Rhyme Time with Jane Yolen and J. Patrick Lewis

April is Poetry Month! Two renowned authors, Jane Yolen and J. Patrick Lewis (current Children's Poet Laureate), teamed up to celebrate poetry by interviewing each other about their experiences as poets. Even better, they've done it in rhyme...

Jane Yolen:
So you say you're a poet,
So how do we know it?
Do you wear special clothes when you rhyme?
So, like how do you show it?
Do you go with the flow? It
can't mean that you rhyme all the time.

J. Patrick Lewis:
I rhyme for a nickle, I rhyme for a dime,
A penny, a quarter--it's strange.
I rhyme when I go to the grocery store.
I rhyme when I'm looking for change.

But I won't if I don't really feel like rhyming.
Sometimes words like playing around
On the horn in my mind or the drum on the page.
I sit back enjoying the . . . noise.

Jane:
As for me, I've been rhyming before I could talk,
with a goo . . . and a gaa . . . and a waa.
I rhymed for my daddy, my uncles and aunts,
and especially rhymed for my Ma.

I began with real verse in rhymed couplets for school
when I was in first grade, I'm told.
(Though I must admit that I'm growing a bit,
Getting better as I have grown old.)

I did a long poem, all in rhyme, at thirteen,
an assignment about New York State.
A great rhyme for Otis, who made elevators,
and I did not turn it in late.

I won a Scholastic award for my verse
and the poetry prizes in college.
I sold my first poem to a real publication
before I'd amassed enough knowledge.

So--over to Pat, catch us up with your verse.
Do you think you're now better or now getting worse?
(To keep rhyming this way can be seen as a curse
Or a-musing.)

Pat:
How can you write sonnets or epics if, Lordie,
You don't meet Ms. Prosody till you turn forty?!
Where was she hiding? My Pied Piper teacher
In third grade? In eighth grade? Dark mystical creature
To juggle me the noun and swivel me the verb,
To give me a special hat, Do Not Disturb:
The Boy in the Corner May Turn Out To Be
A Man of Outlandish Whimsicality.

Nowhere, I tell you, my wee muse had flown,
So I had to stumble ahead on my own.
My ear is improving, I'm glad to report.
I'm learning by doing this indoor sport.
Who knows? If I practice both day and night,
By flashlight and candle, I may get it right.

Both:
So the word from the experts, is just keep on moving.
The more that you do it, the more you're improving.
And whether you've rhymed from your childhood or dotage,
If you work at your poems, then you're sure to get quot-age.







Stay tuned for the upcoming release of Jane and Pat's next poetry collaboration, Last Laughs: Animal Epitaphs, due out July 2012.

Discovering Your Inner Tiger

Where do you get your ideas from? People ask me that question a lot, and sometimes I hear a tiny wisp of frustration in their voices, as if maybe they think that there is some sort of secret, magic warehouse crammed with ideas, and if only I would reveal its location, then – voila – they could become the next J.K. Rowling.

I love how Madeleine L’Engle dispelled such folly when a little girl posed this same question to her. She bent down and gazed into the little girl’s face, answering, “I get my ideas from the very same place that you do.” In other words, there is no magic key to unlocking the mystery of creativity. Perhaps E.B. White sums it up best, “All I want to say in books, all I ever wanted to say is, I love the world.” Inspiration, I believe, comes from all that we love in this world - and that can be an infinite fountain. But I find it helpful for children if I narrow it down to what I call:

My Five P’s of Inspiration
1. Poetry (and I use the term loosely to include any words that stir my soul, be they in poem, story, song, or even a snippet of a conversation)
2. Pictures (could be an actual painting, photograph, or just a visual image that has taken root in my heart)
3. Places
4. People
5. Passions

A few thoughts then on each of these as they relate to my picture book, Raj the Bookstore Tiger.

Poetry

As a little girl, growing up in Scotland, I had to learn volumes of poems by heart. Like all Scottish schoolchildren, I could recite my poems as well as I could chant my tables. We never viewed such learning as a tedious task, probably because we were the product of a culture that honored the beauty of the spoken and written word. When I first came to America, I was amazed at how much emphasis everyone placed on food – the supermarkets had a whole aisle devoted to cereal! The advertisements touted a different diet every month it seemed, and always someone you met was counting calories or carbs. But yet, I never saw the same emphasis on what we feed our hearts and souls –and that puzzled me, for what better way to feed our souls than with truth and beauty –the very “stuff” of POEMS (and great stories)?

As I grew older, I came to realize just how comforting it was to have that little snippet of a story or poem tucked away in my heart to lean on in troubled times or dark days, such as “All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” (Julian of Norwich) And when my plans are turned head over heel, what better words to recall than those of our very own Scottish bard, Rabbie Burns, “the best laid plans o’ mice and men gang aft aglae.” In Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt described how he first fell in love with poetry. As he lay sick in the hospital, the girl in the typhoid ward next to him recited “The Highwayman” verse by verse, day by day. But when she died before finishing the whole poem, Frank was grief-stricken – not at her untimely and tragic death, but rather at having had his poem so suddenly snatched from him. Some might view this as rather cold hearted and callous of McCourt, but he already knew death well, for his poverty-stricken life so far had been riddled with it. However, this was his first encounter with a poem, and so he moved toward its grace and light and life as surely as a moth seeks the flame. As Rumi writes:

“Sometimes you hear a voice through
The door calling you, as fish out of
Water hear the waves or a hunting
Falcon hears the drum’s come back.
This turning toward what you deeply love
Saves you.”

Not surprisingly then, when I first came upon these words of William Carlos Williams, many years ago, “You cannot get the news from poems (and I would also add, picture books or stories), but men die every day from lack of what lies therein,” I knew I had the seed of a story. For many years these words simmered in my soul, until they flourished into Raj the Bookstore Tiger – the story of a little marmalade cat who is “saved” by William Blake’s poem, “The Tyger.”

Pictures

As soon as I saw this picture on a greeting card, I knew I had a story. I just wasn’t sure what it would be, and of course it finally morphed into a story about a little cat who sees himself, not as a lion, but as a tiger. It is still the same basic premise: are we able to see our inner potential when we look in a mirror? Can we see our inner tiger? Can we see our best selves? Who are we? We are more than flesh and bones, we are lions and tigers, kings and queens, we are bright shining stars – at our best, we are all of these.

1996 Alan Wnuk, Sausalito, CA, Portal Publications Ltd. “Roaring Reflections”

Places

I did a lot of editing on this story with my wonderful editor Randi Rivers, and along the way, I had Felicity Fotheringham (Raj’s owner) invite a guest author, Sanjiv Patel, to show the children about his native land, India. The first country I ever visited outside of the U.K. was India, and its cornucopia of sights and sounds and smells remain etched in my mind and heart to this day. Funnily enough, the month that Raj was released, off I went to India again, to visit my daughter who was working there. She even took us to a little Indian school, where I read them Raj the Bookstore Tiger.



People

Jane Yolen maintains that “Adult books maintain lives and children’s books change lives.” The people who inspired me to write Raj – a story about how words can transform us - are really all the writers from my childhood whose words have transformed me in some way or another.

But one in particular outshines all the others. When my uncle first gave me The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, I spurned it immediately on account of that pesky word –wardrobe. As an ardent lover of fairy tales, I simply could not accept the notion that something as mundane and perfunctory as a piece of furniture had any business being in a book about a lion and a witch. I wanted wonder. I craved magic. I needed mystery. And as far as I was concerned, all of these things were quite separate from the world of ordinary, everyday objects.

Of course, when I finally succumbed to opening the first page, I fell in love with Narnia, with those haunting images of a faun standing in snow beneath a lamppost, of Lucy chatting with Mr. Tumnus by the fireside, and of Edmund bundled up on a sled beside the Witch, greedily sipping his ill-gotten drink. I felt Lucy’s hurt and frustration when her siblings refused to believe her, I blushed for shame at Edmund’s treachery, (to this day, I associate the act of betrayal with the sickly cloying taste of Turkish Delight), I shed hot stinging tears to see dear Aslan lying bound and helpless, and in the end, I knew the triumph of winning the battle.

Jane Yolen says that, “The writer lights many candles in a good fantasy novel. The shadows they cast in a child’s soul will last for the rest of his life.” Indeed my beloved Narnia still casts its shadows on my soul. Thanks to Mr. Lewis, I see that magic and mystery merge with the mundane and the ordinary – they throb beneath all the layers of life. And I realize that we need the concrete, every day objects, be they wardrobes or railway platforms, as bridges to the Beyond. Indeed, we should never try to separate them, for as L’Engle says, “there is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred.”

Many, many other writers too have touched my heart deeply: L’Engle, Steig, McCourt, E. B. White, Dostoevsky, Thomas Harding, to name but a few. All of them made me love more. They showed me some glimmer of hope, some glimpse of beauty simmering beneath the sometimes sad surfaces of our lives.

Passions

I once read somewhere that the difference between an addiction and a passion is that while our addictions diminish us, our passions enlarge us. My passion, of course, is stories – writing them, reading them, listening to them, and telling them. At the age of twelve, when I had to babysit a three year old, I discovered the power of storytelling. Being at a loss for how to deal with such a small child, I decided to tell her a fairy tale (I knew most of them) in my own words. It worked. She was spellbound, and so my apprenticeship as a storyteller had begun.

Ever since, I have been telling stories and reading stories to anyone who will listen. When I came to America, I began to read books on tape for the blind and I read aloud fairy tales and folktales from around the world at an inner city school in Denver. Seventeen years later, I now see the truth of what that wonderful storyteller John Shea said, “One tells a story not to educate or indoctrinate, but rather to enchant the reader or the listener into the world of the story, so that when they emerge, they do so with an enhanced view of the possibility of their lives.”

One vivid example of this: Some years ago, I read Aesop’s Lion and Mouse to a 3rd grade class at this inner city school. All year long there had been one child, the tiniest and most timid in the class (mouse-like), who had sat still and silent–never did she utter a sound. On this particular day after I asked the class, “I wonder what will you remember about this story? What will you keep in your hearts,” this little girl suddenly perked up, she knelt on her chair, jutted out her chin, and proclaimed in a loud, proud voice, “Small people can do great things.” Tears sprang to my eyes as I witnessed HOPE brimming from that child’s soul. What a tribute to the power of story – the words of Aesop slicing through space and time into the heart of a little girl at an inner city school – words that made her find her TIGER! Words that helped her burn bright like Raj.

And so that brings me to my favorite part of Raj the Bookstore Tiger –

Felicity is reading aloud to Raj. She is feeding him words that will save him – words of encouragement. I love to tell children that encouragement, comes from the French word, la coeur, meaning heart, so of course when we encourage someone, we are feeding hearts and souls.

This is also my favorite illustration in the book because of the starry sky outside. It reminds me of my favorite painting by Van Gogh, Starry Night.

When I came to Colorado from my native Scotland, I found myself missing the sea a lot. I missed the salty tang of it and the foamy white crest of the waves. But here in Colorado, the skies seem vast and endless and at night, they are studded with so many stars, that it always reminds me of Van Gogh’s painting. There is also a beautiful line from a Hopkins poem that I like to match to Van Gogh’s painting -

What a lovely description of the stars. As I gaze up at the starry skies of Colorado now, I like to remember all the “firefolk” in my life – those dear writers like L’Engle and Steig and McCourt and countless others, whose words still “burn bright” for me.

Posted by Kathleen T. Pelley, author of Raj the Bookstore Tiger.

A Poet Makes A Laughing Sound

In honor of National Poetry Month I would like to write a bit about how my poems come to be. I have always loved words, and I have written poetry since I was fairly young. I remember writing poems in fourth grade, probably my first conscious attempt to be a writer. I think they were about horses.

Here is a poem I wrote in high school that got published in our literary magazine:

Well

Deep, dark, damp, and dank
Smooth stone on smooth stone;
Hollow cylinder, receptacle of Earth's tears.
Hairy beard so sopped with ooze
Dripping, dripping, dripping, dropped.
Ringed rings rolling, rolling
Strike the mossy walls with silence.
Deep, dark, forgotten, lost;
Stones of earth laid by man
Worn and worn and worn again,
Cold, rejected, forgotten, hidden
at the base of trees' naked roots.
Home of rat, spider, and dead mole.
Dripping drops of liquid rock
Dark, forgotten cylinder, receptacle of Earth's tears.

Reading this poem now it reminds me of how much I like the feel, the taste of words. I must have just discovered alliteration as a poetic device. I wrote with rhythm, and I was thinking in images. My poems today are not a whole lot different--I look for rhythm. I taste the words and feel the flow of the words physically as I write them. I think about images.

The poem "The Robin Makes A Laughing Sound" grew out of a walk. I was walking home on a March evening, listening to the bird sounds. A funny noise, soft, yet sudden, made me stop. It reminded me of my neighbor's guinea pigs, the sort of noise they make. I looked around and spotted a robin. I began to think about how to describe the sound the robin had made. This was not its song. This was a kind of call, perhaps a warning. The best I could come up with was a laughing sound. "The robin makes a laughing sound. " Those words fit with the rhythm of my walking. By the time I walked all the way home I had four lines, the beginnning of a poem:

The robin makes a laughing sound
Reminding me to look around
At buds on twig tips swelling big
And swelling worms which robins dig.

The words came naturally as I thought about what I had just experienced. I wrote them down in my journal.

A few days later I came back to the idea. More lines came to me as I revised my first thoughts:

The robin makes a laughing sound
It makes me stop and look around
To see just what the robin sees--
Swelling buds on twigs of trees--
A nice high branch on which to rest
A nice safe ledge to hold her nest.
The robin makes a laughing sound.
I always stop. Look around!

a little kitten says meow
the robin isn't laughing now.

Sparrows in a privet hedge--

Seagulls like dumps and garbage and hang out at the mall

About here I realized I was getting sidetracked, but I had found a rhythm I liked. So I abandoned the last four lines that digress from the idea of the robin. My poem was almost complete. I had circled the two uses of the word "nice" in my journal. Nice is a pretty generic word unless you are trying to make a point about the word nice. What kind of branch would a robin like? What kind of ledge? Also, the line "Swelling buds on twigs of trees" seemed difficult to say out loud.

Here is how the poem looked when I submitted my manuscript:

The Robin Makes a Laughing Sound

The robin makes a laughing sound.
It makes me stop and look around
To see just what the robin sees--
Fresh new leaves on twigs of trees--
A strong high branch on which to rest--
A safe, dry ledge to hold her nest.
The robin makes a laughing sound.
I always stop. Look around!

My poem was almost complete--there were just a few editorial changes: the punctuation was changed to make the poem easier to read. And the last line shifted slightly. Instead of ordering my reader to look around, I kept the line within my own experience--"I stop. I always look around."

The Robin Makes a Laughing Sound

The robin makes a laughing sound.
It makes me stop and look around
to see just what the robin sees--
fresh new leaves on twigs of trees,
a strong, high branch on which to rest,
a safe, dry ledge to hold its nest.
The robin makes a laughing sound.
I stop. I always look around.

"The Robin Makes A Laughing Sound" took only two drafts to reach its essential shape. Other poems were harder to get at.

I liked the line and the idea of seagulls hanging out at dumps and malls. I live in the Midwest, near Lake Michigan, but 1,000 miles from the ocean. Yet I see gulls all year round. I see them most often when I drive down North Avenue, past mall after mall. The gulls are everywhere, perching on street lights, soaring over the parking lots. Why are they here? I began to think about my experience with gulls. Gulls are hard to identify so I used the not quite proper term "seagulls" which encompasses many different species. I wanted to emphasize how out of context the gulls seemed. This was one of my early drafts:

Seagulls

Seagulls like dumps and garbage.
They hang out a the mall.
There is no ocean here for a thousand miles.
But there are lakes an rivers that run to the sea.
And garbage and dumps and malls.

Seagulls make loud noises--
They're not shy. They are the teenagers of birds--
Showing off, making noise,
Traveling in packs. But always competing.
Just like the boys in junior high who hang out at the mall.

One reader suggested that I concentrate on the secon stanza and develop the idea of seagulls as the teenagers of birds. Although I like the idea of gulls living so far away from oceans, I felt it was a good suggetion for bringing some unity to the poem. Here is the version that I submitted in my manuscript:

Seagulls

Seagulls are the teenagers of birds.
They hang out at he mall,
Scrounging for French fires and scraps of burgers.
They laugh. They swoop. They're not shy.
They travel in packs, squawking, playing at tug of war over crumbs,
Just like the boys from middle school,
Who hang out at the mall.

I like the poem and I really liked the comparison of seagulls to kids, but I felt the poem was too literal, too direct, lacked style. I continued to work on it as the book went into production. My "ah-ha" moment was when I realized that I did not need to tell the reader that seagulls are the teenagers of birds--the poem shows that comparison through it's actions. So I dropped the first line and opened with the second. I played with the order of the lines and images until I had simplified the poem. My editor suggested that all the verbs used should be able to apply equally to kids and birds, so "swoop" was out. "Strut" replaced it. The final suggestion, which I am still second-guessing, was to eliminate the last line. It has a repetitive, plaintive note that I like and that my editor and my writer's group felt was unnecessary and did not contribute to the poem. I still miss it.

Seagulls

Seagulls hang out at the mall.
They laugh. They squawk. They strut.
They're not shy. They travel in packs,
fighting over french fries
and scraps of burgers--
just like the kids from middle school.

What do you think? Should this poem end with the lines "just like the kids from middle school/who hang out at the mall."?

Posted by Sallie Wolf, author/illustrator of The Robin Makes a Laughing Sound.

The Recipe for an Ocean Soup

Once a park ranger, always a park ranger. Fresh out of college, I worked as a National Park Service ranger. I loved "teaching" or interpreting natural history to park visitors.

One August almost ten years ago, our Vermont family piled into our beat-up Toyota Previa van and drove the six hours to the coast of Maine. We landed in a tiny coastal harbor in a village called Blue Hill. The rental cottage overlooked a narrow tidal inlet. We would be there for the week. E.B. White, the author of many books including Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and Strunk and White's Elements of Style, lived in Brooklin, Maine, just up the road.

The tide pools at the edge of this little Maine cape would provide the inspiration for one of my children's books many years later. A half-mile section of tide pools spanned our front yard, less than 100 feet from the deck of the rental house. At low tide, mid tide, and high tide, I would go exploring. I'm a Vermonter. We have no ocean. So this was like Disneyland for a naturalist.

I'd often take our two daughters, Hayley, 12, and Devon, 10, to investigate the pools. We'd creep over the rocks and peer into the still water. The life in the quiet, salty pools fired my imagination. It was like looking into someone's living room. Everyone was home: anemones, barnacles, starfish (now called sea stars), crabs, sculpins, sea urchins. For five days I watched their comings and goings, prying into their private lives. I scribbled notes. I took photographs. I stayed long after the girls got bored. I'd studied tide pool ecology in a Field Biology course in college a million years ago, so this felt like meeting up with old friends.

As a writer, you have to be ready for inspiration when it shows its face. We returned to Vermont, shook the sand out of our sneakers, and stored our beach gear in the barn. And then every morning for the next two weeks I woke at five, went to my desk, and wrote poems about tide pool creatures. I browsed field guides. I stared at the shells we'd collected. Sniffed the salty carcass of a sea fan. And with the promise to myself that I would keep B.I.C (Butt In Chair) until I had written something, I began to hear the voices of the tide pool inhabitants.

I wanted Ocean Soup to work on two levels: poems that were entertaining and educational, and solid factual information that would enlighten and expand awareness about a beautiful and threatened habitat. Besides a glossary and further resources to explore, I wrote brief factoids about each critter.

I don't know exactly how and when Ocean Soup became poems rather than straight nonfiction text, but the writing emerged as poems right from the start. And I knew that they had to be funny. I wanted the creatures to speak for themselves. A starfish with attitude. A sea urchin proud of its spines. A blue mussel tired of being pushed around. I envisioned the sculpin first as Fagin in Oliver! and I just knew that Hairy Doris, a sea slug, was Mrs. Doubtfire.

Shortly after completing the book, I began "performing" some of the Ocean Soup poems in conferences around the country. They were so well received, I thought there might be an opportunity to take it further. During a conversation with my savvy and tech-loving nephew, an idea was born to videotape me performing the poems in an actual tide pool. So on a warm weekend in late August, we drove three hours to Odiorne Point in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.


The filming of the Ocean Soup videos was a total blast. My wife, Heather, held the cue cards and boom microphone and my nephew, Sasha, filmed the action with an HD digital camera. I dressed as a pirate, and English school boy, a well-endowed hussy, a nightclub performer. I poked around thrift shops and found a dapper white and blue seersucker jacket. We filmed in morning and late afternoon light. The staff at Seacoast Science Center were a great help suggesting locations to shoot and even providing us with some "tame" tide pool critters.

I feel like this book, these poems, have taken on a life almost all their own. I love Mary Peterson's colorful and playful illustrations. They complement my text perfectly. And to cap it all off, I'm very proud of the dynamic and whimsical website we've developed at www.oceansoupbook.com. So from the first time I peered into a marine tide pool all those years ago, to the creative energies I poured into the writing, performing, and promoting of the tide pool poems, what a long, fun trip it's been.


Posted by Stephen R. Swinburne, author of Ocean Soup.
Watch Steve's Ocean Soup videos here!

The Poems Are Told For You: Poetry and Parody in the Classroom

Parody has had a long tradition across many times and cultures. Lewis Carroll famously used serious, dry poems as fodder for clever parodies like "Father William." Many contemporary films and books for young people give a nod back to the plots and styles of Jane Austen (e.g., Clueless), William Shakespeare (Ten Things I Hate About You), William Blake (A Visit to William Blake's Inn), and Emily Dickinson (The Mouse of Amherst). In my children's poetry books Because I Could Not Stop My Bike and Other Poems and I Must Go Down to the Beach Again and Other Poems, I similarly transform classical works by poets such as Blake, Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Poe into poems with child-friendly themes like riding a bike, eating macaroni and cheese, and going tot he beach. In this way, I have tried to draw on the beautiful and varied rhythms and meters of famous poems while giving children of all ages a topic that they can relate to.

The benefits to children are several: most important of these, to ignite their interest in poetry by giving them poems they would love to read over and over. I wanted them to laugh and have fun, to be touched by a thought they may not have considered, or learn something new about their world. Each of my poems starts with an "apology" to the famous author from which the inspiration was drawn. I always intended the poems to work on two levels: to stand completely alone without any need whatsoever of the original works to appreciate the new ones, and yet also to have extra meaning for hte grownups and teenagers who were familiar with the originals. Like Sesame Street's "Letter B," "Cereal Girl," and "Monsterpiece Theater," the humor becomes multi-layered--both the actual rhyming story is funny (for children taking it literally) and the wordplay provides a bit of amusement for the grownups and older children who recognize the sources.

After a recent interview that I had on NPR's "Morning Edition" with Renee Montagne, I was surprised by how polarized some of the responses were to my having taken the classically great poems and changed their topics to ones of interest to children. Some responders were worried that these parodies represented a "dumbing down" for kids, and advocated reading the original works by the masters, even to younger children. Their "poetry purist" position seemed to indicate that playing around with poems suggests disrespect for the original authors. A popular educator bloggist, Miss Rumphius, countered with the following viewpoint:

"Since when is parody dumbing-down? Frankly, to parody well you need extensive knowledge of the original work. I think kids, particularly those in middle school could really exercise some poetic muscle by writing parodies of their own. I haven't seen the books (yet), but they seem like they might make wonderful mentor texts."

While I can understand that a poetry lover may be apprehensive that someone is playing irreverently with their favorite work, I must agree with this bloggist that a really good parody does indeed require a deep understanding of the author's style. As I wrote these poems, I began to appreciate the poets in a way that I never had before when merely a reader. It was as if I felt my way inside their way of making rhythm and rhyme, and in doing so, expanded my own skill and understanding. In fact, it was suggested to me by a theater professor at Guilford College that my poems are not really parodies at all--not in the definition of mocking or making fun of hte original work, not intended to spoof. "What I really think you're doing, " he wrote to me, "is taking the image patterns and meters of great poems and placing child-accessible thoughts in the poetic structure in the same way the more complicated thoughts are placed in the orginals... It gives the child a kinesthetic experience of the poem."

When authors engage with classical works in a playful and interactive way, they give permission for others to do the same. Literature doesn't have to be static. So long as we give the proper credit; a parody can show deep respect for a poet's talents even as it sings a silly tune. I have heard from teachers and librarians all over the country what a useful and fun exercise it is to encourage students to attempt writing "transformations" in their classrooms. Obviously this task will be easier for some than others, but all will emerge with a little better understanding about what poets are trying to do when they sit down to create. I don't like poetry that makes someone feel bad because they can't understand it. I want children to feel alive about poems--that they can act them out, laugh with them, sing them, or write their own. In my author visits to schools, I adapt activities from the poems across grade levels--from using puppets with first graders to engaging middle-schoolers in humorous dramatic readings of the poems, I have found that students can make a strong connection to poetry at their own developmental level. If they feel even a little more inclined to play with language, I have been successful. To that end, I leave you with a thought inspired by John Donne and which has become my tagline: "Do not ask for whom the poems are told/the poems are told for you."



Posted by Karen Jo Shapiro, author of Because I Could Not Stop My Bike and Other Poems, and I Must Go Down to the Beach Again and Other Poems.