Booktrust is an independent charity in the United Kingdom dedicated to “ensuring  that every child and adult has the opportunity to experience the delight and power of books and the written word, regardless of income, language, literacy skills, disability or culture.” Their aim of making a national impact on  encouraging positive attitudes to books is carried out in numerous ways, such as providing book gifts for children, conducting targeted literacy campaigns (like The Big Picture, which we have featured in our Gallery), education projects, providing resources and sponsorship for literary endeavors (check out the newly opened Free Word Center), and administering the Booktrust prizes.

And do take a look at the Booktrust Children’s Books website. It contains a veritable treasure trove of  information and resources. Something that really caught my eye was the Booktrust Online Writer in Residence program, currently featuring Nii Ayikwei Parkes. (more…)

The UK’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award have just announced an exciting new development for their website: a library to showcase “the wonderful success our youth members have gone on to achieve”. They have sent out the following call:

If you are or have been a youth member of the society and have a published book or pamphlet which you would like us to feature, please email us the details along with a photo of yourself, the book cover image and a link to where the books can be purchased, to: hhopkins@poetrysociety.org.uk with “Youth Members Library” in the title bar.

This is a wonderful way to commemorate this year’s hundredth anniversary of the Foyle Young Poets Award and will hopefully prove to be as inspiring as the competition itself. We’ll let you know when it’s up and running. You can read this year’s winning entries here.

No, this post is not about recipes.  You’ll not find “Alligator Pie” in any Canadian cookbook, that’s for sure,  but you will find scores of Canadian kids familiar with the poem and book of the same title.  Alligator Pie written by Dennis Lee in 1974 (original edition illustrated by Frank Newfeld) is a Canadian poetry classic. Children just love this zany poem’s rhymes.

Alligator pie, alligator pie,

If I don’t get some I think I’m gonna die.

Give away the green grass, give away the sky,

But don’t give away my alligator pie.

Many a child, including my own, has gone to a Lee reading to shout out with glee the end word rhymes to this famous poem.  Indeed, Mr. Lee encourages it.  “I never realized how soon a child can take part in “doing poems.”  A two year old will join in, if you pause at the rhyme-word and let him complete it.  Usually it will be the familiar rhyme, but if you’re making up new verses you’ll be surprised what he thinks of.  Try starting a verse “Alligator juice … ”

Lee’s intent was to create a book of rhymes for children that departed from the old English nursery rhymes he grew up with.  He wanted rhymes for children in the context they lived in as Canadians.  But not without being playful, of course!  My children love Lee’s wordplay with Canadian place names — for instance, this one on our home town.

Someday I’ll go to Winnipeg

To win a peg-leg pig.

But will a peg-leg winner win

The piglet’s ill got wig?

Is there poetry about your town or the place you live?  Is there a way to make word play with its name that will make your kids laugh out loud and think about where they live in a new and lively word-conscious way? Do tell!

As a poet, I always felt embarrassed about writing about my children.  It seemed self-indulgent and I feared being sentimental.  But then what could be more poetic than one’s children?  To not see poetry in their being bespeaks a terrible lack.  In Gifts: Poems for Parents, editor and poet Rhea Tregebov, addresses that lack with a slim but powerful selection of poems about children written by contemporary Canadian poet-parents.  “I think that as a poet, I began writing about being a parent not so much to correct misapprehensions or to vindicate my choices as to excavate my own terrors and pleasures.” Tregebov says in her introduction to Gifts.   The “terrors” and “pleasures” of parenthood are on full display here wrought in finely crafted poems by the likes of such poet parents as Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and Rhea Tregebov herself.  There are poems of fear — night terrors, noises outside, wolves and monsters; and there are poems of wonder and awe; and poems, too, of frustration and anxiety.  If I were to be asked the question of who I was as a parent, I would like to answer the way John Steffler does in his poem “Hollis Street, Halifax” where

those with children at the ends

of their arms, [are] small versions of themselves brightly

inflating as they drain down,

as though they’d opened a vein in their wrists and

out poured blood taking the shape of a child

pulling them by the hand:

Parents are those, the poet says,”going invisible, sucked up the straws/of six year old arms, diving/inside small skins,/starting over again, small.”  That starting over again, the re-seeing that comes with being a parent is something that Gifts attempts to bring to the reader.  Look Mommy, Tregebov seems to say with this collection, poems especially for you.

Today’s Poetry Friday host is The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Poetry is often about the spiritual, the naked human voice crying out to be heard.  Such is the voice of Japanese poet, painter and writer Tomihiro Hoshino.  Hoshino is well known in Japan for his simple, down-to-earth verses and essays about the natural world and his reflections on life.  A vigorous and active phys ed teacher, Hoshino became a quadripalegic in 1970 after a near fatal gymnastics accident.   After spending nine years in hospital where he learned to write and paint with his mouth, he returned to his home village Azuma in Gunma prefecture.  From there, he married and continued with his writing and painting, garnering a following with his books and exhibitions.

Although there are now several of Hoshino’s books translated into English, the one I have is Road of the Tinkling Bell published in 1990 (trans. Kyoko and Gavin Bantock.)  It contains a sampling of Hoshino’s poetry, painting and essays.  The writings are simple and heartfelt, easily appreciated and understood by children and adult alike.  What I like about Hoshino’s work is the raw and naked wonder he expresses towards the natural world and his humble expressions of human vulnerability and weakness.  In “Cyclamen,” he writes:

I decided today

to do nothing

The flowers

seem much closer somehow.

Road of the Tinkling Bell is illustrated with Hoshino’s own paintings which are strikingly well-crafted images of flowers and natural scenes.  The pleasure of reading the verse goes hand-in-hand with the remarkable illustrations.  In the original works, verse and illustration went together mouth-painted on stiff boards used for calligraphy.  Such is the love of the Japanese for this remarkable artist, that a museum exists for his work in Gunma, Japan.  However, one need not go there to be inspired by the simple, gracious words of a poet whose calling is genuine and deeply spiritual.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Wild Rose Reader.

There’s a lovely haiku by Basho about the first snow where he awaits the event with great anticipation, returning to his hut every time the clouds gather in the sky in early December.  He wants to be ready to write the words down as soon as he experiences the moment.  When the snow first came to our city in mid November, my daughter made me fetch a pair of cross country skis we’d acquired from a friend and set out into the slush with glee.  For the last few years we have had very warm, languorous autumns in my part of Canada, and this has oddly increased our anticipation of the first snow.

The seasons are often written about in poetry of every language.  This past summer, I stumbled on a children’s poetry book at a library cast-off sale.  It is called Seasons and is edited by the master anthologist, Alberto Manguel.  Manguel has selected poetry from all over the world and of different periods and languages that note, in some way, the seasons.  The book is illustrated by Japanese Canadian artist Warabe Aska who has a playful way of engaging the childish imagination with his pictures.  Often embedded in his colorful drawings are hidden pictures of animals or people.   My daughter delights in finding these images and this activity enhances her appreciation of the book’s contents.  For winter, there is this lovely poem by eleventh century Japanese court lady Sei Shonagon:

Snow

As though pretending to be blooms

The snowflakes scatter in the winter sky.

Accompanying the text, is Aska’s picture of a popcorn vendor in the park on a snowy day.  Popcorn, blooms — all are lovely metaphors, visual and literary, for snowflakes.  And so did my daughter and I feast our eyes this year on popcorn puffs and garden blooms in the otherwise dreary skies of November.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted at Lisa’s blog…

A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing in which a particular letter, or groups of letters, are missing.  Imagine writing a paragraph, for example, excluding the letter ‘e.’   It’s tougher than you think, especially, if you decide to omit vowels — the linguistic glue, as it were — between the consonants.  In A Voweller’s Bestiary, author JonArno Lawson takes a unique stab at the lipogrammatic genre.  He has created an alphabet book of animals based on vowel combinations, rather than on the usual initial letter form.  The lipogram part comes in when he excludes certain vowels from each set.  Sound complicated?  Well, what’s a constraint (and possible consternation!) for the poet in terms of rules can be a delight to the ear and eye of the reader.  And that is how a Voweller’s Bestiary was received by my son, listening to the contorted word music of “Ants and Aardvarks” or “Jaguar, Tarantula, Tangalunga” or “Tortoise, Porpoise, Crocodile.”  Reading poetry can attune your child to the sounds of language and help them appreciate the elasticity of words.

Another poetry book I tried out on my younger child was Rascally Rhymes by Jordan Troutt, illustrated by Sarah Preston-Bloor.  This book, also an alphabet one, takes names and makes ‘rascally rhymes’ with them.  There’s Ian who eats “worms and toads/and rocks and snails/a la mode.” or Gillian who “stomps like a gorillian.”  After we finished reading this book, my daughter and I went through all the names and tried to see if we knew anyone with the same name.  That was fun!  Palimpsest Press, who publishes this book, is now offering a contest on their blog for children to makes rhymes.  Reading this book definitely had an effect on my daughter.  While sorting laundry together the other night, she held up a sock and said “Mom, this sock doesn’t have a rhyme!”

Being a poet and a parent, I’m cognizant of the way language works in books.  So on occasion, I like to read poetry to my children.  It’s the play with words that is what delights and amuses the childish imagination.  Take for example, the two books I’ll be reading to my children and reporting on for Books at Bedtime next week.  Rascally Rhymes by Jordan Troutt, illustrated by Sarah Preston-Bloor makes rhymes out of children’s names.  And The Voweller’s Bestiary by JonArno Lawson is an animal alphabet book of lipograms based on vowel combinations.  Stay tuned for more on the poetry beat on PaperTigers from me! And feel free to leave comments or make suggestions on poetry for children.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about our Library Summer Reading Challenge – well, during this week’s library visit I discovered a poetry anthology edited by much loved British poet Roger McGough and illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura: The Ring of Words (Faber and Faber, 1998). It is wonderful! My children have been a fan of Roger McGough before they even realised it because he was the narrator for the beautifully produced video of animated Eric Carle stories – now we are enjoying some of his own poems set among this very eclectic collection.

The title comes from a short, thought-provoking poem by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Words

Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them,
Fair the fall of songs
When the singer sings them.
Still they are carolled and said –
On wings they are carried -
After the singer is dead and the maker buried.

Set both at the beginning and the end of the anthology, this poem brings the book full circle and each time I read it I feel I am peeling off another layer of meaning – perhaps also because of the other poems in the anthology we’ve read together in the meantime. McGough has indeed been the right person to ring this ring of words – there are poems about everything under the sun, from echoes to ghosts to a cat spinning in a washing machine – all apparently very disparate but all in harmony with each other in creating delightful surprises with words – like Thomas Hood’s “No“, so readable and “modern”, yet Hood lived from 1789-1845! McGough, however, doesn’t give any extraneous information beyond the actual poem apart from the name of the poet – so in a sense it is the perfect introduction for enquiring minds to delve into poetry.

Kitamura’s black and white illustrations shift their style subtly to the poetry – and sometimes add an extra layer of meaning – so for example, June Crebbin’s shape poem “Kite” about a kite getting stuck in a tree is stuck in a tree! It is no surprise when you look deeper into the illustrations to learn that Kitamura won the UK’s prestigious National Art Library Illustration Award for The Ring of Words in 1999.
And so we return to the ring of words and Naoshi Koriyama’s beautiful poem “Unfolding Bud”: yes, you do need to allow poetry the time to unfold –

“Revealing its rich inner self, As one reads it
Again
And over Again.”

And I can see that we will either be hogging this book from the library for a while or we’ll have to go out and get our own copy…

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by The Well Read Child – and as always there’s plenty on offer…

Our selection last month once again had us travelling all over the world and this time included poetry, fiction and non-fiction.

First of all, in honor of Poetry Month in the US, we chose Linda Sue Park’s Tap Dancing on the Roof as our reading-together book. We’ve all had great fun dipping into it and taking it in turns to choose and read the poems to each other. There were some gem moments like Older Brother discovering the sijo about how annoying it is to be summoned out of bed to go and clean your teeth – minutes after being subjected to the same treatment himself! The more we explored the poems, the more I marvelled at Linda Sue’s knack for getting the words just right – whether she’s describing a very ordinary, every day event or taking off on a flight of whimsy and metaphor. I’ve already blogged about Tap Dancing on the Roof so I won’t say any more here, but pass on to…

… Older Brother’s choice, which was Grandpa Chatterji by Jamila Gavin, illustrated by Peter Bailey. Here’s what he (aged 9 1/2) has to say:

I really enjoyed Grandpa Chatterji and I thought it was very funny sometimes, especially the part at the fair when Grandpa and Sanjay went on the rockets and they flew up into the air – when they came off they were green! Then in the evening Sanjay said, “Shall we have another go next time?” and Grandpa replied, “Maybe.”

I learned that in India some people pray standing on one foot and then when they pray they say, “Om” and the O is like the shape of the sun. People think of God as the sun because he is bright and the light of the world.

I would recommend reading it because I think people would enjoy it. Now I want to read the other two Grandpa Chatterji books.

In the meantime, Little Brother has enjoyed dipping into and absorbing the Australian Creatures of the Rainforest:Two artists explore Djabugay country by Warren Brim and Anna Eglitis:

I love books, especially encyclopaedia books about animals. This book has some animals in that I love, like echidnas and kookaburras and bandicoots. I learned that some ants are edible (the green ants) and I learned some words in Djabugay like gurrina, which means echidna, and badil, which is a zamia palm tree. Luckily at the end there is a guide to how you say their letters.

The book is by two artists – first there are lino cuts then there are original aboriginal pictures. It is very good.

So, as you can see, we are very much enjoying the PaperTigers Reading Challenge and I know my boys are finding the books they’ve chosen to be fun and enriching. Do let us know how you are getting on – only a couple more months to go!