Children's Poetry Blog Hop: On Haiku

When my friend (and fearless leader of Wednesday writers) Jackie Jules asked if I would participate in the Children's Poetry Blog Hop, I knew I had to say yes. What I didn't know was what I was going to say next. You know, on the subject of children's poetry. I'm supposed to ask (and answer) three questions in a Mortimer Minute. Here goes:

Formal or free verse? Formal. As a writer, I like the freedom of working within certain contraints, and the subversive pleasure of defying them.

A favorite form? Haiku. Three lines: one breath. I teach haiku as part of a program for families that uses observation, discussion, and poetry (or sketching, or sound) to explore works of art, and I encourage my families to think about haiku as an experience--capturing a moment--not an exercise in counting syllables. 5-7-5 doesn't work in English the way it does in Japanese; try short-long-short instead.

A collection of haiku for children? My favorite is Today and Today; haiku by master Kobayashi Issa, pictures by G. Brian Karas (Scholastic, 2007). Karas selected and arranged 18 of Issa's haiku to tell a story of four seasons--one ordinary, extraordinary year--in the life of a family. Our library shelves it with the picture book fiction rather than the poetry, actually. It's beautiful, understated but very sad.

That's all for the Mortimer Minute! And thank you, Jackie, for asking me to participate: as it turns out, I did have something to say about children's poetry. Maybe even more than a minute's worth! If you do, too, please consider participating in the Children's Poetry Blog Hop. Mortimer and I will thank you.

[Poetry Friday is at Jama's Alphabet Soup today. Thanks, Jama!]

The ballad of Long Lankin, for Poetry Friday

Debut author Lindsey Barraclough's YA novel Long Lankin was inspired by the eponymous old English ballad (Roud Folk Song Index 6) in which Long Lankin, aided and abetted by a nursemaid, murders a lady and her infant son--by pricking him all over with a pin (shiver):

"Where's the heir of this house?" said Long Lankin. / "He's asleep in his cradle," said the false nurse to him.
"We'll prick him, we'll prick him all over with a pin, / And that'll make my lady to come down to him."

The baby's cries bring his mother, and she dies in Long Lankin's arms.

Barraclough sets her retelling of the ballad in postwar England: Sisters Cora and Mimi are sent from London to stay with their great-aunt Ida in the coastal village of Bryers Guerdon, but Auntie Ida, stern and secretly terrified, doesn't want them there. Of course, Cora and Mimi disregard her warnings (Ida doesn't even want them in the great big house alone) and go straight to the forbidden church and graveyard. Don't they know they're in a gothic horror story? Sigh. Poor Mimi.

Moo, Moo, Brown Cow for Poetry Friday

Baa, Baa, Black Sheep is probably my favorite nursery rhyme--I sang both my children to sleep for years with Raffi's extended version, Cluck, Cluck Red Hen (Milly still likes to hear it at bedtime).  In Raffi's version, the singer asks a hen for eggs, a cow for milk, and a bee for honey. Here's the exchange with the cow:

Moo, moo, brown cow, have you milk for me?
Yes, sir, yes, sir, sweet as it can be.
Churn it into butter or make it into cheese.
Freeze it into ice cream or drink it if you please.

The little boy in Phyllis Gershator's new picture book Moo, Moo, Brown Cow (illustrated by Giselle Potter; Random House, 2011) does the same sort of thing (he also asks a gray goose for down, but otherwise the animals are the same); however, Gershator's narrative is more purposeful: the little boy is looking for a blanket for his bed, a pillow for his head, and a sweet and simple bedtime snack of bread and honey with a glass of milk.  Here's his exchange with the cow for comparison:

Moo, moo, brown cow, have you any milk?
Yes, sir, yes, sir, smooth as silk.
Does milk make me sleepy before I go to bed?
Yes, sir, yes, sir, the brown cow said.

It's also a little more difficult to sing (lines 3 and 4 of each stanza especially), but even I was able to manage it. The reward comes in the closing stanzas, when animals and boy alike go to bed ("in the hive... / in the barn... / in the coop... / in the shed").  Giselle Potter's final illustration shows him tucked in bed with his own collection of farm animals (there's even a bee mobile), dreaming of jumping over the moon.

Potter's palette could have been inspired by the classic colors of old-fashioned milk paint, which lends her work here a folksy farm feel. My favorite illustration is this one of the black sheep knitting the boy's blanket out of a ball of his or her own curly wool:

Bonus points for showing the sheep holding the needles correctly; how many times have you seen them pointing up in picture books?

Poetry Friday: My Uncle Emily and the Buccaneers of Buzz

"One day when we were in the garden, choosing flowers for the table, my Uncle Emily gave me a dead bee and a poem for my teacher."

I was reminded of this incident with the dead bee, as reimagined by Jane Yolen in My Uncle Emily (Philomel, 2009), while writing yesterday's post about The Humblebee Hunter.  The poem in question is Emily Dickinson's "The Bumblebee's Religion--".

There are a lot of bees in Dickinson, actually; but the poem that is important to this book is Yolen's favorite, and maybe yours: "Tell all the Truth."  The book itself is beautifully written in something like free verse, and illustrated with period-appropriate style in pen-and-ink and digital media by Nancy Carpenter.  And it pairs perfectly with The Humblebee Hunter, now that I think of it.  Even the covers match!

Valentine's Day in Xanadu

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

(Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

I've been reading about Marco Polo, Venice, the Silk Road, and the court of Kublai Khan in Alan Armstrong's middle grade novel Looking for Marco Polo (Random House, 2009).  Coleridge's poem isn't there, but I couldn't resist posting it in advance of Valentine's Day.

I first read the opening lines of Kubla Khan a long time ago, in another middle grade novel, Next Door to Xanadu by Doris Orgel (1969).  That book has nothing to do with thirteenth century explorers or emperors--it's about two ten-year-old girls who live in an apartment building in Brooklyn, actually--but I still remember the way the poem threaded itself throught the final chapters of the book, and I've always wondered what went on in that pleasure dome.  N.b. that is not the focus of my current research.

Happy Valentine's Day!

STBA Blog Tour: Margarita Engle, Tropical Secrets

 

Welcome to the 2010 Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour!  I'm honored to be hosting Margarita Engle, author of Tropical Secrets:  Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (Henry Holt, 2009), at bookstogether today.  Tropical Secrets is this year's STBA winner in the Teen Readers category.

Anamaria Anderson (AA):  Congratulations and welcome to bookstogether, Margarita!

Margarita Engle (ME):  Thank you.  I am so deeply honored by the Sydney Taylor Award, and I am so grateful for this opportunity to speak about Tropical Secrets. 

AA:  Tropical Secrets is such an evocative title.  Would you share some of the secrets to which it refers (without, of course, giving any of them away)?

ME:  I feel very close to this title.  It springs from my own sense of wonder about the story.  There is a feeling of discovery.  I am fascinated by the safe harbor Jewish refugees found in Cuba, and in other Latin American countries as well.  I am particularly intrigued by the Cuban teenagers who volunteered to teach Spanish to the refugees.

AA:  How did you go about the research for this story?

ME:  I found the factual details in an amazing scholarly study called Tropical Diaspora, by Robert M. Levine.  Without the nonfiction accounts in that reference, I could not have written Tropical Secrets.  I am astonished that the history of Holocaust refugees in Cuba, and in Latin America as a whole, is not more familiar. 

AA:  I agree, Margarita.  The fictional characters of Tropical Secrets—Daniel, Paloma, David, and el Gordo—bring these unfamiliar historical events to life for your readers.  When did your characters, and their personal stories, begin to reveal themselves to you?

ME:  The characters and plot of Tropical Secrets came to me in a huge wave.  It was overwhelming.  I could barely scribble fast enough to keep up with the flow of words.  It was as if this story had been waiting to be told, and was searching for a home.

My mother is Cuban, and was raised Catholic.  My father is the American son of Ukrainian-Jewish refugees.  Tropical Secrets unites the diverse branches of my ancestry.

AA:  I think it found the perfect home.  What would you like your readers to take home from Tropical Secrets?

ME:  I wrote Tropical Secrets because I admire the resilience of refugees, and the generosity of those who help them.  This is a facet of Tropical Secrets that transcends all borders and eras.  It is true of natural disasters as well as manmade ones.  I simply wanted to pay homage to the idea of safe harbors and the kindness of strangers.

AA:  That facet of Tropical Secrets resonates especially clearly right now, in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti; and it is always worth remembering.

Thank you so much, Margarita, for these insights into your work, and congratulations again.  I look forward to your forthcoming books (The Firefly Letters and Summer Birds:  The Butterflies of Maria Merian, both 2010) and wish you all the best.

And thank all of you for stopping by the STBA Blog Tour!  Please be sure to visit the other stops on the tour today and later this week; and of course I hope you'll visit me at bookstogether anytime.

Poetry on ice?

Literally, according to this reference in Louise Borden's The Greatest Skating Race: A World War II Story from the Netherlands (illustrated by Niki Daly; Margaret K. McElderry, 2004):

She could cut letters and words in the ice of the canal
with the blade of her skate,
like the long-ago Dutch poets.

Who were these Dutch poets?  Did they really cut poems in the ice?  Vondel and Bredero wrote poems about skating during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (known as Europe's Little Ice Age), and some of Vondel's poems are even short enough to skate (two words: U / Nu!).  The whole thing is probably apocryphal, but it's a lovely image nonetheless.

[The painting is by Hendrick Avercamp, A Scene on the Ice (1625).  You might recognize it from Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (actually, it belongs to the National Gallery, and you can skate there, too).]

Paint me a poem in reverse

I met Justine Rowden, author of Paint Me a Poem: Poems Inspired by Masterpieces of Art (Boyds Mills, 2005) at KidlitCon '09 (we had exchanged email before then, and she had kindly sent me a review copy of her book).  In Paint Me a Poem, Justine pairs each of thirteen paintings from the National Gallery of Art's collection with an original poem that offers just one new and unexpected way to look at it.

My favorite of Rowden's poems was inspired by Andre Derain's Flowers in a Vase, a still life I probably wouldn't have stopped to look at if I passed it in the Gallery.  Justine imagines two of the flowers (pink roses, also shown in a detail image) jostling one another for space in the vase.

The quality of the reproductions in Paint Me a Poem is excellent.  Unfortunately, as Justine informed me, the cover image of Cat and Kittens by an anonymous 19th century American artists was reversed!  The interior image is correct, and the book is being reprinted.  [Breaking news!  Laura at Author Amok reports that Paint Me a Poem has just been reprinted.]

What one detail of Cat and Kittens captures your imagination?  Poems welcomed but not required!

[Poetry Friday is at GottaBook today.  Thanks, Greg!]

Awful Ogre, Summer's Over

Awful Ogre and I are forced to admit that summer's over.  You can read all about Awful Ogre's summer in Awful Ogre Running Wild by Jack Prelutsky, with gloriously grotesque watercolor and pen and ink illustrations by Paul O. Zelinsky (Greenwillow, 2008).  Actually, Awful Ogre and our family did a lot of the same things:  painted pictures, went on picnics, attended concerts, visited grandparents.  There may have been a little running wild in there, too.

"Awful Ogre Reflects on the Summer"

Oh, it's been an awful summer,
A delightful awful summer,
Just the sort of awful summer
Awful Ogre does adore.
But at last, alas, it's ending,
Yes my awful summer's ending,
My delightful awful summer
Now is practically no more.
[continued]

Prelutsky and Zelinsky's Awful Ogre's Awful Day (Greenwillow, 2005) is just as awful as his summer was.  Which is to say, we loved it.

[Poetry Friday is at Wild Rose Reader today.  Thanks, Elaine!]

Poems in Your Pocketses

Tomorrow is the second national Poem in Your Pocket Day.  This year I'm choosing a riddle poem, thereby increasing the likelihood that it will actually be read aloud.  Most people are probably familiar with Bilbo and Golem's exchange of riddles in The Hobbit; Tolkien modeled these on the riddle poems in the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon Red Book of Exeter.  This one is my favorite of Tolkien's (also the easiest to solve):

A box without hinges, key, or lid
Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

You can answer it in the comments.  And tell me, what you have got in your pocketses?

Poetry Friday: On the Farm

From David Elliot's website, a poem written for On the Farm (illustrated by Holly Meade; Candlewick, 2008) that didn't make it into print:

The Robin
sings from her branch
but wants to roar--
small cousin of Tyrannosaur.

Of the 13 poems that did make the cut, The Bull and The Bees (also quoted in the Horn Book review) are my favorites, but all of them are witty and well-observed.  I also like the old-fashioned farmyard feel of Holly Meade's woodcut-and-watercolor illustrations, their spaciousness and scale.  Everything works together in this book--the poems, the illustrations, the design (large format, large font); it seems perfect for a preschool storytime.  We liked it at home, too.  A Cybils finalist in the Poetry category.

[For local folks:  Kidwell Farm at Frying Pan Farm Park in Herndon, VA is a 1930s-era working dairy farm.  Their spring birthing schedule is already up!]

Poetry Friday: Nevermore!

In honor of the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's birth (this Monday, January 19); the opening lines of "The Raven:"

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door--
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--
Only this and nothing more."

[Read the rest--you know you want to--at poets.org)

I can't read Poe's "Raven" without being reminded of Mortimer.  He's Arabel's Raven (Joan Aiken; illustrated by Quentin Blake).  Another childhood favorite with several sequels I never knew existed before writing this post.  Nevermore!

Poetry Friday: Father's Fox's Christmas Rhymes

Here am I, old Father Fox
With sweets in my pocket and holes in my socks
Bringing a basket brimful of cheer
A toy for each day until Christmas is here

We're fond of foxes here at bookstogether.  Our favorite foxes are sisters Clyde and Wendy Watsons's; their Father Fox's Pennyrhymes was a National Book Award finalist in 1971.  This collection of 18 original Christmas rhymes was published over thirty years later (FSG, 2003); we like it even better.  The rhymes (by Clyde) are both crisp and cozy; the illustrations (by Wendy) reward lots of looking.

The Christmas rhymes can stand alone, although taken together (as we read them), they tell a story.  I chose this one to share because it describes so well the atmosphere in our house (and the foxes') during the days before Christmas.

Secret things in
Secret places
Whispered words
And knowing faces

Red glass beads
In the cracks of the floor
A whiff of paint
From behind a door

Paper rustles
Scissors snip
A telltale wink
And a finger to the lip

[Ssh!  This year I'm making the kids stuffed foxes of rust-colored wool felt, wearing patched white linen nightclothes like the ones the Fox family wears.  What are you making?]

[Poetry Friday Roundup is at poet Elaine Magliaro's blog Wild Rose Reader.  Thanks, Elaine!]

Poetry Friday: "In an Artist's Studio"

Christina Rossetti's sonnet makes the perfect epigraph to Julie Hearn's YA novel Ivy (Ginee Seo/Atheneum, 2008), about a laudanum-addicted artist's model in Victorian England:

One face looks out from all his canvasses,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness,
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,
A saint, an angel; -- every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light.

Hearn chooses to quote only these eleven lines, which I found somewhat disconcerting but which makes sense in the context of her novel.  Here is the final tercet; it doesn't apply to Ivy (yet):

Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

[This poem is in the public domain.]

I liked Ivy, especially inasmuch as it reminded me of another modern Dickensian novel, Sarah Waters's Fingersmith.  That one's definitely for the grownups.  Don't miss it.

And speaking of Dickens:  I haven't read any (gasp!).  Well, that's not strictly true:  I've read A Christmas Carol and Molly and the Magic Wishbone (retold and illustrated by Barbara McClintock; FSG, 2001).  Where should I start?

Poetry Friday: The Farmer's Bride

I love narrative poetry for children, like "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" (Eugene Field) and "The Owl and the Pussycat" (Edward Lear).  Also for grownups:  "The Highwayman" (Alfred Noyes; thank you, Charlotte) and "The Farmer's Bride" (Charlotte Mew).  The latter was the Poem of the Week on the Guardian Books blog this week (thank you, Carol Rumens); like "The Highwayman," it is a dark and lovely love poem.

The Farmer's Bride

Three summers since I chose a maid,
Too young maybe - but more's to do
At harvest-time than bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of a winter's day.
Her smile went out, and t'wasn't a woman -
More like a little frightened fay.
One night, in the Fall, she runned away.

"Out 'mong the sheep, her be," they said,
'Should properly have been abed;
But sure enough she wasn't there
Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before our lanterns. To Church-Town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last
And turned the key upon her, fast.

[Read the rest here.]

[The Poetry Friday round-up is at Wild Rose Reader this week.  Thank you, Elaine!]

Poetry Friday: Los zapaticos de rosa

The poem in my pocket yesterday was a childhood favorite: "Los zapaticos de rosa" by Cuban poet Jose Martí (picture book edition illustrated by Lulu Delacre; Lectorum, 1997). I chose it in honor of my mother, whose birthday was yesterday, too. When I was little I used to make her recite it to me every night before bed. She knows it by heart; the way, I suspect, many Cubans (and Cuban-Americans) do. These are the opening lines:

Hay sol bueno y mar de espuma
Y arena fina, y Pilar
Quiere salir a estrenar
Su sombrerito de pluma.

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Mami!

[This week's Poetry Friday roundup is at The Well-Read Child (which also happens to be one of my favorite kidlit blogs).]

Poem in Your Pocket Day

Tomorrow is the first national Poem in Your Pocket Day (New York City has been celebrating it since 2002).  I love this idea in theory, and will put a poem (TDB) in my pocket before I take the kids the school in the morning, but will I read it to anyone?  Probably not.  Wait--the kids!  I'll read it to them, and send them off with poems in their pockets, too (maybe Milly could memorize a short one).

If you're looking for a poem for your pocket, check out these pocket-sized Poem PDFs, some poems about pockets (love this idea, too), or just browse poets.org.  It is National Poetry Month, you know.

Poetry Friday: Behind the Museum Door

I'm a museum person:  I'll look at just about anything if it's behind glass and has a little plaque.  Fortunately for me (and for the kids, who also get to go there on field trips), we live within frequent visiting distance of the Smithsonian Institution and its complex of wonderful--and free--museums.  The 14 poems in Behind the Museum Door: Poems to Celebrate the Wonders of Museums, selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins and illustrated by Stacey Dressen-McQueen (Abrams, 2007), are framed by a school visit to a museum whose exhibits range from mummies to moccasins, fine art to fossils.  My favorite (poem, if not exhibit) is Alice Schertle's "O Trilobite."  Against a dark blue background teeming with the little critters, these are the opening lines:

O trilobite, there are a few,
here in the Fossil Room, of you.
Once billions strong, you ruled the sea,
a Cambrian Age majority.

In print, the left margin of the poem's lines forms a gentle convex curve, like the shape of a trilobite's shell.

I love Stacey Dressen-McQueen's rich and expressive artwork, made with acrylic paint, oil pastel, and colored pencils.  The multicultural group of children she's painted here is clearly delighted with their trip to museum.  I would be, too.

Poetry Friday: Bronzeville Boys and Girls

The 34 concise poems in this collection, Bronzeville Boys and Girls by Gwendolyn Brooks, illustrated by Faith Ringgold (Amistad, 2007) were first published in 1956.  They are just as fresh and appealing today; maybe even more so in this newly illustrated edition by Ringgold, whose paintings of the neighborhood houses and children are a perfect match for Brooks's poems [compare the cover of the original edition below].  I love that each poem has a name (Keziah, Nora, Tommy):  the name of the child it speaks for or about.  Ringgold, in "About Bronzeville Boys and Girls," says "[Brooks] reminded us that whether we live in the Bronzeville section of Chicago or any other neighborhood, childhood is universal in its richness of emotions and new experiences.  We are all Bronzeville boys and girls."  I think she's right:  at least I recognized myself (child and adult) in more than one of these poems.

From "Eunice in the evening:"

What is so nice in the dining room
Is--Everybody's There!
Daddy on the long settee--
A child in every chair--
Mama pouring cocoa in
The little cups of blue.
(And each of us has leave to take
A ginger cookie, too.)

Highly recommended. 

[The original cover art by Ronni Solbert.]

Poetry Friday: From the Gargoyle's Den

We spent last Saturday morning at the Gargoyle's Den, a workshop for families held every week from 10-2 in the crypt classroom of the Washington National Cathedral.  Lots of projects:  Leo and Milly loved it.  The classroom has a nice collection of cathedral-themed picture books, too.  This poem is from A Gargoyle on the Roof by children's poet laureate Jack Prelutsky; pictures by Peter Sis , whose distinguished work as an author and illustrator I admire (Greenwillow, 1999).

Mother Gargoyle's Lullaby

The moon and stars have vanished,
The long dark night is through,
Another day is dawning,
The sky is clear and blue.
The morning sun is rising,
It's climbing overhead.
My precious baby gargoyles
Should snuggle into bed.  [continues]

Other picture books about gargoyles:

god bless the gargoyles by dav pilkey (Voyager, 1999).  Look at this book for the gorgeous paintings (made with acrylics, watercolors, and India inks).  One was inspired by Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

Night of the Gargoyles by Eve Bunting; illustrated by David Wiesner (Clarion, 1994).  Gargoyles on a museum building come to life at night in Wiesner's black-and-white charcoal drawings.