Summer is often a time for travel and for making observations about new places and sights.  One of our great traveling pastimes as a family is the noting of unusual words or signs on the highway or in the city.  Sometimes these words become ‘found poems.’  A great website that exploits the art of the ‘found poem’ is the playfully and poetically titled  G.P.S. Global Poetry System.  I can’t remember now how exactly I stumbled on the site, but I found it entertaining and delightful.  The G.P.S. project began with poet Lemn Sissay, artist in residence in London’s Southbank Centre.   Here’s what the website says G.P.S. is about:

Global Poetry System is a Southbank Centre project to explore and map the poetry of the world. It’s based on the idea that poetry is all around us, from gravestones to graffiti, from birthday cards to blogs, in the landscape and in our memories. G.P.S. invites you to take a fresh look at where you are and find the poetry that inspires you. Photograph it, video it, audio record it or write it down – tell the world where it is on the map.

I haven’t tried submitting a ‘found poem’ yet myself, but the site inspired me last year to send my students out into the streets to look for poetry in their surroundings. They came up with some great stuff!  Maybe you and your kids might stumble across something in your travels — a found poem — that you’d like to post to G.P.S.

Today’s Poetry Friday host is Laura at Teach Poetry K-12.  Also, on another note, do check out Corinne’s recent post on a children’s poetry festival to be held in El Salvador in November.

Canadian Poems for Canadian Kids edited by Jen Hamilton, illustrated by Merrill Fearon (Subway Books, 2005) is exactly what the title says it is — twenty five poems by Canadian poets for kids about life in Canada.  With a foreword by the late and well known Canadian poet, P.K. Page in which Page states of the importance of poetry for the development of childrens’ minds, the book launches into its poems with aplomb beginning with Irene Watts‘ “Stories.”  “Everything/ has a story,” Watts asserts, and “a world full of stories” is what we need “to grow.”

I liked the poems that best celebrate creativity and imagination.  The late Marianne Bluger’s “I Chased a Butterfly” encapsulates the childhood desire of wanting to catch that flitting beauty that is the butterfly, but the poem ends with the plain but rather profoundly stated:

I chased that butterfly
one whole day
but it’s all right with me
that she got away.

Ken Ward’s “I Want to be A Painter” is about the envy two creative artists — one a baker, the other a painter — have for one another’s work.  And Page’s poems “Cloud Watching” is about the imaginative exercise of seeing shapes in the clouds.

I think I would have liked this collection more if there were a diversity of poets represented here that spoke to the  multicultural aspects of Canadian identity.  Certainly there are many fine Canadian poets out there that have done just that and could have been included in this anthology.   I was sorry that the editors couldn’t have tracked some down.  However, that aside, Canadian Poems for Canadian Kids introduces some fine poetry by Canadian poets for children.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Breanne at Language, Literacy, Love.

With this month’s issue of PaperTigers being all about play, I picked up a Canadian poetry book chock full of rhymes one can skip, clap, bounce a ball or do actions to.  The book is called Eenie Meenie Manitoba by Robert Heidbreder, illustrated by Scot Ritchie (Kids Can Press, 1996.)  I’ve featured one of Heidbreder’s other poetry books in a previous post, and was also at the same time, quite happy to discover this book!

Eenie Meenie Manitoba explores Canadian geography in such delightful rhyming poems as “Toronto-to-to,” “Horsing Around BC,” “On the Rideau,” and “Charlottetown Fishmongers.”  In this huge country with such wildly diverse landscapes, climates and cultures, it’s great to find a book that attempts to cover all the ‘bases’ so to speak!  Alongside some poems are directions on how to use the rhymes in play.  For example, to the poem “To Be, or Not To Be,” one can pull petals off of a daisy in the way people used to with the old  ’she loves me, she loves me not’ rhyme.  “Apple Me Dapple Me” is a good poem to bounce a ball to.  And for skipping, there’s “Nova Scotia Lobsters.”  The trick is to memorize the poem so one can use it in play.   Summer is a good time to try out these rhymes and get your kids and yourselves outside with a bit of rope and a ball.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Carol at Carol’s Corner.

Anything But Hank by Rachel Lebowitz and Zachariah Wells, illustrated by Eric Orchard (Biblioasis 2008) is the story of a child in search of a name.  Told in quatrains of rhyming verse with an abab rhyme scheme, the story unfolds over five ‘books’ as it were, titled Book the First, Book the Second, etc.   A mother and father of an infant cannot agree on a name which makes the baby cranky and unruly (you would be, too, if you were “known by ‘it’ and ‘thing’ ) until at last a  pig appears with a possible solution.  He will take the child to a naming wizard’s lizard.

The rhymes in this book are entirely playful –  is it any surprise, for example,  that the wizard has a lizard?    Or that the full moon over the hedge is named Reg?  The illustrations by Eric Orchard are rich and lush with particularly expressive renditions of the pig and the little red-outfitted nameless infant.  The title, Anything But Hank, of course, refers to the name of Hank which the child is NOT to be named, but finding out what the child’s name will be is what keeps you reading.  I won’t tell you what that name is, but will give you a hint:  it rhymes with ‘fridge.’

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Amy at the Art of Irreverence.

With our current focus on How Children Play Around the World, I’ve also been looking a wee bit closer to home and have enjoyed revisiting Bairn Rhymes (Mercat Press, 1999) by Scottish poet J. K. Annand (1908-1993). He was passionate about Scottish poetry and his own poetry for children is wonderful. I have chosen a couple of extracts from the “Games” section of Bairn Rhymes.

The first is from the poem “Conkers” – and I wish you could see Dennis Carabine’s accompanying illustration of “me” leaning smugly against a tree while “my” opponent tries to smash “my” conker – and there’s some lovely play later on in the poem between “conker” and “conquer” too, but here’s the exhilarating beginning:

We’re for the laird’s wuid,
Geordie speels the tree,
Shakes aa the conkers
Doun on me.

The second poem I’ve chosen is called “Skatin”, which charts learning to ice-skate. Little Brother empathises with this one, and still feels stuck in the first verse:

Skatin on the ice
I tummelt aince or twice.
I gaed hame feelin glum
Wi bruises on my bum.

This beautifully produced book makes no allowances for anyone not reasonably well-versed in Scots – but I’d really encourage you to have a go. With poems about animals and birds; people like the Dentist, the Polis or the Postie; or childhood encounters such as “Grannie’s Scooter” or the “Twa-leggit Mice” who mither thinks eat the chocolate biscuits out of the tin, the collection is a delightful evocation of childhood that offers nostalgia to the grown-ups and contemporary relevance to children. Poetry can do that!

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Two Writing Teachers – head on over!

…wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” is the famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but I’m using it for today’s post to direct your attention to two things — 1) the new PT issue that went live on June 2 that is all about children and play, and 2) about Shakespeare plays and poetry.  The word “play” has various meanings and one of them refers to drama.  Children naturally act out stories with each other or their toys, and create little ‘plays,’ as it were.   And so taking them to see plays is a natural extension, I think, of that basic child-like impulse to create them.

Last year, I wrote a post about the Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night, put on by the Unicorn Theatre in London.   We also went to see Romeo and Juliet at the Globe theatre.  I was convinced by my experiences there that children (and parents) need not be intimidated by Shakespeare’s plays.   Of course, for most people, it is the poetic language of Shakespeare (the plays are mostly written in blank verse which is unrhymed iambic pentameter)  that can be off-putting; however, if one gets to see the play acted, the language does not appear nearly so opaque and in fact contributes to the pleasure of watching the drama.  In Winnipeg where I live, we have a local theatre company, Shakespeare in the Ruins, that puts on a Shakespeare play every summer in outdoor venues.  This year they staged the Merry Wives of Windsor.  We took both our children to the play and they enjoyed watching it.

Have you ever taken your children to a Shakespeare play?  What was it and did they enjoy it?  Does your city have a local company that stages plays for children?  Do tell us here at PaperTigers.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Kelly Polark.

What a lovely name for an anthology of poetry – Rainbow World: Poems from Many Cultures (Hodder Children’s Books, 2003). Edited by Bashabi Fraser and Debjani Chatterjee, and illustrated by Kelly Waldek, it brings together more than 80 poets, focusing “on the voices of Black and Asian poets from Britain, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand and the continents of Asia and Africa”. The poems are divided into different sections – I’ve chosen extracts today from poems in the first and last “chapters” – firstly, from ‘Who’s Who – race, culture and identity’, part of the poem “a ‘coloured’ girl, I sleep with rainbows” by Lucinda Roy:

I am black. I am white.
I am the colour of the sun at noon.
I breathe with the sea.

For coloured girls who sleep with rainbows
there is light in the spittle of strangers.
My father, as black as brown can be;
my mother as white as the half-moons in his nails.
I am their tangible kiss.

And, from ‘The Last Word – peace and harmony’, part of a poem called “The Unknown You Have Made Known to Me” by Rabindranath Tagore from India, translated by Debjani Chatterjee:

I fear to leave a place I know of old,
Who knows what the future will unfold?
I forget the simple truth that within
The new, you are the familiar.
You have brought the distance near, my friend,
And made a brother of the stranger.

To read the rest of these poems, get hold of this superb anthology – mine came from my local library. It’s chockablock with poems that are soul-searching, identity-searching, thought-provoking, whimsical, catchy and just plain fun.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Laura Salas over at Writing the World for Kids. Head on over…

See Saw Saskatchewan is a children’s collection of poems about Canada by Robert Heidbreder, illustrated by Scot Ritchie (Kids Can Press, 2003.)  I found out about this delightful book from librarian Sue Fisher’s blog, Mousetraps and the Moon.  For National Poetry Month which was April, Sue featured various  children’s poetry books on her blog.

See Saw Saskatchewan is a playful collection of poems  that can be skipped to, ball-bounced to, or clapped to.  The poems are about life in Canada in various locations featuring activities, or animals, or sights particular to the locale.  There’s definitely a touch of Dennis Lee in these poems that’s detectable in such poems that play on Canadian place names like in  ‘Niagara Falls’:

Kapuskasing sings
Cornwall calls
Thunder Bay storms,
And Niagara
FALLS!

In fact there are a lot of playful references to famous children’s rhymes which you can tell by the titles of some of the poems like ‘Pick a peck of P.E.I.’ or ‘Take Toronto by the Toe’.  I had to laugh at the poem referring to my home city of Winnipeg: ‘Winnipeg Mosquitoes’. Yes, we do often have them and in enough abundance, to make them poetry-worthy! There’s a cute illustration of two besotted mosquitoes sucking blood out of a finger, which vaguely reminded me of a line from John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ — “wherein two bloods mingled be” — except in this case it’s the reverse with the blood of one Canadian ‘mingled’ into two lovelorn mosquitoes! Now if that isn’t an image of Canadian love, I don’t know what is.

Do you know of any good poetry books that celebrate your locale? Or play with the funny names of your towns and cities? In Canada, we have some great place names like Moose Jaw and Nipissing, Tumbler Ridge and Nanaimo. See Saw Saskatchewan does a nice job of making Canada a fun place to read about with its delightful poems set all over the land.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by jama at jama rattigan’s alphabet soup.

Think Again is JonArno Lawson’s latest book of poetry.   Published just this spring (2010) by Kids Can Press and illustrated by Julie Morstad, the book is a delightful exploration of the feelings of early adolescence — and indeed, of adults, as well!  The poems are short meditations written in pithy quatrains like this one called  “The Heart”:

Make sure that your heart
isn’t too well defended.
Your heart is designed
to be broken and mended.

Accompanying each poem is a lovely illustration by Morstad that gets at the ‘heart’, so to speak of the poem.  There are 61 poems altogether and one can easily read through the book in a short time, but the poems are of the kind that are worth revisiting.  They are loosely based on the feelings of  young lovers, sometimes towards or about each other;  at other times, the poems are just about the individuals themselves.  Though not quite as linguistically acrobatic as Lawson’s earlier book on lipograms, Think Again is nontheless a charming collection of poems that are witty and playful in their own way.

I have to quote the last poem in the book, “An Attempt at Description”, because it’s about tigers(!) and about what poets try to do with their words.

How to describe the natural world?
I think I know how to begin:
A tiger has terrible, beautiful eyes,
And the night has lovely skin.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this small taste of Lawson’s recent poetry and seek out your own copy of Think Again. It will be well worth it.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Mary Ann at Great Kid Books.

Sally has already written a post for today’s Poetry Friday, hosted by Mary Ann at Great Kid Books, but I’m going to sneak this extra one in too… Today is the last day of National Poetry Month in the US: but, of course, that doesn’t mean we stop reading poetry until next year – on the contrary. Hopefully the focus on poetry over the past few weeks has inspired lots of young people to read and write more themselves…

I was very excited to receive a Poetry Postcard from Vancouver, Washington last week, part of Ms Mac from Check It Out’s Poetry Postcard Project. In this age of computerized communication it’s really nice to receive a tangible missive through the letterbox. Thank you, Kolbee. I wasn’t sure if it was going to make its way across the Atlantic in time, with all the disruption caused by the dust plume from Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, but it did and I’m delighted to share it with you all now:

Kolbee’s poem is also featured on Day 11 of Ms Mac’s Thirty Days~Thirty Students~Thirty Poems series, which has been running all through April – do head on over and check them out.

Thank you again, Kolbee, for your lovely poem – you made my day – and I also had to go and seek out some Duke Ellington music!