I was in the library looking at poetry books for children when I stumbled on Jean Little‘s When the Pie was Opened (Little, Brown and Company, 1968).  Little, a Canadian,  is a well known author of children’s books but this was the first book I’d read by her.  What a delight and pleasure! Here was children’s poetry that spoke to my heart as a mother.  I’m not so sure my daughter would like this book, but sometimes there are childrens’ books that are really meant for their parents and this certainly felt like one of them.  All the attendant facets of good poetry are displayed in this collection — attention to details in the natural world through the seasons, deep self awareness and introspection, reflections on reading and books, and poems about poetry itself.  The rhyming quatrains of some poems and references to British classical tales of Robin Hood, Jane Eyre and Jane Austen date the poems somewhat, but there is a pleasurable breadth, spiritually and philosophically, to the poetry that make it seem timeless.  Take for example, the first two stanzas of “Tonight I Must Sing”

Tonight I must sing or sob.
Which will it be?
I am balanced between despair
And ecstasy.

Either will leave me hurt.
I shall be torn asunder.
By the tumult of this joy,
This wound of wonder.

I love the paradoxical and alliterative combination of ‘this wound of wonder!’  I think one of my favorite poems in the collection was “The Glory,” which in some way must be autobiographical as Little was diagnosed legally blind as a child. The poem is narrated by a timid child whose only sensation of light is from a candle lit in her room until the day she she is able to finally perceive the sun outside in all its shining glory.  Glory has been much on my mind lately –  a sermon at a recent funeral I attended spoke of glory as being of another dimension –  but in Little’s poem, the speaker understands that the relation between her candle and the glory of the sun is that “all God’s fire is one” for her “parents had simply set alight/[her] candle from their sun.”

Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Jone at Check It Out.

Compiled by Alice Curry, illustrated by Jan Pieńkowski, with a Foreword by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales,
A River of Stories: Tales and Poems from Across the Commonwealth
Commonwealth Education Trust, 2011.

Ages 8+

What a fabulous anthology!  Seaside, riverside and wellside stories; rain, dewfall and rainbows; a sea-devil from Grenada; gosile ghosts from the Solomon Islands; Rain and Fire arguing in Namibia; Hermit crabs marching in the Bahamas and mother and son crabs walking crookedly in Sri Lanka; three brothers from Mozambique and three more from Kiribati; sailors and fishermen; the beautiful goddess Mawu of the Waters from Ghana; stars in the sky and in the sea… Such a wealth of legend and contemporary observation, all brought together by the unifying theme of water and through Jan Pieńkowski’s gorgeous illustrations.

Published to commemorate the 125^th Anniversary of the Commonwealth Education Trust, A River of Stories brings together each of the 52 Member States of the Commonwealth of Nations in a vibrant mix of traditional storytelling and poetry that highlights both individual cultures and universal human concerns.  By basing the book around water, anthologist Alice Curry immediately creates the potential for empathy among the book’s readers, for water is something that we all experience, though in different ways, as indeed Curry ponders in her thought-provoking introduction. The Prince of Wales, in his Foreword, also points out the way these stories and poems from a vast array of cultures and traditions are a way of “enhancing and explaining reality” and “encourage us to think about the kind of future we will pass on to our children and grandchildren, and the central importance of water to that future.”

As well as a lavish full-bleed double-page spread given over to each section title and a delightful illuminated letter introducing each story, Pieńkowski’s bold illustrations splash across every page: a monkey hangs from the header line here; there, the green “claw-like hand” of the malignant Nkalimeva from Swaziland holds tightly onto the dismayed elephant’s nose that stretches across the whole width of the book.  Pieńkowski’s iconic silhouettes and stylised use of color echo the full gamut of the shading possibilities of silk-screen printing to great effect, from solid overlay to beautiful gradations that belie the apparent simplicity of the design.

Some of the writing may already be familiar, such as Kenya’s entry, an extract from Verna Aardema’s now classic “Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain”.  Much of it will very likely be new, and with the sources given at the end, there is plenty of scope for further exploration.  Each story or poem is no more than a five-minute read and since each one begs to be read aloud, this is the perfect book to have on stand-by to take advantage of spontaneous readaloud opportunites.  It would be a good idea to keep it to hand in any case, as it’s likely to become a firm favourite with young readers.

Marjorie Coughlan
February 2012

Winter nights are long, cold and dark in northern countries like Canada.  So often, getting up for school means trudging out into the pitch blackness which can be a little unsettling.  In Caroline Woodward’s Singing Away the Dark (illustrated by Julie Morstad, Simply Read Books, 2010), a six year old girl must set out from her family farmhouse and walk a long way to the highway bus stop.  She must go down a hill,  in between the barbed wires of a fence and through a stand of trees — all, of course, in the darkness.  A very scary prospect indeed, for one so young!  So what does the little girl do?  She sings, sings away the dark.

The girl’s journey is narrated in verse, in loose quatrains, with end rhymes every second and fourth line.   So the journey reads a bit like a song itself, accompanied also by some very fine illustration by artist Julie Morstad.  By the time the little girl meets the bus, she has overcome her fears and is “so happy when [she sees] two headlights blaze into view.”   For any child who must negotiate dark mornings as is so often the case in rural communities in northern Canada, Singing Away the Dark is certainly a good solution to the problem.

This week Poetry Friday is hosted by Laura at Writing the World for Kids.

This past Christmas holiday, I visited family and ate a lot of food!  One of the dishes prepared by my sister-in-law was the Korean Bibimbap, or Bee-Bim Bop — a rather musical sounding dish to be  sure.   A couple nights later, I found myself reading Linda Sue Park‘s Bee-Bim Bop (illustrated by Ho Baek Lee, Clarion, 2006) to my four year old niece.  Bee-Bim Bop is about a young girl who helps prepare Bibimbap with her mother.  Written rather appropriately in verse and making full use of that Bee-Bim Bop alliteration and words that rhyme with ‘bop’ like ‘shop’ and ‘flip flop’ — the girl helps her mother shop, prepare and serve the meal.   It was fun to read this book to my niece after we had dined on the dish so recently!  I since discovered that bibimbap is often served as a lunar calendar New Year dish, so our eating it just after Christmas before the New Year was  somewhat timely.  But bibimpap any time of the year is delicious.

What festival foods did you and your family consume over the holidays?  Are there kids books about those foods?  Do drop us a line and let us know the title.  Reading is a kind of feasting, after all!

Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Tara at A Teaching Life.

We recently received an email from Carol-Ann Hoyte, a children’s literature specialist-advocate based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, who is editing a sports-themed e-book anthology of poetry for children. She asked us to circulate the call for submissions for this project (which we are more than pleased to do!)  and said “So far, I have received around 130 or so poems, mainly from the U.S. but also a handful of poems from each of the following countries: Ireland (10 poems), New Zealand (5 poems), England (8 poems), Canada (3 poems), and Japan (1 poem). I am currently working to increase the number of submissions coming from Canada, England, and Australia as well as from Caribbean, African, and Asian nations.”

For any of our PaperTigers readers who may be interested in participating, here are some additional details on the project:

ADULTS who write children’s poetry, including those who are emerging poets, are invited to submit their work before March 21st, 2012. Poets whose work is selected for the collection will receive a small honorarium and will be contacted shortly after the deadline if their poem is chosen to be included in the anthology

The editors are looking looking for original, unpublished poems, written in English aimed at 5- to 12-year-olds that deal with various aspects of athletics: Olympics and other major international sports events (i.e., FIFA World Cup), winter/summer sports, individual/team sports, winning and losing, etc. Poems may be written in a variety of forms  including but not limited to the couplet, triplet, limerick, haiku, tanka, cinquain, diamante, mask poem, apostrophe poem, list poem, etheree, palindrome, etc.

Submissions should be emailed to Carol-Ann Hoyte:  kidlitfan1972(at)yahoo(dot)ca

A portion of the anthology’s proceeds will be donated to Right to Play, an international organization working with volunteers and partners to use sport and play to enhance child development in areas of disadvantage.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Teaching Authors – head on over…

If it happened here
as it happened there. . .
If it happened now
as it happened then. . .

Who would have seen the miracle?
Who would have brought gifts?
Who would have taken them in?

This poem is at the beginning of Canadian artist William Kurelek‘s A Northern Nativity (Tundra Books, 1976).  An old book to be sure, but a bit of a Canadian classic, especially if you happen to be an admirer of Kurelek’s work.  A Northern Nativity explores the notion of what a nativity would look like if Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus were to have been in Canada in the years of the Great Depression.  Various diverse locations such as an igloo on the far northern tundra to the inside of a prairie grain elevator to a fishing cabin perched on rocky outcropping on the sea become a place for the holy family seeking shelter.  The story is relayed of how during a cold December in the 1930′s in Alberta, twelve year old William had a series of Christmas dreams in which he envisioned the holy family in need as many were in those hard times.  And always in his mind were the questions: If it happened there, why not here?  If it happened then, why not now?  And so is the Nativity experienced and re-experienced by William and the reader throughout this book’s text and images.  If you don’t have the wherewithal to get the book in hand on time for Christmas, you can watch this video of Kurelek’s images in the book set to Chris DeBurgh’s When Winter Comes.

This post will be the last PaperTigers post of 2011 and we wish all our readers a happy holiday season and best wishes for a New Year.  Corinne will be back with her calendar on January 1.   Poetry Friday is hosted this week by Doraine Bennet of Dori Reads.

Sometimes poetry can feel like such a grown-up subject — too hard for children to understand and enjoy.  My efforts in getting my children to like poetry have had mixed results.  However, a children’s poetry book by the recently deceased Florence Parry Heide and daughter Roxanne Heide Pierce entitled Oh, Grow Up: Poems to Help You Survive Parents, Chores, School and Other Afflictions (Orchard Books, 1996) was a real hit with my daughter.  Illustrated by Nadine Bernard Westcott, this funny book explores what it’s like to be a child and have to ‘grow up.’    There’s poems about having to share with or being outnumbered by siblings; there are poems about braces and hand-me-downs.   My daughter was particularly fixated with the ‘braces’ poem:

My braces have been on for years.
They’re coming off next week
I can hardly wait to see
if there are teeth beneath.

I wonder if her fascination has to do with her brother’s braces which, rather coincidentally, came off this week!  As is our usual custom, we read the poems alternately — she reading one poem and I reading the other — and it was an enjoyable poetry reading experience for both of us.   The illustrations by Westcott were as down-to-earth as the poems and my daughter quite liked the pictures.

Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Robyn at Read Write Howl.

Continuing our exploration of the world of e-books for children, we’re asking practitioners and people on the ground about some of the challenges and triumphs for them personally, as well as for the children’s publishing industry as a whole.

Today we have with us Janet Wong, former lawyer turned children’s book author of numerous books, including A Suitcase of Seaweed, Me and Rolly Maloo, Twist: Yoga Poems, and Once Upon a Tiger, an illustrated e-book poetry collection about endangered animals, as well as three e-poetry collections, co-designed and edited with Sylvia Vardell: Poetry Tag Time, p*tag and the recently released Gift Tag. Janet’s many awards include the International Reading Association’s “Celebrate Literacy Award”.

We first interviewed Janet in 2008 and it’s great to welcome her back to PaperTigers to talk here about her experiences with e-books.

***

What was your inspiration for writing e-books? Was that your intention from the get-go, or was there an evolution in your creative process?

Sylvia Vardell and I hatched our PoetryTagTime project one year ago at the NCTE convention with one simple goal: to make poetry an impulse buy. Poetry books are too often neglected, left to collect dust on bookshelves. We wanted people to hear about our books, read a sample poem, click “buy” (for no more than the cost of a cup of coffee)–and fall in love with poetry!

Children’s books, particularly picture books, present specific challenges to the e-book industry in terms of faithful reproduction of art and story. They also present exciting opportunities for new forms of interaction. What limitations or challenges, expected or unexpected, have you personally experienced creating e-books for children, and in turn, what benefits have you discovered as compared to printed books?

Designing for the small black-and-white screen of the Kindle isn’t easy, especially since you can’t know what size font a reader will choose. A child who chooses a large font might end up breaking a poem’s lines in places where a line break might be, well, ugly. For our third PoetryTagTime venture, GIFT TAG, Sylvia came up with the name “Kindleku” to describe the form that we “invented” for the Kindle screen. This form allows a maximum of 10 lines and 25 characters per line (including spaces)–the most that will fit on a Kindle screen when it is set at Font Size 6 (though Font Size 4 is, in my opinion, the best size for reading most e-books). Douglas Florian called this form the “Kindlekuku” and we acknowledge in the intro that it was cuckoo to limit our poets to 250 characters per poem–but we think the poems are terrific!

Particularly in English-speaking countries, a common concern is the lack of diversity in children’s books. How do you think e-books might address such concerns, and how has your work engaged with issues of multicultural children’s books? 

More and more people are discovering the authors in themselves and soon will be using e-books to make their voices and stories heard. This is such an exciting time to be involved with books. There will be lots of awful books, just as there are lots of awful YouTube videos–but there will also be indie-published gems. I anticipate an explosion of diversity in subject matter and also books offered in many more languages. For instance, one of the e-books I’m working on is a ballad about the first famous Chinese poet, Qu Yuan, and the origins of the Dragon Boat Festival, that will appear in a bilingual Mandarin/English edition. I’m looking forward to publishing e-book versions of several of my books in several languages, from Korean to Lithuanian!

On a similar note, in the twentieth century the development of children’s rooms in public libraries marched hand-in-hand with growth in the children’s publishing industry. Do you think e-books will change the roles of traditional libraries, and how do you envision e-books reaching children of all incomes and backgrounds?

Thousands of copies of my e-books Once Upon a Tiger: New Beginnings for Endangered Animals and PoetryTagTime have been downloaded by children in Ghana and Kenya through the terrific Worldreader.org program–books that would’ve cost a fortune to ship to Africa. The newest Kindle includes a $79 version; with the abundance of free and cheap books, these e-readers might be the best way to reach children in circumstances where traditional libraries are not an easy option.

We love sneak previews! What are you working on at the moment? Do you plan for it to come out in print, as an e-book, or both?

Right now Sylvia and I are finishing up GIFT TAG, an anthology of holiday poems. This is the third book in our PoetryTagTime series. It will be available as an e-book for Kindles, Nooks, iPads, phones–and computers, too (many people are just discovering that they can download the free Kindle app to their regular computers). The book begins with a Thanksgiving poem by Jane Yolen and contains a reminder of the meaning of Christmas by Lee Bennett Hopkins, a whimsical dreidel poem by Douglas Florian, a Mew Year’s Day poem for cat-lovers by Children’s Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis, and 23 more poems about everything from getting your first bicycle to your first bottle of perfume, being a spider in a Christmas tree, and having your Christmas stocking pop!

If you were a fortune-teller, where would you predict the future lies for the evolution of the printed book vs. the e-book generally? 

Too often I hear people say something negative about e-books, followed by the phrase, “because I love books.” I love both ice cream and frozen yogurt; can’t we have both? I’ll make a bold prediction: e-book poetry anthologies will actually make print collections of poetry more popular than ever. I think a lot of people who are new to poetry will take a chance and spend $2.99 to buy an e-book anthology like PoetryTagTime, which will lead them to discover a bunch of poets that they’d never heard of before. You can’t read Allan Wolf’s poem in P*TAG about burping up kittens in Shanghai without wanting to read more of his work–which is currently mainly available in print books only.

What’s up next on your to-read e-book list? Do you have any favorite e-books that you’d recommend?

Each week I have a new favorite! Today’s favorite, though, is an OLD book: Opposites by Richard Wilbur. The line drawings come through really well on the Kindle, and the poems beg to be read again and again, of course–even just one poem at a time, when the mood strikes. That’s a great thing about a poetry book: you can read it a poem at a time and not feel like you’ve “lost your place”–and the poems are so short that you can read one on your phone while you’re waiting in line!

***

Thank you, Janet.

And the good news is that since doing the interview, Gift Tag has been released and is now available to buy… Time to get e-reading!

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Carol at Carol’s Corner.

The 2nd Children’s Poetry Festival was celebrated in El Salvador, November 16 – 18, 2011. Talleres de Poesia hosted the event at the National Library in San Salvador where a number off well-known poets including Jorge Tetl Argueta, Francisco X. Alarcon,  Maria Guadalupe Castellanos, Jorgelina Cerritos and Manlio Argueta worked with Salvadoran children, youth and teachers in a blend of poetry readings and workshop presentations. The  theme of the workshops this year was the importance of reading and significance of peace for Salvadoran children and youth. The event was a resounding success; check out the smiles on the participants’ faces and the video of the event.

Edited by Debjani Chatterjee and Brian D’Arcy, illustrated by Shirin Adl,
Let’s Celebrate! Festival Poems from Around the World
Frances Lincoln, 2011.

Ages 5-11

Let’s Celebrate is an effervescent anthology of diverse poetry put together by poets Debjani Chatterjee and Brian D’Arcy. It invites young readers to share in the exuberance of a wide array of festivals celebrated around the world. Starting with “The Chinese Dragon” bringing in the Chinese New Year, ending with “Kwanzaa” in December, and visiting different cultures, countries and religions in between, the book takes children on a journey whose unifying thread is the happiness that each of the festivals awakens. Children will likely find poems relating to festivals that are familiar to them, and their curiosity will be aroused to find out about the rest. Endnotes about each festival give relevant background; and again, children may want to know more after reading them.

The poems themselves come in a variety of forms – some with regular patterns of rhyme and meter, others in free verse. There are choruses that just have to be chanted aloud, like “Carnival! Carnival! Everybody shout out – Carnival!” in Valerie Bloom’s wonderful poem “Carnival”. There are also translations, like the selection of Japanese “Cherry Blossom” haiku; “Dance, Dance: A Poem for Rangali Bihu” from Assam; and extracts from Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Tomatoes”, used to commemorate the Spanish Tomatina Festival. Illustrator Shirin Adl’s exuberant splashes of red paint certainly get the message across here!

In fact, the illustrations are a joy throughout. Adl uses an effective blend of painting and paper/fabric/photographic collage (I especially love the seeds, pulses and herbs illustrating Chatterjee’s acrostic “Diwali”). Plenty of authentic contextual detail helps to bring the celebrating to life, and lots of happy children and their families are an open-armed invitation for young readers to join in the celebrations too, whether it’s helping to scrape pancakes off the ceiling while “Tossing Pancakes” (by Nick Toczek), running to “get your skates on” for the “Ice Festival” (by D’Arcy), or counting out the significance of each candle for “Hannukah” (by Andrea Shavick).

So yes, let us indeed celebrate – you can’t help but be caught up in the joyous spirit of this anthology. And with every day being a festival somewhere in the world, as Chatterjee and D’Arcy point out in their introduction, if there isn’t a poem for their particular festive day (or indeed, even if there is), Let’s Celebrate! will doubtless inspire young readers to compose one of their own.

Marjorie Coughlan
November 2011