National Poetry Month

My objective, and I’ve said from the very first, is to write across the curriculum, and to write across the age spectrum. Occasionally I’ll write a “I can read” book for the very young. I’d also like to think that I’m helping to create another genre which is adult picture books.

I happen to agree with you, I think some of my books really are intended for adults or at least can be appreciated by adults as well as YA or the YA high school audience. And you know, I’m trying to write about every subject under the sun, math teachers and sciences teachers come up to me and say, I’m sorry math and science it’s, they’re like oil and water to poetry. I said not to me, I’ve written a book called Arithmetickle, I’ve written a book called Edgar Allen Poe’s Pie where I put classic poems into math puzzlers.

There’s nothing under the sun you can’t write a poem about, nothing. And it really bugs me. I heard this today at the school I spoke at, one of the teachers said this and he said it with almost a certain amount of pride, it was too bad because he used the term, and this is to me it’s unfortunate, two words that I think are the worst words in the English language when put together: Poetry and unit.

When I hear a teacher talk about a poetry unit, I know that he or she is going to spend maybe 3 or four days at poetry and then thank the lord it’s over, we can move onto something really important. But to me, poetry ought to be an everyday experience for every child, and you can do it with DEAR, Drop Everything and Read, take five minutes, you can.

I try to encourage principals at elementary schools, you should be reading a poem every day on morning announcements. It would take fifteen to thirty seconds, you would have no end to volunteers, teachers, students, custodial staff, secretaries, everybody would want to be on it.

Billy Collins actually came up with that idea it’s called, “Poetry 180” for 180 days in the school year, he came up with that as the US Poet Laureate, but I wrote to him in fact, I said, “Why didn’t you include elementary schools? That’s such a wonderful idea.” I think it should also be done for elementary schools.

Just after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I went down and volunteered and was working at an arts camp, a performing arts camp at theater, dance music, and also poetry. And I was there as the poetry person to help young people cope with what had just happened that originally we had planned to just do a performing arts workshop and camp, but because of Hurricane Katrina, we realized we cannot just carry on as usual. We really need to address what’s happening. And I was taking creative arts therapy courses at the new school and was thinking about and learning how the arts can help young people cope with trauma and how some of our young people may never go to therapy or get counseling, so how can we bring that to them through art making? And so this camp was powerful and heartbreaking and everything in between, I have fell in love with these young people who were sharing their stories, not just about what happened during the hurricane, but who they were before and what their neighborhoods were like before. 

So I got to really know them and came back the next year. So I went back three times and worked with young people and they wrote these amazing poems. And when I was in class writing and working on a picture book for a class assignment actually that was about, whoa, write a story about an issue that might bring a child to therapy, so maybe a divorce or death of a loved one, something like that. And these stories were on my mind. And so I began what now is A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, but that was first a class assignment that I was just writing to think about how do you deal with heavy topics in picture books? So their voices were still with me, their stories were with me. I wanted to honor my time with them. And in that class, my professor and a classmate encouraged me to send that out. 

And so the long story is that that’s the first book that got published, but the inspiration behind it was the real work that I did with young people. And I’m really proud that I got to go back and once the book was published, Shadra Stickland and I, who I love and adore, and she did the illustrations for that book. The two of us went on a book tour, we went to New Orleans, gave books to the kids who inspired the story and got to see them in a better place. This was five years later, a lot of restoration have begun. And so it was nice to come back and see them and honor their stories, give them the book and spend more time with them when they weren’t so deep in the hurt and in the trauma of it all. 

My recommendation for K through 3 in terms of introducing poetry is, first of all, to get beyond the sense of intimidation about sharing poetry. What I’ve discovered is that most adults have had a really unhappy experience with poetry in their own student life, and so they’re kind of put off at the very notion of sharing poetry with their students. So, it’s important to remember that if you present poetry as if it were castor oil, no one will like it.

A way around that is to find poetry that you love, that you are excited about, and that you’re passionate about - because students are going to pick up on your attitude. People talk about poetry that they feel should be taught, and I always say, “Don’t ‘should’ all over me. Choose work that you like.”

The poetry market is so rich now that it can be used throughout the curriculum. There’s poetry on math, science, space travel, sports, school supplies — poetry on just every conceivable subject.

So choose poetry that you like, that you connect with, and that you know your students are going to connect with, and start there, so that they have a positive experience. Have fun with it! Don’t start out by analyzing! Nobody needs to start out analyzing — get them in love with the genre. Let analytical work come later — years later. Their first experience should be enjoyable. It should be fun. Choreograph poems. Experiment with ways to perform it. Children love an opportunity to perform. Do reader’s theater with it. Make it a fun experience for yourself and for your students. After that, they’ll take off. You won’t be able to keep them away from it.

Poetry is like the human soul entire distilled into very few words and they’re power packed. You can get a whole beginning, middle, and end in 10 lines. Poetry, because of the language we choose, because of the metaphors we use, we can make the reader feel something pretty powerful in those few words.

Maybe Toni Morrison and Edwidge Danticat, they do it I’m sure with their prose, but you take sort of the average prose and you look at a paragraph or a chapter, you don’t get that full emotional power-packed movement and energy and that complete beginning, middle, and end, not to say one is better than the other.

But I will say this, I took a poetry — I took a playwriting class back when I was in college and it was a master class and it was taught by Cicely Tyson, Douglas Turner Ward, and Charles Fuller. And Charles Fuller had written A Soldier’s Play that Denzel starred in, which that turned into this movie, A Soldier’s Story.

And so I remember Charles Fuller was teaching us about playwriting and he asked us did we know how to write poetry, and most of the students said no, we write plays, and he was like learn how to write a poem. It’s the basic building block of all forms of writing. And I believe that with my heart and soul.

You know, I grew up, you know, in terms of my — in terms of the sort of accessibility of the prose and the poetry that I try to write, I remember reading Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni and Hakeem and all these amazing poets and learning so much from them; being informed but also being inspired in so many ways by their words.

And that inspiration came from the feeling that their words gave me, but it also came from a place of I was able to understand what they were saying. I was able to get it and relate it to my own life. I’ve tried to write like that. I’ve tried to make my poems and my prose, which are very personal, I’ve tried to make it your business, and I believe that’s so important, especially when we talk about getting young people engaged with reading.

I went through a phase in middle school where I did not like reading. In fact, I loathed it because I was being forced to do it. And I think that books are like amusement parks, and sometimes we have to let the kids choose the rides. And I wasn’t being given that opportunity to ride, to find my groove. And I think I try to write from that vantage point.

I try to write from a vantage point of making sure the work is accessible, commercial, literary. I don’t want to be put in one box, but I need to do all these things that I’ve grown up learning how to do, and I guess inevitably it’s my style, it’s my swag, it’s sort of how I dance on the page, and it works for me. And I think that is the key that I learned from Nikki is that it has to work for you first and you stand a much better chance of it working for the rest of us.

Why do I write for children and young adults? Well, I guess it started with my seven-year-old. I had written quite a few books of love poems. I found it very difficult to get dates as it were in college. Like I wasn’t very cool. I didn’t get cool ’til recently. So, I would write poems and that’s how I would communicate with these girls in college that I liked.

So I spent the first 10 years of my writerly life writing love poems and sort of learning how to write love poems, reading Pablo Nerudo and then, you know, as it happens, I got married and had a daughter and  my daughter wanted to be read to and I wanted to read to her. And we found ourselves reading three to four books a night and I became immersed in children’s literature.

And so I found that some of the poems that I began writing were now love poems to my daughter. And so children’s literature became something that, you know, my daughter is ultimately responsible for why I write it now, and I think it was sort of the best career move I could have made and certainly the most rewarding part of my writing career that I’ve had.

So, with The Crossover, maybe there are four, five, or six or seven different forms of poetry, and I knew going in that I wanted to do different forms of poetry. And so the subject matter of each poem, I found that it lent itself to a certain type of poem. For instance, in the story Josh, the main character’s mother, sent some text messages.

I thought well, text messages are — they’re really short. I mean what are they, 160 characters before it goes onto the one of two and two of two before it continues? And so I thought well, how cool would it be for text messages to be a short form of verse, maybe a haiku. I thought it lent itself to that form.

There are some poems in the book where there are conversations between brothers or conversations between parent and child. And conversations are I say something, you say something, I say something, you say something. I say something a little bit longer, you listen, you say something. I thought how cool would it be for those poems to be in couplets or tercets, which are two-line stanzas or three-line stanzas to really show it.

I was really trying to make sure that the poems on the page visually looked like I wanted them to sound and like they would be heard. And so there were some poems where the main character is sort of trash talking or bragging, which was something I used to do on the tennis court. I wasn’t very good in my first two years of playing tennis in high school, but I was tall and I had — I wore corduroy shorts and I wore a yellow tank top and red high-top Chuck Taylors and so I had this visual look and I talked trash.

And I won. I won a lot of my games by getting inside their heads. And I thought when writing The Crossover, how cool would it be to have this trash talker and for us to see his trash talking on the page and so I made the words do different things in those poems. And some of the words are diagonal and some of the, you know, some of the words are — they get bigger. And so I think the subject matter of each poem dictated the form of poetry that I would use and I hope it worked.

The book, the book Hello, Goodbye Window was also done with paint but also oil pastel and it was inspired a good deal by children’s artwork and a kind of abstract all over kind of drawing that I like when children make, make’s shapes and images and then proceed to just kind of, just color in aspects of it, following their own, their own internal sense that may or may not look like it makes sense.

And I was hoping I could get away with that in this book. So it turned out very scribbly and I find that generally when you do, when the action of the creation of the art is visible and is still — is visible in the final work so you can see the scribble — the movement of the pastels which are like crayons and you can only get what you see if the crayon is moving at a certain speed.

Whether you notice that or not consciously as an onlooker you do know that, you can’t — if you’ve ever used a crayon you know, you know what it looks like when you’re scribbling rapidly or when you’re kind of dobbing with the crayon and that speed of the application of the colors and the materials somehow has an effect on the image itself.

I think it makes the image seem — it has its own, it has its own time in it in that you see how much time it took to make that image, if it’s a single fast moving line then it’s a quick moment. If it’s many fast or slow moving lines together you can almost judge exactly how much time transpires within the panting itself.

I think you can see this within, it’s thrilling to me to see oil paint — oil painted works where that time is also quite visible and you can tell — each brush stroke remains visible and the time of each brush stroke is there. Other paintings, the more academic type paintings, they might have been painted over years by one or more hands and so that kind of — that’s a different sense of time certainly but I like the, I like the more, the more immediate, the more immediate grouping, I guess.

So how to approach the text, that’s the big question and that takes a lot of experimentation and thinking. In the case of in the books I’ve done with poetry I wanted to keep it very graphic, in other words — another way of saying that might be that the images are flat there’s not a lot of deep space on the page so that it doesn’t conflict too much with the poem which sits right on the surface of the page.

If that makes sense. So that the poem adds a visual element, has kind of an equality with the visual elements that I create and they just visually are balancing each other rather than the notion of a poem existing in a kind of metaphysical ethereal space and we look past the poem and we see into a world that the poem is talking about.

I look at it more from a design sort of a view, I want the page to really look of a piece and kind of close together somehow. I don’t know if that makes sense. With my, with my own books for instance John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, that went through many, many different approaches and finally when I decided to let the sort of characters that I had created in an earlier version sort of stand in abstract characters of John Coltrane’s music that kind of started to work and that they would then overlap visually as they overlap in sound, in John Coltrane’s music. So to find that hook or — find that hook to hang the illustrations on it takes me a long time of just doodling around or well thinking, or walking, or sitting, or drinking coffee staring into space.

Well as Robert Frost said, “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. And a children’s poem begins in delight and ends in delight.” And I haven’t heard it described any better than that. There really is a world of difference between adult poetry and children’s poetry.

I think generally speaking adult poets think that, they think of children’s poetry as sort of a cultural demimonde, not quite a legitimate enterprise, and I think that’s too bad, I mean we’re the ones after all if we’re any good are the ones who are sending these young readers onto possibly reading their work.

So I think our mission has to be an important one.

Lucille Clifton, a well known African American poet once said, “I can’t tell you what good poetry is, but I can tell you a good poem when I see it.” And I think you know, I can’t improve on that. I mean poetry is beautiful speech, as Frost said, “It’s a momentary stay against confusion.”

It’s a blind date with enchantment. There are so many, hundreds of definitions for poetry and I think those, most of those definitions apply to children’s poetry as well.

I really must say a word against what is commonly referred to as giggle poetry, because giggle poetry is written by poet’s who think they must include burps and nose picking and stuff like that to get down to, to speak to children, and that’s exactly what they’re doing, they’re writing to the lowest common denominator. So none of that poetry in my opinion deserves to even be called poetry.

The emphasis on sound in poetry is absolutely essential. Most of my poems do indeed rhyme but as I say that just doesn’t happen willy-nilly, it happens because you’re willing to work at it, and many people aren’t, they go for the cheap rhyme or the quick rhyme, and it just doesn’t work.

And children are notoriously bad at rhyming. And it’s not because they’re naturally bad it’s because they simply lack the vocabulary, one, and two they lack the time. I mean, what child is going to sit for eight, nine hours a day in a chair thinking about poetry? None of them, and they shouldn’t. They’re too busy living their lives.

So my advice to them is always first and foremost just write, why put yourself in the box of rhymes? It’s too difficult to write yourself out of it. My parents and teachers when I was a kid, used to say, oh don’t color outside the lines, well ask any illustrator in America and they will say the first rule of illustrating is break borders, go outside the lines.

And I want to tell children who are starting to write poetry, break the rules, go outside the lines, go outside the rhymes rather, and just write. You know, it’s so much easier than trying to come up with good rhymes especially if you have a limited vocabulary.

Well they can, if they’re able, and obviously many poor parents aren’t able, but if they’re able, surround their children with good books, with books of poetry. Not just poetry they like, and I’m speaking to teachers as well, fill your classroom full of books of poetry, all kinds of poetry, serious, humorous, all kinds of verse forms.

And what you’re doing is allowing the children to see the magic of language, what language can do for them. And to them, it really is an emotional experience. At least that’s the way I see it in reading poetry and I read poetry every single day, there’s not a day goes by that I don’t read poetry.

I’m not trying to make kids love poetry, in fact I want them to hate poetry less than most Americans do. Most Americans really hate poetry. We’re maybe the only country in the world, we are the one country in the world who has less interest in poetry than anyone else.

I go to Russia so often, and my friends are just average Russian citizens and they can recite reams of poetry, Pushkin, Lermontov and other great Russian poets, you go out in the street here and ask somebody a couplet and it would be hard for us to do it. I’m not saying everybody should love poetry, in fact when I leave a school if I have reached three or four students out of a school of four hundred, I feel that I’ve succeeded.

Encouraging them to follow poetry for maybe the better part of their lives.

Poetry has a kind of magic I think. It’s condensed. It’s intense. It helps us to see — and it’s short; well, condensed. So, but it helps us to see ordinary things in new ways so that they become extraordinary to us.

I think it also expresses feelings that maybe we weren’t able to articulate. So, it’s that moment of ah, yes, that’s exactly how I feel that poetry can do for you. And it has that music with the rhythm and the repetition and the literation and all of those kinds of magic tricks that poets know how to do that I think no other genre does for us. And I think children respond to poetry in ways that they may not respond to longer literature.

Well, the poetry for children within the African American children’s literature seems to me to be one of the genres that focuses particularly on self affirmation. One of the thematic threads I think that goes through African American children’s literature is this valuing of children, of saying to them we see you as beautiful, we see you as competent, we see you as worthy, and you should know that.

And one of the things I remember about a number of African American books of poetry is that so many of the titles are children’s names, you know. Even with — I was just thinking of Nikki Giovanni’s Nikki-Rosa. But Nathaniel’s [unint.] — I forgot the exact title for that one.

But many of the Danitra Brown, many, many of their poems have children’s names as the title or as part of the title. Gwendolyn Brooks’ Bronzeville Boys and Girls, I think every poem is a child’s name. So, it’s that celebration of children that is really one of the special things I think about the poetry.

Poetry can be fun. One of my very first reviews 40 years ago, for my first book, A Gopher in the Garden, said that there’s an old Greek idea about learning through laughing. I don’t remember who said it. I don’t remember who reviewed the book, and the reviewer didn’t remember where the quote was from, but I’ve always kept that in mind. So, I’m conscious that I am teaching things. I’m certainly teaching vocabulary, because I don’t condescend. I use very complex vocabulary in some of my poems. Words like “mucilaginous” and “gelatinous” and “eviscerate,” “evaporate.” In the dragon poem that I wrote last night, I got to put in a six-syllable word: “inextinguishable.”

I like to laugh, and I want to make other people laugh. That’s really what I’m trying to do. I just happen to be able to make those things rhyme.

Would I have been better off writing prose? I don’t think so. There are plenty of people that do it so much better than I do, or could. I’m really happy to do what I’m doing.

You see, these boring teachers I had would recite a poem and then say, “Now open your geography book to page 122,” or whatever.

Well, my feeling is this: find a poem that goes along with the other thing you’re teaching. If you’re teaching math, find some poems about math. If you’re teaching about the food chain, you’ll find plenty of funny poems about food.

I used to talk about a poem called “Willy Ate a Worm,” and I’d say, “Do the food chain and talk about eating a worm.” Don’t be afraid to combine poetry with other media. We’ve had kids set poems to music, combine them with art, make little paintings and mobiles and sculptures and dioramas, and put on plays. Really, the only limit is their imagination and the teacher’s imagination.

It’s the idea that the words are all out there. I do invent some words, but basically, all the words I’ve ever written are in the dictionary. It’s just finding the way to combine them.

Find the key. There’s a key to every poem. Remember that when the poem was written, the poet wrote that poem because something happened to the poet first. It was something felt, or thought, or remembered, or dreamt, or experienced. So, try to put a little of the same feeling into recreating the poem in class that the poet put into writing the poem.

Being home for the vacations was wonderful for me, because both my mother and father were readers. My father particularly was. He was a rough, tough, gruff, old Irishman who was extremely macho, even though we didn’t know that word. He wore those plus-fours, but I think you call them knickers here — you know, the pants that go halfway down your legs — and the checked socks and the brown brogues and the duncher cap. And he would stand out in the street and talk to his cronies, and they would talk about cattle and sheep and the price of grain.

But when he was at home, he read poetry. And he would’ve died if any of them knew that. But he read, especially the Irish poets. He loved Yeats. He loved all the Irish poets. And he inoculated me with poetry from as far back as I can remember.

You know, it rains a lot in Ireland, and lots of times we’d sit in the house by the big turf fire. And he would take me on his lap and read to me. He would stop now and then when it would maybe be a little difficult. And he would say, “Now, my darlin’, do ya understand that? What’s the poet trying to say?” And we would talk about it.

I feel that poetry should be read and listened to and be almost a communal thing, rather than just read on the page. Though I have some reservations about poetry slams, but I have to admit I don’t know that much about them and a few that I’ve witnessed, I’ve liked parts of them very much. And it just seems that I’m not the only one. There are a lot of people out there now and really talking up poetry.

And I’ve known from the time I was a kid and then from the time that I had kids myself and went into the schools I have no doubt that children love poetry. They love language. They love word play. They have a good time and it just takes someone who really is enthusiastic and kind of knows her stuff a little bit to get them. Audience participation is the sine qua non. You just can’t go into a school or an audience and just stand there and read the way you would at an adult poetry event; you’ve got to get the kids to participate from the get-go.

And it can get a little raucous sometimes, but that’s just fine. And they all have ideas and they all want to share. And I’m always very curious and when I hear and get feedback about what a visit of mine has meant, it’s often very, very encouraging because the teacher feels more empowered and the children are excited. And poetry is fun and you can go from fun and light verse and word play and you can segue very nicely into far more serious ideas and use of words and you bring the children with you.

I find no difficulty in talking to kids about serious ideas and using adult poems sometimes that are proper for them. And I believe that it’s now one of the things that I’m saying with all the cutbacks in the arts and everything — no art supplies, no instruments — the art of poetry is free. It’s absolutely free. It probably should be liberated to a certain extent from language arts and put into the arts where you can do it as choral reading, as back and forth reading, use it with plays, with drama. So there is just an infinite number of ways that you can use language.