henderson. Honesdale, PA: Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press.
April 22, 2009-- Ruddell, Deborah. 2009. A Whiff of Pine, A Hint of Skunk. Ill. by Joan Rankin. New York: Simon & Schuster.
April 21, 2009-- Argueta, Jorge. 2009. Sopa de frijoles/ Bean Soup. Ill. by Rafael Yockteng. Toronto, ON: Groundwood.
April 20, 2009-- Shahan, Sherry. 2009. Fiesta!; A Celebration of Latino Festivals. Ill. by Paula Barragan. Atlanta, GA: August House.
April 19, 2009-- Hoberman, Mary Ann. 2009. Strawberry Hill. New York: Little, Brown. [Not-poetry by a poet]
April 18, 2009-- Mecum, Ryan. 2008. Zombie Haiku. Cincinnati, OH: How Books.
April 17, 2009-- Oelschlager, Vanita. 2009. Ivy in Bloom. Ill. by Kristin Blackwood. Akron, OH: Vanitabooks.
April 16, 2009-- Florian, Douglas. 2009. Dinothesaurus. New York: Simon & Schuster.
April 15, 2009-- Agee, Jon. 2009. Orangutan Tongs; Poems to Tangle Your Tongue. New York: Disney-Hyperion.
April 14, 2009-- Lewis, J. Patrick. 2009. Countdown to Summer: A Poem for Every Day of the School Year. Ill. by Ethan Long. New York: Little, Brown.
April 13, 2009-- Hopkins, Lee Bennett. (Comp.) 2009. Incredible Inventions. Ill. by Julia Sarcone-Roach. New York: HarperCollins.
April 12, 2009-- Greenfield, Eloise. 2009. Brothers and Sisters: Family Poems. Ill. by Jan Spivey Gilchrist. New York: Amistad/HarperCollins.
April 11, 2009-- Hughes, Langston. 2009. The Negro Speaks of Rivers. Ill. by E. B. Lewis. New York: Disney-Hyperion.
April 10, 2009-- Hughes, Langston. 2009. My People. Ill. by Charles R. Smith Jr. New York: Simon & Schuster.
April 9, 2009-- Katz, Alan. 2009. Going, Going, Gone!: And Other Silly Dilly Sports Songs. Ill. by David Catrow. New York: Simon & Schuster.
April 8, 2009-- Wilson, Karma. 2009. What's the Weather Inside? Ill. by Barry Blitt. New York: Simon & Schuster.
April 7, 2009-- Fehler, Gene. 2009. Change-up; Baseball Poems. Ill. by Donald Wu. New York: Clarion.
April 6, 2009-- Maddox, Marjorie. 2009. Rules of the Game. Ill. by John Sandford. Honesdale, PA: Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press.
April 5, 2009-- Smith, Hope Anita. 2009. Mother; Poems. New York: Henry Holt.
April 4, 2009-- Lewis, J. Patrick. 2009. The Underwear Salesman: And Other Jobs for Better or Verse. Ill. by Serge Bloch. New York: Simon & Schuster/Atheneum.
April 3, 2009-- Zimmer, Tracie Vaughn. 2009. Steady Hands: Poems About Work. New York: Clarion.
April 2, 2009-- Franco, Betsy. 2009. Curious Collection of Cats. Ill. by Michael Wertz. San Francisco, CA: Tricycle Press.
April 1, 2009-- Heard, Georgia. 2009. Falling Down the Page; A Book of List Poems. New York: Roaring Brook.

However, it’s not Poetry Friday without an actual poem, so allow me to share another nugget I gleaned from that amazing trip to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy in March. I met a woman named Jet Manrho (based in the Netherlands) whose life’s work-- Poem Express-- is traveling the world conducting workshops with kids to promote poetry appreciation, poetry writing, and creating posters in response to poetry. AMAZING! She regularly publishes a full color poster-size book of their work, featuring original poems by kids from around the world. Each page is a poem poster with an original poem written by a child along with the art she/he creates to go with the poem. Each poem appears below the art in four languages (Dutch, English, French, German). It’s a collection of real quality and ingenuity.

I have Volume 15 which includes 110 poem posters in fourteen languages from 29 countries. I’d like to highlight this somewhat snarky poem by a 9-year-old Polish boy. I love the attitude!

Al span ik me nog zo in,
toch kan ik voor geen goud
een gedicht verzinnen.

No matter who hard I tried,
even if you paid me,
I could never write
a poem.

J’ai beau essayer
meme pour tout l’or du monde
je n’arriverai jamais
a inventer un poeme.

Auch wenn ich mich noch so anstrenge,
fuer kein Geld der Welt kann ich mir
ein Gedicht ausdenken.

by Piotr Sochaczewski, age 9, Poland
(Here is Piotr with his poster and poem!)

Poem Parade 1992-2006; Poster Book Poems by Children. ISSN 0926-3985; ISBN 90-73657-64-4, p. 16.


There are more opportunities for kids to continue participating on the Web, as well as more information about this very ambitious project! I thought this might be a particularly fun choice for today since our Poetry Friday Host is Allegro, an 11 year old poet herself. Thanks for hosting, Allegro.

Image credits: poem-express

Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2009. All rights reserved.

Happy El Día de los Niños/El Día de los Libros

Today is El Día de los Niños/El Día de los Libros also known as Children's Day/Book Day. For the annual April 30th celebration, both the Reading Rockets and Colorin Colorado Web sites are offering suggestions for library and classroom activities. The Association for Library Service to Children also lists Día events around the country. As the national home of Día, one of the things ALSC does is to provide a database where people can enter their Día events and/or see what else is going on near them and anywhere in the nation. It's wonderful to see everything that's going on, and to see how this initiative, originally conceived by Pat Mora, with REFORMA as a founding partner, has caught on and grown in the past 12 years.

In addition, Pat Mora, the Grande Dame of Día has established her own blog now-- ShareBookJoy-- which is a wonderful resource on Día and so much more. Pat is a gem and a giant, a force to be reckoned with, and an author, poet and advocate with a gift for storytelling AND empowerment. Be sure to check out her Web site, too.

In honor of Día, I would like to mention a new poetry collection just published by Bloomsbury: Come and Play, Children of Our World Having Fun. The poems are written by children under the guidance of their teacher, Ayana Lowe, in response to photographs that are provided by Magnum Photos, the “most highly celebrated photographic collective in the world.” The images of children come from around the world and from over the last 50 years. Thumbnails, captions, and maps in the backmatter let the reader know a bit more about each photograph. And the poems reflect the clever word coining and fresh abruptness of children’s language. Here’s one example:

A Tight Squeeze
(Accompanying a photo of a crowded beach scene in Wonsan City, North Korea, 1982)

Wet and happy.
The beach is hot.
I’ve saved you a spot.

From: Lowe, Ayana. Ed. 2008. Come and Play; Children of Our World Having Fun. NY: Bloomsbury.

Individual poets are not named, which gives the reader the impression of a collective voice of childhood speaking. (Their energetic signatures cover the end pages!) The oversized format juxtaposes a poem in a large colorful font on a black background on the left with a full-page black and white or color photograph on the right. Very dramatic and accessible. And I love the opening page featuring this quote from Poet Laureate Rita Dove:

“I think all of us have moments,
particularly in our childhood,
where we come alive,
maybe for the first time.
And we go back to those
moments and think, ‘
This is when I became myself.’”

It begs for imitation—gathering photographs from family, magazines, or the Web to prompt children’s own writing, and then creating their own collective books of poetry and pictures.

Happy Día!

Picture credit: http://sharebookjoy.blogspot.com and Amazon.

A pair of poems for Mother’s Day

I love my mom, but I’ve always thought of Mother’s Day as holiday promoted by the greeting card industry. Even as a mom myself, I just don’t get this whole thing. It’s nice to acknowledge our moms, of course, but the holiday is so loaded with saccharine expressions that are just a bit cheesy IMO. That said, I wanted to share two poems that I find meaningful on the subject of parents and parenting. One, “Warmth” is written by a child and the other “Grown Children,” is by New York Poet Laureate, Sharon Olds. Together, they have us looking ahead and looking backward…

Warmth
By Richard Furst
Grade 10

I walked through the empty kitchen
to the door,
to leave the warmth of home
for the bitter-cold anxiety of
a Monday at school.
Ducking the old dogwood outside,
I heard a familiar call,
and turned to see my mother
waving me off to school,
sending me a small fire
to keep my heart a little warmer.

From Ten-Second Rainshowers: Poems by Young People compiled by Sanford Lyne. Simon & Schuster, 1996.

And pair with Sharon Olds’ poem about “Grown Children” which begins observing a baby toddling on the beach and ends with the lines:

Grown Children
by Sharon Olds

… And now our daughter
is asleep on the couch, not six pounds
thirteen ounces, but about my size,
her great, complex, delicate face
relaxed. And our son, last night, looking closely
at his sweetheart as they whispered for a moment, what a tender
listening look he had. We raised them
daily, I mean hourly—every minute
we were theirs, no hour went by we were not
raising them—carrying them, bearing them, lifting them
up, for the pleasure, and so they could see,
out, away from us.

From The Unswept Room. Knopf, 2002.

Picture credit: rocksinmydryer.typepad.com

Poetry BY Young People

In honor of Young People’s Poetry Week, I thought it might be appropriate to feature some poetry that is written BY children. In general, my goal in sharing poetry with children is to focus on reading, performing, and discussing it, rather than on writing it; on the experience of poetry rather than the production of it. However, many children naturally experiment with writing poetry, particularly when they are immersed in reading and talking about it. (But I continue to be frustrated by the converse: children expected to WRITE poetry, when they’ve had very little experience reading or listening to it.) Sharing poetry BY kids can be appealing because it touches adults with the voices and experiences of our youngest, and inspires children who begin to think of themselves as possible creators of poetry. Here’s one of my personal favorites, gathered and published by poet Sanford Lyne in Ten-Second Rainshowers:

Forever and a Day
By Heather Lachman
Grade 4

I want to go home.
The day is long.
It has been long ever since
I woke up.

From Lyne, Sandford, comp. 1996. Ten-Second Rainshowers: Poems by Young People. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Several poets who have worked in schools, libraries, and with other youth projects have gathered and edited collections of poetry written by children of all ages. Collections such as Salting the Ocean edited by Naomi Shihab Nye (Greenwillow, 2000) or Ten-Second Rain Showers (Simon & Schuster, 1996) and Soft Hay Will Catch You (Simon & Schuster, 2004) both edited by Sanford Lyne, and for young adults, Paint Me Like I Am: Teen Poems from WritersCorps by Bill Aguado (HarperTeen, 2003) and Things I Have to Tell You: Poems and Writing by Teenage Girls and You Hear Me? Poems and Writing by Teenage Boys (both Candlewick, 2001) collected by Betsy Franco are all beautiful books full of unsentimental and authentic young voices. And for a more humorous look at poetry writing, consider Australian author Gary Crew’s mock journal, Troy Thompson’s Excellent Peotry [sic] Book (Kane/Miller, 2003) which LOOKS like a collection of very personal poems in a child’s own handwriting (although it’s created by an adult). For children who aspire to be writers or who may find personal poetry writing a helpful release, these books are an invitation to see oneself as a writer, to see children as capable of poetic expression, too.

Picture credit: www.pierce.ctc.edu