by Roger Sutton
The very first book I can remember loving was the large, well-worn Mother Goose on the bottom shelf. Because I had been read to from that book since before I could stand, and knew the rhymes by heart, I put it in my lap, looked at the pictures, recited the verses, and thought I was reading. And soon, of course, I was reading — and rereading — the poems in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.
On the second shelf I found a collection of books bequeathed me by an older cousin: the Nancy Drew books. I read all thirty-two. Or did I read one of them thirty-two times? They all seem to blend. I don’t remember what Nancy did in any of those books, but whatever it was, she always did it awfully well. Eventually, and probably none too soon, I wound my way out of the high-crime community of River Heights and up to the next shelf, where I found those noble, faithful, often abused, long-suffering animals: Black Beauty; Smoky, the Cowhorse; My Friend Flicka; Lassie Come-Home; The Yearling. I cried my way through those books with the growing suspicion that writers of animal fiction suffered from an unhealthy compulsion to kill off their title characters.
About this time, my mother imposed a curfew on my reading. She thought I needed my sleep. You would think that a parent who wanted to restrict a child’s reading after a particular hour would hide the flashlight. On one memorable occasion I emerged from under the covers with a book just as the sky was beginning to go gray in the east. I had found the book that kept me reading until dawn not in the tall living-room bookcase but in a kitchen cupboard. Many of us — teachers, librarians, writers, editors, parents — grapple with the problem of how to get a child to read. I recommend wrapping a book in a dish towel and hiding it behind the cookbooks. When I found Forever Amber so wrapped, wedged behind 101 Ways with Jell-O, nothing would have stopped me from reading it. And I have to say that it expanded my horizons considerably. Fortunately, back at the bookcase, I found reading that kept me from thinking of romance solely in terms of Forever Amber.
Thank goodness for poetry. For “Evangeline,” “The Lady of Shalott,” for “Lochinvar,” who rode out of the west, and “The Highwayman,” who rode through the night to meet Bess beneath her casement, and
rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair in the casement! His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(O sweet black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the West.
Who could resist?
And so, I read my way up the bookcase, until the day came when, once again, I took from the top shelf Pride and Prejudice. I opened to the first page and read, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” I read every word. It was worth waiting for.
But, of all my childhood reading, it is the poetry that has stayed with me. I can’t remember a line from Raggedy Ann, or from the animal stories I cried over, or from Treasure Island, The Secret Garden, The Jungle Book, or Little Women — all of which I loved. Though it is still probably my all-time favorite novel, I can quote only the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice. But I know every rhyme from that old Mother Goose book. I still know many of the poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses. And I can still recite from memory all seventeen stanzas, one hundred and two lines, of “The Highwayman.”
It took me twenty-seven books to get around to writing poetry. My first twenty-six were picture books. In a way, writing picture books is a lot like writing poetry. I’d say that, considered in terms of the amount of time spent per sentence, or per line, or per word, it takes more time to write the shortest work — a poem — than anything else. Next is probably the picture book. Benjamin Franklin, who, as far as I know, didn’t write picture books, said, “I don’t have time to be brief.”
Poetry is language compressed, an intensification of language. It’s saying more in fewer words. Developing a picture-book story, too, is a question of peeling away the layers, of eliminating the extraneous, of trying to discover, to understand what this story is “about.” Which means you have to find the core, the center, the heart — and in order to sustain a whole story, that heart has to be beating. Which is just a way of saying that a picture-book story has to be parked on something substantial. Humor will provide it. Humor is its own excuse for being. But even in a story that isn’t funny, this thing at the center has to be there. It doesn’t have to be profound or complex; just a kernel of significance will do. It has to be there in a poem, too.
Writers collect words almost compulsively. In Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing, the main character has this to say about words: “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little, or make a poem children will speak for you when you’re dead.”
He’s right about words; they deserve respect. There’s nothing like laboring over one or two lines for a few hours to foster that respect. It’s made of me a listener. It’s one reason I am a compulsive rereader of sentences and paragraphs, lines and stanzas. I listen to what I’m reading, in my head, and when I hear something really wonderful, I have to go back and find out how the author did that. Or, if it’s less than wonderful, I want to try to discover what went wrong.
Writing formal poetry, lines using traditional metrical form, makes you analytical of words in a way that can become almost obsessive. You tend to hear words — people’s names, for example — in terms of the metrical feet they represent. Humphrey Bogart: two trochees. Esa-Pekka Salonen: trochee, trochee, dactyl. Pierre Cardin: iambic. Eleanor Roosevelt, Engelbert Humperdinck: double dactyls.
These are the kinds of thoughts that come unbidden into the mind of a person who spends a few hours every day writing poetry using form — traditional, metrical, scannable, often rhymed. I don’t mean to imply that I write, or read, only formal poetry. But I love the music of lines written in form. I think children respond particularly to such poetry, and I think form is the inescapable and essential foundation of all that came after it, including poetry that rejects it. So here are some thoughts about the process of writing such poetry.
If I am working on a poem in form, do I say to myself, “Now I think I’ll use mostly trochees here” or “Here’s where I’ll throw in some anapests”? No. But at least I’ll be aware of the effect of certain poetic feet, certain rhythms, on the speed of a line, for example.
It is sometimes suggested that certain kinds of feet, rhythmical units of sound, create specific “moods” — that anapests, for instance, are light, happy, appropriate only in light or humorous verse. (Anapests, you’ll recall, are feet of three syllables, the first two unstressed, the last syllable stressed. The word persevere is an anapest. “She’s a calico cat” would be two anapests.) I don’t like to invest poetic feet with too much personality. I’ve seen too many poems in which lines with anapests in them are serious, or lyrical, or even somber to think of them as giddy or irresponsible feet. But when I use them, I’ll try to remember that anapests, and dactyls, will speed up a line, as certain other kinds of feet, or rhythms, will slow a line down.
There is a Robert Frost couplet that I like to use with classes of children to show them how the rhythm of a line can echo what’s happening in the poem. The first line is slow, halting, almost awkward — because he’s talking about something that is old, and slow, and stiff. But the second line is as fast and bouncy as its subject. The couplet is:
The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.
Which brings us to the question of just how much analysis of poetry you can do with children. I’d never start out a poetry session with fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-graders with a lesson on metrics. But after we’d done a few poems, and they were into it, and I could see that the poetry had th
em, then I might slip in a little metrics, in a painless and nonthreatening way.
We might collect names or words that are dactyls: Jennifer, Abraham, Melanie, Deborah, suddenly, relative, mayonnaise, sycamore. Many classes can construct whole dactylic sentences if you start them out:
Jennifer/wouldn’tplay/basketball.
Jennifer/probably/wouldn’tplay/basketball/after she’d/eaten a/hamburger.
Jennifer/probably/wouldn’tplay/basketball/after she’d/eaten a/hamburger/smothered in/onion rings/if she were/counting her/calories.
In my experience, children love form. They respond to the regularity of it; they find its predictability satisfying. (Adults do, too.) In some instances, it’s as pleasurable as solving a puzzle when they discover the pattern. And it is the pattern of sound in rhymed poetry that helps them to memorize, to make a poem their own.
Most classes of fifth- or sixth-graders have heard the Robert Frost poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and it’s easy for them to hear the rhyme pattern: in the four-line stanzas, lines one, two, and four rhyme. Line three does not. But what they don’t hear — not consciously — and what they love to discover is that the stanzas are linked; they are tied together by the unrhymed sound at the end of the third line. It’s that sound that provides the rhyme for the next stanza.
If poetry is about sound, and writing poetry a matter of learning to listen, poetry is also about image, and writing poetry a matter of noticing things. Images are all around, and there are poems in those images, if I can just learn to see them.
Writing poetry is about sound, and about image, and about a third thing that comes from inside. I think it is a tantalizingly shy thing. I do not know how to summon it at will. And I cannot name it. But Emily Dickinson could. She said:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, —
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
No one will ever approach you and say, “This looks like a good day to curl up and read poetry.” You have to do that for yourself. One great thing is — you can sneak it in, between all the other things you are doing. The poet William Stafford carried his own poems on small cards in his pockets — we may carry our own or someone else’s. Poetry books are often elegantly slim, which allows them to fit easily into purses or briefcases. The brevity is beneficial. You may read and reread in the same amount of time it might take to eat a few crackers with cheese. Your day will feel deeper, calmer, better. Once, a natty businessman seated next to me on an airplane began weeping when he saw me reading a book of poems. He said, “When I was young, poetry gave me so much hope. Why have I denied it to myself all these years?”
Recently, while preparing dinner in our renovated hundred-year-old kitchen, now jazzed up with a new black sink, handmade green Mission tile from Mexico, and our first dishwasher (we’re very slow), a sense of negligence washed over me. What about the sunset? I thought. Have I sat with the sunset lately? Why not? What time is it?
Leaving the garbanzos resting in the blender with their little moon of garlic, I hoofed it to the front porch and sat on the steps. Sure enough, the wide sky toward the west was softening into lovely pink stripes — all in unobtrusive silence. Cars were whizzing home, buses rounding the corner. But the beautiful big sky — that ripe pink and purple sky above the pecan trees, the Mexican cafés, and the abandoned Judson candy factory — radiated outward in stripes. Taking a long breath, I closed my eyes, then opened them again to see the plum-colored swirls intensify and merge.
Right then my neighbor Amparo walked by, noticed me sitting there, and called out across our fence, “What’s wrong?” Usually she speaks Spanish to me, but these conversations often end abruptly, so now she tries English. “What’s wrong?”
I laughed, pointing. “Nothing is wrong! It’s right! Look up at the sky!”
She turned and looked, shrugged, and said, “I thought you locked out.” She walked on.
This is what we have come to in our culture — you sit down to rest, to breathe and to stare, without doing anything, and it appears peculiar.
I’d like to go back in time.
“What do you hope to do with your life?”
“Gaze at things. Thank you.”
Beginning at about the age of three, I was regularly attracted outside onto the square concrete porch of our Saint Louis home to watch the softening light. A gray midwestern glow or a lonesome yellow beam said, “Take heed. Notice me. I am going now, and you will soon be shipping off to bed.” It made me feel poignant — already I was nostalgic for a different kind of slow-paced life.
The only good thing about going to bed was hearing our father’s wonderful Palestinian folktales, which made us laugh happily, and, afterward, our mother’s voice, winding us down with resonant poems, spoken in a calm, deliberate tone. Frequently her daily voice was harried and nervous, so this nocturnal care for each syllable felt delicious. She read Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg. . . . I loved poetry’s leaping interweave, the selectiveness of each magical word. Poetry wasn’t worrying about anything. It was contemplating. I loved the rich descriptions of lines and scenes. Poetry wasn’t trying to get us to do anything, it was simply inviting us to think, and feel, and see. It was language we could tuck under our chins. A cool sheet, a cotton quilt.
Poetry’s understated quality of hinting somehow felt better than the words that got passed around the rest of the day. With intimate immediacy, poetry took me to a deeper place, a time-pillow of heightened consciousness. I am sitting on the step of the book, soaking something in. . . .
I also liked the way poetry looked on the page — all that white space around the words suggested that each word had honor.
Henry David Thoreau said that “to see the sun rise or go down every day . . . would preserve us sane forever.”
It’s the pause we humans are desperate for. If you don’t think everyone is desperate, ask a gymnasium of kindergartners how many of them feel they have too much to do and are always rushing, and nearly every hand will go up. They don’t have to ask what you mean, either. They know.
Poems can really help.
MORE GREAT POETRY
Gwendolyn Brooks, illustrations by Faith Ringgold, Bronzeville Boys and Girls
48 pp. Grades 4–6. With acute observation and feeling, Brooks captures moments of childhood. The strong colors of the illustrations place the poems both in the real world and the imaginary world of childhood, where a tea party seems to float in the air on a raft of blue.
Douglas Florian, Comets, Stars, the Moon, and Mars: Space Poems and Paintings
48 pp. Grades 4–6. Moving from planet to universe, Florian sums up the heavens in twenty snappy rhymes. With its gorgeous palette, sweeping vistas, and ingenious effects, this is an expansive and illuminating view of the subject.
Paul B. Janeczko, illustrations by Chris Raschka, A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms
64 pp. Grades 4–6. The twenty-nine poems in this attractive collection — from light verse to a Shakespearean sonnet — are arranged by form (tercet, haiku, roundel, etc.) and are accompanied by bright, playful illustrations. Companion volumes include A Poke in the I: A Collection of Concrete Poems and A Foot in the Mouth: Poems to Speak, Sing, and Shout.
Ron Koertge, Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs
170 pp. Grades 6–8. Writer/first baseman/eighth-grader Kevin writes poems about his life, from baseball playoffs to romantic complications. The pleasing variety of verse — a villanelle here, a sestina there — is a seamless fit for Koertge’s story and characters. Sequel to Shakespeare Bats Cleanup.
Naomi Shihab Nye, illustrations by Terre Maher, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls
118 pp. Grades 7–12. In this quiet, personal collection of more than seventy free-verse poems aimed especially at girls between twelve and seventeen, Nye captures the struggle of a young teen to connect with and understa
nd her world.
Linda Sue Park, illustrations by Istvan Banyai, Tap Dancing on the Roof: Sijo (Poems)
40 pp. Grades 4–6. Twenty-seven engaging poems in a traditional three-line Korean poetic form on themes such as seasons, home, and school. The illustrations add an extra element of wit and imaginative freedom.
Jack Prelutsky, illustrations by Brandon Dorman, Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face and Other Poems: Some of the Best of Jack Prelutsky
194 pp. Grades K–3. Containing a wide selection of Prelutsky’s euphonious, often challenging, usually humorous verse, this collection is everything a fan could ask for. An accompanying CD sets many poems to music. For more Prelutsky, see Something Big Has Been Here and My Dog May Be a Genius.
Alice Schertle, illustrations by Petra Mathers, Button Up!: Wrinkled Rhymes
40 pp. Grades K–3. Fifteen adroitly phrased rhymes, voiced by various pieces of clothing, reflect children’s amiable relationships with these intimate possessions. Schertle’s contagiously rhythmic, playful verse is perfectly reflected in the art, which ranges from delicately comical to downright funny.
Joyce Sidman, illustrations by Rick Allen, Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night