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.

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!

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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 Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan.  I have been reading about them lately through books like Kayano Shigeru’s The Ainu (Tuttle Publishing, 2004).  Kayano Shigeru, who died in 2006, was himself an Ainu and worked tirelessly to preserve and disseminate elements of Ainu culture to the world.

The Ainu had an oral tradition of tale-telling and one of their oral tales or songs known as kamuy yukar is translated into English by Kyoko Selden and given here on the website of the Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.  As typical of many oral tales, it is presented as poetry.  As it explains on the website, kamuy yukar are songs of gods and demi-gods.  This particular story is of the wind goddess, Pitatakamuy and her encounter with the demi-god Okikurumi.    It is a revealing tale insofar as it shows how the Ainu relate to their deities — they relate to their gods not just with reverence, awe and respect but they also challenge and chastise the gods for wanton and destructive behaviour!  I remember being surprised by that when I read The Song of the Cicada by Shizue Ukaji, another Ainu writer and storyteller.  The old woman swept away in the typhoon gets angry at the goddess who has caused the terrible typhoon much like the demi-god Okikurumi becomes angry with Pitatakamuy.

The Ainu have a rich oral tradition of poetic tale-telling, but little of it has been translated into English.  However, this is slowly changing with the efforts of a variety of scholars and students of the culture.  I’ve discovered a wonderful blog called Project Uepeker: Introducing the Ainu Oral Tradition to the English-Speaking World that is chock full of information about Ainu culture in English.   In fact, it was at this blog that I discovered a new book called Ainu Spirits Singing: The Living World of Chiri Yukie’s Ainu Shin’yoshu by Sarah Strong (University of Hawaii Press, 2011), a study and translation of Ainu kamuy yukar as originally translated into Japanese by Ainu writer Chiri Yukie.  I hope more developments like this keep happening and that word gets around about the oral storytelling traditions of this indigenous people of northern Japan.

Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe.

If you want something for young children that’s full of zing and just a little bit different on the poetry front, then Anything But A Grabooberry is exactly what you’re looking for! First published by the wonderful Tara Books in 1998, it still feels as innovative as it was then.

Anushka Ravishankar’s nonsense poem that fills the book is based on the premise that I’d rather be anything else apart from a Grabooberry… The examples that make up that “anything else” will have young readers laughing aloud, as well as letting imaginations fly with what the dreadful grabooberry might be. And Rathna Ramanathan has incorporated the words into the book’s design, creating a visual treat in red and green through her exuberant combination of the words’ meanings and physical appearance.

As you read, you find yourself having to slow down over each page to savour the design. This in turn encourages deeper pondering of the meaning – thereby intensifying the enjoyment of reading nonsense! Choosing favorite bits is difficult, but here goes:

i want to be an elephant or a packing trunk

- I love the juxtaposition of elephant and trunk, and you can see these pages on this post from a Japanese blog, which also reproduces the book’s blurb in English;

i think i’d like to be sneeze
flying through the sky

- where “sneeze” and “flying” fizz across the pages and some of the letters are spun at angles – the “i” in “flying” becoming, appropriately enough, an exclamation mark; and

the sun, the moon or sixteen stars
any planet, even ours

Anything But A Grabooberry is perfect for getting children chuckling aloud, and both they and the adults they share it with will appreciate the book’s visual wit and sophistication. Do read this article by Rathna Ramanathan for some fascinating insight into the book’s creation – I especially liked what she said about children’s feedback on early drafts, and Gita Wolf’s comments:

I tested the pages out on several friends’ kids – their reading aloud of the typographic text on the page was an invaluable input. It gave the bee many more ‘e’s, and the grabooberry more ‘ooo’s… [...] As Gita Wolf, publisher at Tara Books explains, ‘We found that children enjoy figuring out words like puzzles, since they have no pre-conceptions about this. Adults are not necessarily faster at comprehending it.’

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Tabitha Yeatts: The Opposite of Indifference – head on over…

Poetry Friday falls on Remembrance Day here in Canada when we remember fallen soldiers of the past.   Every year the fifth and sixth graders of my daughter’s school are asked to participate in the Remembrance Day Assembly by singing a song and this year’s class song choice was Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s haunting fusion-rendition of  Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World.  Many of you have probably heard the song, but may not know much about the singer unless you’re  Hawaiian.  The song became a big hit when it was released in 1993 and catapulted a little known full-time Hawaiian musician to international fame.

On the liner notes to the  CD Facing Future featuring  Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World is a short poem from which the title of the album gets its name.  I won’t quote the whole poem here which is in part about Hawaiian nationalism, but the essence of it is contained in these last two lines:

Remember the past but do not dwell there
Face the future where all our hopes stand.

Remembrance Day ceremonies give us the chance to remember the past so that we might ‘face future’ as Bruddah Iz would have it, with hope.  As one coming from a people and a land conquered by white colonialists, Israel’s words ring with a particular poignancy on the matter. As we remember the fallen dead on this day, it’s good also to remember those who fell or were felled before the formation of our nation states — namely the aboriginal people of the countries we live in.

Poetry Friday today is hosted by Teaching Authors.