When I was in the UK this spring, I found a delightful poetry anthology called I Like This Poem: A collection of poems chosen by children for children in aid of The International Year of the Child.  The book was published in 1979 as a fundraiser and was unique insofar as the poems had been selected and recommended by children from ages 6-15.  The anthology is divided into age categories, so a parent or children themselves, can select the section appropriate to their age or the age of their child.  As to be expected, I had differing experiences reading the poems to my twelve year old son and my eight year old daughter.

One of the nice details in this anthology is the inclusion of a child’s comment on why s/he liked the particular poem.  I found with reading the poetry to my son — some of it difficult to grasp or opaque to him — that it helped to have another child’s comment on why the poem was liked or meaningful.  Indeed, it also helped me as a reader better experience the poem as well!  My son preferred funny poems, but I was struck by several comments by readers about how the ‘beauty’ in the poems moved them.

With my daughter, I had an entirely different reading experience.  My daughter responded best to poems that played with sounds. Midway through our readings, she got it into her head that she would like to act out the poems.  A particular favorite was “On the Ning Nang Nong” by Spike Milligan.  A playful-with-words kind of poem, it goes like this:

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
And the Monkeys all say Boo!
There’s a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots Jibber Jabber Joo.

Watching my daughter happily ‘booing’ like a monkey and ‘bonging’ like a cow, I felt she was experiencing poetry at its most exuberant and celebratory best.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Kate Coombs at Book Aunt.

It’s hard to believe that a month has gone by since my first update on our rising to the PaperTigers Reading Challenge but it has and we are just about managing to keep up! Our three books this month are all very different and once again Big Brother and Little Brother have prepared their own reviews. It is quite coincidental that both their ‘solo’ books are illustrated by Ed Young – and that they both feature piercing eyes on their front covers!

Meanwhile our joint choice has been The Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray. We still have quite a long way to go and I suspect we’ll be dipping into it right to the end of the Challenge: you can’t rush Nonsense Poetry! Each poem has to be savored and the sounds enjoyed. Sukanta Chaudhuri’s translations from the original Bengali are truly amazing – lots of delightful rhymes and rhythms; and nonsense that is both nonsensical and convincingly English. Sukumar Ray’s own sketches and silhouettes sometimes give a visual lead into the poems and it hasn’t worried my two that some of the language is archaic: they expect to be baffled because it is, after all, nonsense! I think the word porcochard from “Hotch Potch” is set to become a new family word. But of course this is a translation – and here is another version, equally virtuoso, of the same poem, this time translated by Sukumar Ray’s son, Satyajit Ray. Here the extraordinary combination of a pochard/duck and a porcupine has become a “Porcuduck”…. Which of course leads into all sort of questions about translations… but that’s for a later date!

Big Brother’s book was Sadako in the picture book version by Eleanor Coerr, illustrated, as I said, by Ed Young. I said how much I was looking forward to seeing this book in a post for World Peace Day; here’s what Big Brother (aged 9 ½ exactly!) has to say: (more…)

Yesterday was National Poetry Day in the UK and the winners of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award were announced. One of the winning poems was written in the style of a mediaeval ballad but was a commentry on the prime-ministership of Tony Blair. The prizes include school visits and, for older winners, a week-long residential course – and, of course, having their poems published in an anthology – wow! When some of the winning poems are up and running on The Poetry Society’s website, I’ll add a link… here they are!

Stories in verse make really satisfying read-alouds. Children pick up the rhymes and rhythms and love to preempt what’s coming or chant along once the verse becomes familiar. Mine always surprise me by being able to quote what seem to me great tracts compared with what I would be able to come up with! As I’ve mentioned before, we love Julia Donaldson’s books and a favorite is her retelling of the Chinese legend The Magic Paintbrush, which reads in true ballad form, over many 4-lined rhyming stanzas, and with repetitions and recurring themes, such as the steaming pot of shrimps the young heroine Shen conjures up before her astonished family:

“Did you catch some shrimps, Shen?
Did you catch some fish?
Did you gather oysters
To fill the empty dish?”

It’s beautifully illustrated by Joel Stewart, who has a particular talent for illustrating poetry, from Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky to Carol Ann Duffy’s zany Underwater Farmyard, another book we have all enjoyed.

Reading this Magic Paintbrush (more…)

Chicken Spaghetti’s Poetry Friday this week highlights a piggy limerick. I enjoyed the quotation of a limerick interwoven with her line-by-line critique, which seems to be heading towards creating a new form of comic verse… I think Edward Lear would approve! We have been reading and reciting Lear’s limericks on and off over the school holidays, following the visit of a friend who started inventing them at the dinner table. My younger son’s love of playing with words until they are transmuted into something not-quite-completely different is fully satisfied by Lear’s Nonsense Alphabets, which he loves reading aloud with me and then chewing over on his own afterwards:

A was once an Apple-pie,
Pidy
Widy
Tidy
Pidy
Nice insidy
Apple-pie

And so on…

We were also bowled over in a Devonshire pottery (on our way home from Cornwall) when we were regaled with a complete rendition of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky – truly inspiring! By chance, we had been listening to a dramatised recording of Alice’s Adventures through the Looking Glass in the car so the boys were able to join in in parts, thus gaining more kudos than they truly deserved!

Now I really must seek out Sukumar Ray’s collection of nonsense poetry, Abol Tabol, as chosen by Swapna Dutta in a Personal View for PaperTigers. Do any of you have a favorite of his that you would recommend – or any other nonsense poetry for children?