Was I running a blog? Has it been a year? Let’s just say LONG story and leave it at that shall we? Meanwhile, what you really want follows here:

On the eve of National Poetry Month, I thought I’d compile some useful resources. I’m a longtime member of both the AAP, AWP, and the PSA–which are amazing organizations. And I was thrilled to see the new incarnation of the Internet Poetry Archive while spelunking the web tonight. Plus Bill & Ted’s Excellent Poetry Adventures (couldn’t resist the reference–Billy Collins and Ted Kooser), along with Pinsky’s Fave Poem Project, are extremely all-ages friendly and aimed at a wide audience. Two of my favorite sites–and my homepages at various points (bumped out by the NYT)–are Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.

It should probably be noted–most of what I’m handing you is contemporary American poetry. In many cases, work written in the last decade. Not to say that there isn’t value in the canon of work worldwide that has preceded this present bounty–but most people know about Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. However, if you’re one of the, say, 98% of the American public that’s never read a contemporary poem, here’s a chance to change that.

And, BTW, Jack Prelutsky is now the official U. S. Children’s Poet Laureate. Other children’s poets of note include Eve Merriam, Shel Silverstein, Bruce Lansky (See Giggle Poetry below), David McCord, Karla Kuskin, and Judith Viorst (who also does adult work). My favorite books of children’s poems are Viorst’s “If I Were in Charge of the World” and an anthology called “Reflections on the Gift of the Watermelon Pickle.” Prelutsky’s newer work is also top notch. Well-known poets Gwendolyn Brooks and T.S. Eliot have also produced volumes for children (Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats is where the musical came from).

So, the somewhat haphazard list:

Billy Collin’s Poetry 180 site (also follow the links to the Library of Congress poetry resources)
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/

Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry page (syndicated newspaper column using one accessible contemporary poem with Kooser’s brief analysis of it)
http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/

America’s Favorite Poem Project
http://www.favoritepoem.org

Internet Poetry Archive
http://www.ibiblio.org/dykki/poetry/

Academy of American Poets (AAP or just “the Academy”)
http://www.poets.org

Poetry Society of America (PSA)
http://www.poetrysociety.org

Poets & Writers (the industry–the po-biz–magazine)
http://pw.org

AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs)
http://www.awpwriter.org

Council of Literary Magazines and Presses
http://www.clmp.org

Voice of the Shuttle (a scholarly clearinghouse including lots of real academic articles on poetry)
http://vos.ucsb.edu

PSI (Poetry Slam Incorporated–these are the Chicago folks who started it and still do it better than anybody else)
http://www.poetryslam.com

Poetry Daily
http://www.poems.com

Verse Daily
http://www.versedaily.org

Poetry Magazine and The Poetry Foundation (more Chicago folks–and the only money in the po-biz)
http://www.poetrymagazine.org

Project Bartleby
http://www.bartleby.com/verse/

CAPA (Contemporary American Poetry Archive–electronic versions of out-of-print contemporary poetry books)
http://capa.conncoll.edu

Poetry4Kids
http://www.poetry4kids.com/index.php

Giggle Poetry
http://www.gigglepoetry.com

Scholastic’s Writing With Writers Poetry Section
http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/poetry/index.htm

The Emperor of Ice Cream

by Wallace Stevens, from Harmonium

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dwadle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Okay, the much belated entry on Stevens’ “The Snow Man.” If you haven’t had a look at the poem itself yet, find it here in Poetry Friday stack.

This particular poem has been with me since my freshman year of college. And I still find things in it I hadn’t noticed before. Like just now, I was looking at the stanzas (poetry paragraphs)–three lines each. That’s unusual as a form, but I think the evenness of the stanzas suits the coldness of poem’s tone–and the three-point structure almost makes me think of a waltz. One, two, three, one, two, three, he keeps turning us as we dance through the poem.

The evenness of the stanzas says something about the tone as well. We’re being told something in a very level, reasonable voice–flat even. There’s no hurrying to jam extra lines into one stanza, no lingering with a couplet (two-line stanza) here or there. Nor does the poem take up much space on the page–what he’s asserting here is not A BIG IDEA, and trust me, Stevens is a poet capable of asserting big ideas. It’s a small poem, only 15 lines with only a handful of lines more than 10 syllables.

Those numbers may not sound significant, but in poetry they come close to the big magic: 14 lines of 10 metered syllables each is a sonnet. So Stevens is close to the sonnet form here–but choses instead of the sonnet’s more typical four-line stanzas to use his own three-line structure and to use some really short lines, one that’s only 5 syllables long.

In American poetry, the “conversational line”–the dominant line form of the 20th century and still the dominant form today (though there’s great arguments to be made that text messaging and other electronic media are shortening the standard conversational line)–is 8-12 syllables. It’s called the “conversational line” because 8-12 syllables is about how much one speaker in a casual conversation can say at one time:

“Some weather we’re having, huh?”(7)

“Can’t believe it’s this cold in April.”(9)

“I know. I already packed my sweaters away. “(12)

So Stevens is using lines that tend to be a little shorter than the standard conversational line and he’s not using a standard sonnet form, even though he’s close to it. That tells us he’s doing something different from a sonnet (sonnets generally glory in something or sorrow over it) and that he’s probably artificially shortening some of his lines–which speaks of a certain restraint. So what is he doing?

Above all else that Stevens is remembered for–he is remembered as a poet of great imagination. And here, he’s imagining himself as a snow man. He’s trying to imagine what it would be like to be a creature made entirely of snow–but set with eyes, maybe with earmuffs to suggest ears. He’s asking himself, what would a snowman see? What would a snowman hear? What would a snowman feel or think? As poem, it’s an absurd project, but it’s a testament to his immense talent that he can start with such a wacky premise and produce such a beautiful piece.

And I think the success of this pieces lies in the creation of that cold, reasonable tone (none of the emotionality of a sonnet, none of warmth of a casual conversation between strangers), that measured tumbling of the three lines stanzas, those short restrained lines.

He’s got me convinced that’s how a snowman might perceive the world. Has he convinced all of you? Anybody want to post a counter poem? Or perhaps a poem from a different point of view, say one of the spring’s first daffodils? How would the form of that poem be different, how would its outlook change?

Fitting that our month devoted to poetry begins with a day for fools. I say that in all love–I think it takes being something of a fool to be something as a poet.

Fools take risks. They do tricks. They get away with all manner of outrageous words and deeds. They don’t ask for the attention of the court, by the very nature of what they’re doing, they get it. They exist outside the boundaries that limit everybody else. True, they do so at the king’s whim, but that too is part of being the fool. Knowing that at any moment your life as you know it could be over.

But I digress. Having outed myself as a poet just before National Poetry Month (NPM) and having complained that kids don’t get enough “real poems”–I’ve decided to do my part. Each week I’m going to post on a 20th-century poet whose work includes at least a few relatively accessible pieces that I think parents and children can enjoy together. I’ll post the poems for examination as Poetry Friday pieces, though for the purposes of NPM, any given day counts as a Poetry Friday here at Homeschool Kid Lit.

As for the poets we’ll take up together, I’m going to start with Wallace Stevens. Mainly because I’d never heard of him until college and I wish I hadn’t had to wait that long. Here’s the link to the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens

While the Wikipedia entry’s accurate, it’s going to make him sound a lot scarier than he is. If too much information makes your head hurt, then remember just this much: he was a lawyer, then an insurance mogul–very much a man of the world, nothing like the wispy big-eyed poet stereotype; he’s considered a Modernist–he believed it was important to find the meaning of a thing or an event, though he didn’t believe that religion, the traditional route to meaning and understanding, necessarily held the answers. In terms of his willingness to take on the role of fool? He was positively Shakespearean.

The pieces I’m going to post and offer up for discussion are, I think without exception, from his first book Harmonium, published in 1923.

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens, from Harmonium

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Okay, time for a confession: I’m a poet. Academically trained, have a book out and everything. But I’ve been working outside the genre the last couple of years–doing some other worthy and exciting projects, including my first science fiction stories.

Now though, poetry’s calling me back and I’m moving that direction, not just as a writer but as a reader too. I get something from reading and writing poems that I don’t get anywhere else and it’s why I’ll probably always wander back eventually, no matter where I’ve been roaming.

I love the way the language of a poem slows me down. Makes me enter a moment, a thought, a feeling, an experience with a deliberation and awareness I wouldn’t normally bring to the page. It sounds counterintuitive to say such quick little lines, readily consumable in a single reading, can actually go slower than prose–but here’s the thing, in poetry there’s nowhere to go.

To work, a prose narrative has to effectively carry me from page to page, there has to be a reason to keep reading, keep turning those pages. A poem that really works is going to have me stuck on the same page, reading it over and over, wanting to just crawl between the lines and pitch a tent so I can stay there even longer.

Let me give you an example. When I was eleven or twelve, I got into a stash of literature textbooks my Mom had kept from one of her college classes. I discovered both Shelley and Tennyson that year and took to memorizing lines I loved. I was in college before I intellectually understood a lot of what I was reading, but there was something so compelling about the language, I didn’t care that I didn’t get all of it. I took what meaning I could from it and took the rest on faith. By the time I had to write about In Memoriam in college, I’d had six or seven years of rolling these words around on my tongue and in my heart: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, /Believe me, than in half the creeds.” “And Power was with him in the night, /Which makes the darkness and the light, /And dwells not in the light alone…”

I recently read an argument about what kinds of poems we should be offering our kids in order to instill a love of poetry in them. One side argued they need quick and clever rhymes, puns and wordplay to keep drawing them back to the magic of language that’s so wonderfully concentrated in poetry. The other side argued that kids needed poems that would help them explore the subtle texture of the world, develop their emotional and spiritual selves. The text, of course, resolved the argument by saying quite democratically that we need to offer kids all kinds of poems.

I’d buy that resolution if I really believed that most kids, most teachers, most homeschooling parents had ready access to age-appropriate poems of both kinds. Seems to me that while poetry collections aimed at adolescents manage quite handily to move between those two distinct types of poems (I might say between rhymes and poems)–that poetry collections aimed at younger children tend overwhelmingly toward the bouncy stuff. I’d love to be wrong about that assertion, so if any of you are aware of poems or poetry collections for children under the age of 12 that do have that tendency toward slowness, I’d love to hear about them. Comment away!

So we’re subscribing to a farm this year–it’s a cool idea. We pay a local farmer about $600 for the season and in exchange we get six months of just-picked local organic vegetables–everything from spring radishes to fall squash and lots of yummy stuff in between. Weekly pickups right in town. Since the quantities may occasionally be, well, more than we can eat in a week (four heads of cabbage?), I’ve been obsessing over cookbooks lately–figuring out how we’re going to cook and store such bounty.

My favorite evening last week involved me sitting up in bed reading to my three-year-old about spinach, turnips, and broccoli from Diana Shaw’s Almost Vegetarian. While I think Shaw’s cheerful and inventive cookbook is perfect family reading for short spells–I started to wonder about kids’ books that focus on healthy food culture.

And I realized I already had at least one on hand, Treasure Hunt with the Munch Crunch Bunch by Jan Wolterman, Melinda Hemmelgarn, and J.W. Wolterman. A friend had dropped it off to see what we thought of it and we’d had such fun cutting out the cards–great goofy illustrations of fruits and vegetables with “Foodles” (food riddles) on the back of each one, I’d forgotten it was actually a book. The story’s cute, but it’s the cards that have had all the attention at our house. They’re just the right size for my daughter to carry around, put in any one of her several purses, or sort out and discuss at length. They even have their own carrying case. She recognized a lot of her favorites immediately (“That’s a carrot with a hat!”) and it’s made her curious about some more exotic plants as well (“What’s bok choy?”).

Likewise Lynne Cherry’s How Groundhog’s Garden Grew gave us a fun break from grocery shopping when we sat down to read it at the local health food store. While the text waxes a bit didactic for my taste–groundhog gets chastened into learning to garden, the illustrations are soooooo gorgeous we both wanted to lick the pages. And it’s such a full visual experience. Even the margins are stuffed with tantalizing herbs and spices or small pictures outlining the steps to longer processes. Since it spans the whole growing season, from early spring to the great Thanksgiving feast, its seasonal appeal is a long one. And trying to identify all the lush fruits and vegetables made for a great seek-and-find game.

I am, in fact, off to grab a snack of some of freshly shelled peas…

“South Wind”

by Tu Fu, trans. Kenneth Rexroth, collected in A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry

The days grow long, the mountains
Beautiful. The south wind blows
Over blossoming meadows.
Newly arrived swallows dart
Over the streaming marshes.
Ducks in pairs drowse on the warm sand.

Last week’s post left me thinking I needed to get over to the library, check out whatever Alexander Key books they had and be ready to blog summaries and reflections, Key being a children’s science fiction writer who’s known for little other than his sympathetic aliens.

Here’s the hitch, our library–which I adore and find generally delightful and well stocked–has NOTHING by Alexander Key. Now that I’ve fished around a bit, that’s not such a surprise. Of his 22 novels for children and young adults, only The Forgotten Door is still in print. Of his two novels for adults, The Wrath and the Wind was reissued in 2005 by a small press. Not much of a legacy. But it happens all the time–somebody dies, the copyright holders do nothing to keep the work in print and–zap!–a generation later, the whole wealth of an author’s body of work is largely inaccessible. It’s how American publishing works.

It’s just that, in this case, I feel like I have a debt owing. Alexander Key was my favorite science fiction writer when I was a kid. Yep, for me, before there was Bradbury, before there was Heinlein, before there was Ursula LeGuin, and way before there was Alice Sheldon, there was Alexander Key.

If you buy the party line on why Key’s work has not endured, it’s his sentimentality (telepathic animals) and moral earnestness (aliens are often both wiser and nicer than we are) that have kept him from the iconic status of such genre greats as, well, Bradbury, Heinlein & LeGuin. I don’t buy the argument. Keys is no more sentimental than Heinlein and probably less morally earnest than Bradbury or LeGuin (how could he be more?).

I think the reasons he’s not better known are as follows: 1)He wrote almost exclusively for children and young adults in a genre that, in its haste to legitimize itself with adult readers, has become much less kid-friendly in the last thirty years; 2)He died the year he finished his last novel and his heirs, who have also died, did not keep his work in print; 3)He bears the taint of Disnification (Escape to Witch Mountain and Return from Witch Mountain were both made into Disney movies), which has made him easy to dismiss.

What am I going to do about the situation? What do I want you all to do? Well, this post’s a start. I do know there’s a small cult following online, even a little Internet archive of his lesser known works. I’m not linking you there, as I have no desire to bring a cease-and-desist order down on somebody’s well intentioned labor of love. Besides, if tracking the copyright and convincing somebody to bring the works back in print or sign them over to the public domain proves to be as impossible as it sounds, I might just be starting a little DMCA-violation archive of my own. Stay tuned.

When he created the Star Trek franchise, Gene Roddenberry insisted that futuristic alien-human interspecies relationships were a metaphorical way of looking at present-day interracial relationships in the United States. In the utopian frame of the show–we are to assume Earth (including the U.S.) has already outgrown racial prejudices and that human beings are now at a stage where they are working to make nice with “humanoids” much more different from them than they are from one another.

In genre terms, Roddenberry wasn’t doing anything really new–aliens as outsiders, or “others” to borrow a postcolonial term, have a history almost as long as the genre itself. And though there’s plenty of adult science fiction that features space marines with big guns ready to exterminate any alien menace (genocide, anyone?), I’ll wager there’s an equal amount of adult science fiction that takes the notion of alien otherness quite seriously. I’ll spare you the full genre tour, but suffice it to say that as early as the 1930s, writers from the U.S. and elsewhere were creating sympathetic alien characters and using the relationships between those characters and their human counterparts to explore ideas about difference and tolerance (in terms of race, creed, color, gender, ability, etc.) that would not surface in popular discourse until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

On to the Amazon search I did this afternoon. I thought it would be fun to dig up some kid’s picture books on aliens as an oblique way of opening some points of discussion on difference and tolerance. I was assuming that what’s true of adult science fiction was likely true of kid’s SF as well. Imagine my surprise when I had trouble finding even a handful of picture books that featured sympathetic portrayals of aliens. And not that many overall that featured aliens of any kind. Doesn’t anybody remember how popular E.T. was, or even Lilo and Stitch? In chapter books, there were more aliens–but fewer of them sympathetic in any way. With rare exception, I was thrown back on the few titles I was already familiar with. I’ll list those in a minute, but right now, I’m still absorbing my—admittedly superficial and anecdotal–findings. But assuming those findings aren’t too far from the mark (including picture books and chapter books, I looked at well over 100 titles in Amazon’s 4-8 age bracket):

What does it mean that most readily available children’s books about aliens feature them as a evil invading armies rather than curious individual explorers? Or that those books that do include arguably harmless aliens generally characterize them as ugly, gross or stupid?

I think those questions are a lot more powerful left open, so I’m just going to skip to my recommended list of kid’s picture books featuring sympathic aliens (for chapter books, READ BRUCE COVILLE!):

Sector 7 by David Weisner
Surreal rather than typically sci-fi, Weisner nevertheless captures a playful friendship between a boy and a cloud.

Company’s Coming and Company’s Going by Arthur Yorinks
And why should we not simply invite the aliens over to dinner when they arrive?

George Hogglesberry, Grade School Alien by Sarah Wilson
New to me, but definitely on my get-it list: George is an alien new to Earth and new to school. Great example of what could be happening with the trope in kid lit.

Andy the Alien by Jeffrey Scott Chase
Bending the picture-book definition here, but Andy, our fictional tour guide to the actual universe, looks like such fun.

Hedgie Blasts Off by Jan Brett
Okay, so other than the talking dogs, the aliens here aren’t all the most responsible cosmic citizens, but there’s certainly nothing mean or threatening about them.