Be thankful for our NCTE poets

Janet Wong (poet and project partner, pictured here at our Poetry Party with J. Patrick Lewis, Kristine O’Connell George, Elaine Magliaro and Rebecca Kai Dotlich) and I have a few extra copies of the special "festschrift" book of poetry in honor of Lee Bennett Hopkins winning the NCTE Excellence in Poetry Award. So... drumroll... we propose a mini-competition for giving away the last dozen copies. Here's the challenge:

In the COMMENTS area, list the name of a past NCTE Poetry Award winner whose work you are thankful for (and list a couple of favorite book or poem titles). [Look here, if you need help.] If you are thankful for more than one poet, enter multiple times! (No limit to your entries, but you can win only once.)

Two winners will be chosen AT RANDOM each day from now through the end of Thanksgiving weekend. I'll post daily from now through Sunday, so only comments each day will qualify for that day's giveaway. Clear?

To kick off our giveaway celebration, I'd like to share another Lee tribute poem. This offering is by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater whom I met at our wonderful Poetry Party. It's a quiet, thoughtful poem to honor Lee and his legacy. Thanks for sharing, Amy.

Private Party (for Lee)
by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

In the Library of Congress
on a cold November night
poems tiptoed out of books
dressed up in black and white.

"Tonight we celebrate a man"
one poem raised a toast,
"to LBH, who makes us think
he loves us each the most.

He wrote us down for children
who've read us through the years.
Our words make families giggle
light dreams
dry lonely tears.

And so tonight
we thank you
our father
kind and clever
whose living breath
makes poems sing.

Through us
you'll live forever."

Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell (c) 2009. All rights reserved.

Image credit: SV, Stephen Alcorn

Hurray for Hopkins

I’ve been sitting on a secret for over six months and this weekend all was revealed at the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) convention. Of course I’ve noted repeatedly that Lee Bennett Hopkins was the recipient of the 2009 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. He was officially presented that award at the Books for Children Luncheon at the conference on Saturday—to a standing ovation.

But I had not shared details about the session on Friday where Lee spoke and was “toasted and roasted” by a panel of poets including Jane Yolen, Janet Wong, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, J. Patrick Lewis, Georgia Heard, and Walter Dean Myers.

Well.

My indomitable collaborator, poet and author Janet Wong, lives an hour away, and volunteered to bring a veritable truckload of supplies to our session to create a bona fide party atmosphere! (Bless you, Janet!) So, we had two banquet tables decorated in purple (Lee’s signature color) filled to brimming with our poetry “props”-- cookies, muffins, and chocolates and champagne glasses and bubbly cider to toast and cheer Lee as he entered the room. We had printed purple napkins and helium-filled purple balloons. We had a boombox playing a custom-created riff on Cole Porter’s classic, “Brush up your Shakespeare” (redone for Hopkins) by the lovely poet Kristine O’Connell George, coming all the way from California for this event! And that was just for openers!

Each of the panel poets shared poems and stories about Lee, his impact, his process, his personality. We listened, we laughed, we celebrated. And there were another 10 poets in the audience who joined in, offering their poems and stories, including Carole Boston Weatherford, Eileen Spinelli, Heidi Mordhorst, Elaine Magliaro, Michele Krueger, Bobbi Katz, Sara Holbrook, John Grandits, Kristine O’Connell George, and Ralph Fletcher. (Am I forgetting anyone? I hope not!) (Thank you also to our publishers for their support of this session: Simon & Schuster, Little/Brown, Scholastic, Candlewick, and Boyds Mills Press.)

We also had the best party favor ever, if I do say so myself! Everyone there received a brand new book of poetry published just for this event (in a limited run). This “festschrift” book featured original poems and anecdotes written by 61 poets, many friends and collaborators of Lee. Contributors included (appearing in reverse alphabetical order, just for fun):

Jane Yolen

Joyce Lee Wong

Janet Wong

Allan Wolf

Karen Winnick

Carole Boston Weatherford

April Halprin Wayland

Ann Wagner

Eileen Spinelli

Sonya Sones

Marilyn Singer

Joyce Sidman

Alice Schertle

Laura Purdie Salas

Joanne Ryder

Susan Pearson

Ann Whitford Paul

Linda Sue Park

Naomi Shihab Nye

Walter Dean Myers

Heidi Mordhorst
Pat Mora

Donna Marie Merritt

Jude Mandell

Elaine Drabik Magliaro

J. Patrick Lewis
JonArno Lawson

Julie Larios

Michele Krueger

X.J. Kennedy

Bobbi Katz

Alan Katz

Paul Janeczko

Sara Holbrook

Mary Ann Hoberman

Georgia Heard

Juanita Havill

David Harrison

Avis Harley

Lorie Ann Grover

Nikki Grimes

John Grandits

Joan Bransfield Graham

Charles Ghigna

Carole Gerber

Kristine O’Connell George

Helen Frost

Betsy Franco

Douglas Florian

Ralph Fletcher

Bob Falls

Emma D. Dryden

Rebecca Kai Dotlich

Graham Denton

Jill Corcoran

Leslie Bulion

Calef Brown

Brod Bagert

Kathi Appelt

Jaime Adoff

Arnold Adoff
(Thank you all so much, dear poets. Your copies will be coming in the mail soon, now that the project is no longer secret!)

When we first conceived this project, we hoped to gather a few of Lee’s poet friends to honor him with a small booklet of original poems. I thought it might be a small, stapled booklet that I’d Xerox at the office. Ha! This idea had a life of its own! Janet Wong and I gathered poet names and email addresses and approached NCTE for funding. We asked the amazing Stephen Alcorn, one of Lee’s frequent book illustrators, for art to accompany the project. (Thank you so much, Stephen. Everyone commented on your gorgeous cover!) Everywhere we turned, people said, “Yes!” Yes to poems, yes to anecdotes, yes to art, yes to funding! (Thank you, Debbie Zagorski and Jo Anna Wisniewski, for going to bat for us. Thank you, Ralph Fletcher and the NCTE Poetry Award Committee for all your support!)

All summer long, poems flowed in—poems of all kinds, of admiration, of appreciation, of celebration. And many more poets sent their best wishes, including Jack Prelutsky, Marilyn Nelson, Linda Ashman, Carol Diggory Shields, Jan Greenberg, Charles R. Smith, Jr., Kenn Nesbitt, Stephanie Hemphill, and Tracie Vaughn Zimmer. And we’re sure there are others who have worked with Lee whom we missed who would add their words of thanks and praise to this tribute. It’s been gratifying to see such a thriving community of children’s poets and humbling to observe the legacy of our much beloved Lee Bennett Hopkins.

Our Friday morning session was glorious, full of energy and poetry and admiration for Lee. I think all who were there felt that they had been part of something special. I heard lovely comments from people all weekend long and was so gratified that Lee—and poetry itself—had engendered such a “high” for conference-goers. Thank you all for sharing your words and your work. Thank you, Lee, for making it all possible!

Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2009. All rights reserved.
Image credit: SV, Stephen Alcorn

LBH at the Kerlan

Earlier this fall, I had the opportunity to return to my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, and spend a day at the fantastic Kerlan Collection (part of the Children’s Literature Research Collections, CLRC), one of the nation’s premiere special collections in the field of children’s literature. It houses thousands of manuscripts, galleys, art, correspondence and more surrounding the creation of at least a century’s worth of children’s books. I had spent many happy hours there as a graduate student and even done some research on the German writer and illustrator Wilhelm Busch, but I hadn’t been back in many years. What a treat it was to see their new building, complete with new spaces for display, study, and storage. The staff was lovely and helpful and I caught up with a Karen Nelson Hoyle, the marvelous curator of the Kerlan, too. (Thank you, all!)

My time was very limited, but I did want to dig a bit into the poetry-related holdings of the Kerlan. I chose to study one set of materials for one book—City Talk, an unusual poetry anthology by Lee Bennett Hopkins. I say “unusual,” because I thought I knew Hopkins’s oeuvre fairly well—the breadth and variety of his collections published since the early 1970s. I also knew that he had been a teacher, editor, and frequent speaker in schools and libraries. What I didn’t know was that this had resulted in his publishing a book of poetry written BY children, based on a huge writing project he conducted in several schools across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There were 6 folders of materials related to this book and I went through each item in each folder carefully examining what they all revealed about the creation of this book. Because I find the back-stories behind the creation of children’s books fascinating (how does the magician do that trick? I always marvel), I offer here a step-by-step examination of the available materials for one book. I think kids find this process interesting, too, and I believe it helps demystify the process a bit so they see that writers WORK to write the books kids love. Please join me in my research-walk through these snippets of how one book came to be.

The first file folder for City Talk (labeled “M.F. 459”) contains a 5 page handwritten draft on a yellow pad, possibly of a preface for City Talk and a list of colleagues for an acknowledgements page. There is also a 44 page typescript, with corrections noted on it. I learn that the book is entitled City Talk, and is made up of cinquains written by 40+ children living in and around urban areas, writing through “the city’s seasons.” Hopkins writes, “It’s neither children writing for themselves nor for their peers; it is children writing freely for us all.”

The second folder contains another typescript, also with corrections, and this one is 50 pages long.

A third folder contains yet another corrected typescript, now 43 pages long, and carbon copies (carbon!) and photocopies of 6 page of miscellaneous front matter. Here, we learn that the cinquain poems are created by fourth to sixth graders from Detroit, Hartford, New York’s Harlem and other areas in and around cities. We also learn the cinquain is a “newly popularized form, a simple five-line verse originated here in America by Adelaide Crapsie (sic).”

In his draft of “City Talk; An Introduction,” Hopkins writes, “In Carl Sandburg’s Cornhuskers, published in 1918, he wrote a poem about Adelaide Crapsey. One of the lines states, ‘I read your heart in a book.’ Small wonder that one of America’s greatest poets recognized the majesty of this woman. Born in Brooklyn Heights, New York, her short, tragic life produced a vehicle which lives on in the words and thoughts of youngsters who have helped to perpetuate her versatile and imaginative discovery.” This note is dated November 4, 1969.

Where are these “junior poets” now, I wonder? I note some of their names:
Rodney Starr, Lewis Jackson, Dougal Douglas, Renee Smalls, Deborah Dore, Miriam Gent, Leon Bowman, Hattie Lile from Evanston, Illinois, Sandra Johnson, Willie Robinson, Maria Levant, Nancy Burns, Janet Binnie, Teresa Jastrzebski, Joe Donahue, Gretchen Winters, Peachie Moore, Marilyn Kruth and the whole crew from Wildwood, Pennsylvania.

If they were about 10 years old in about 1970, they’d be about 50 now, right? Do they remember having a poem published in a collection compiled by Lee Bennett Hopkins way back when?

In the next folder, I find a 67p. version of the typed pages including photocopies of the interleaved illustrations which are black and white photographs of kids playing in the city. They have a surprisingly contemporary feel. Kids are kids when it comes to sliding down slides and swinging a bat.

Woo hoo! The next folder includes 9 pages of a galley and a 47-page “page proof.” Here it really starts to look like a finished book. We have a print out of the pages as if they were ready to be bound. It’s crisp white paper and bold black print. We also have a table of contents, a revised introduction, and a list of the children by name who are depicted in the photographs (although the art is not included among these pages). The introduction is far more elaborated and goes on to describe the cinquain form (along with the previous tribute to creator Adelaide Crapsey), “The cinquain is a delicately-compressed, five-line, unrhyming stanza containing twenty-two syllables broken into a 2-4-6-8-2 pattern. The sophisticated reader may note that some of the poems in this volume do not entirely conform to this formula. I have intentionally permitted children to over-step the structured boundaries and some formal grammatical rules in order to encourage them to write. They have!”

Here we also see the page of acknowledgements of the teachers who helped gather the poems. My favorite nugget appears at the end of this acknowledgement page:

“We regret that a cinquain by each child who wrote one for the project could not appear on the pages of this collection. Special thanks to these silent poets.”

Silent poets.

Lovely!

In the last folder, we have a 10 p. page proof photocopy, corrected, and 16 pages of a corrected dummy. There is also some correspondence (10 pages) with the publisher. There are careful notes (5 pages) and lists and correspondence regarding tracking down and accounting for the permissions for each of these young poets. Even in 1969 this was important.

A letter from the Juvenile department reads, “Dear Mr. Hopkins: Please find enclosed the dead matter for City Talk—manuscript, galleys, repros and blues—for your files.”

“Dead matter.”
Ouch. What a phrase. And yet here I am studying it some 40 years later!

There’s also the first copy of what really looks like a book, complete with illustrations and a cover, all in blue. It’s labeled “2nd blueprint” and now we would call that a blueline. It’s not yet bound and pages are out of order, but it feels like a book! Of course, after all this, I just had to find the finished book, which I bought (“used” on Amazon). It was published by Knopf in 1970 and has a smallish trim size (about 7 x 9) and the black and white photographs I noted appear throughout. It may seem dated at first glance, but the poems hold up, as do the photographs of kids at play or pensive—all reflecting timeless moments and thoughts that ring true now as they did then. As a teacher, I always liked to have a few books featuring children’s writing in my classroom library. I think it’s very empowering for kids to see that possibility. It’s also a great example of what you can produce yourself with kids, paper and a camera.

And here’s the finished book and a sampling of two of the kids’ cinquain poems from it:

Rain clouds
Think of the rain.
Rain looks blue and dark grey.
It splashes hard on sidewalks, and,
On me!

Robert Harding, Julesburg, Colorado

It’s fall.
Leaves falling
Breezes showing signs of
Winter. Things settle down for a
Long nap.

Myrna Campbell, New York, New York

FYI: Use the search function to see other postings about poetry by children. In previous entries, I’ve mentioned other collections by Naomi Nye, Betsy Franco, Sanford Lyne, and others.

* * * * *
And if you’re attending the upcoming convention of the National Council of Teachers of English in Philadelphia, please join us on Friday (Nov. 20) at session A.18, for a “Poetry Party,” celebrating Lee Bennett Hopkins receiving the 2009 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. It will be Friday morning, 9:30-10:45am in Convention Center Room 201A on Level 2. Lee will be speaking, of course, and we’ll also have a crew of poets toasting and roasting him, including Jane Yolen, Janet Wong, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, J. Patrick Lewis, Georgia Heard, and Walter Dean Myers, among others. It is not-to-be-missed. In addition, Lee will officially receive his poetry award at the Books for Children luncheon on Saturday. If you can’t make the conference, look for the “Profile” article about Lee in the September 2009 (v. 87, n.1) issue of Language Arts by Janet Wong and Rebecca Kai Dotlich.

Look for more on the Poetry Friday front at Gottabook hosted by Gregory K.

Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2009. All rights reserved.

Image credit: SV at the CLRC

Birth of the Zeno

I’m on a JPat roll at the moment, happy to share news of another contribution of J. Patrick Lewis. He has invented a new poetic form, the zeno! Tricia scooped the news at The Miss Rumphius Effect earlier this week, but I think it bears repeating. I know teachers enjoy introducing the form of poetry to kids, as they model for children the different ways a poem can look and sound. And kids often enjoy this aspect of poetry too—approaching it as a puzzle to solve and understand. And I know poets themselves approach the form and structure of poetry with great intentionality and I’m always curious about why a certain choice is made. Well… drum roll… you can see Pat’s past as a professor of economics in the roots of his new poem form, the zeno. He describes it so:

"I've never invented a new verse form... until now… It was inspired by the mathematical "hailstone sequence," simply explained here…. I call the form a "zeno," so named for Zeno, the philosopher of paradoxes, especially the dichotomy paradox, according to which getting anywhere involves first getting half way there and then again halfway there, and so on ad infinitum. I'm dividing each line in half of the previous one. Here's my definition of a zeno: A 10-line verse form with a repeating syllable count of 8,4,2,1,4,2,1,4,2,1. The rhyme scheme is abcdefdghd. Naturally, I don't expect it to displace the sestina, villanelle, triolet, et al. But it would be grand if they all moved over one seat and made room for it.”

Here are a few examples to illustrate the form:

Nature’s Art Gallery

By J. Patrick Lewis

Wind’s paintbrush strokes in streaks the trees,

a miracle,

ages

old,

it knows without

being

told—

Novembering

maples

gold.

Traveling by Armchair

By J. Patrick Lewis

You can take a trip by Greyhound,

motorcycle,

paddle-

wheel,

ocean liner

(package

deal)—

I prefer a

bookmo-

bile.

I think kids will love it—the math of it and the brevity. I know they enjoy list poems and this form suggests a list, but requires a bit more thought and planning. I hope they’ll give it a go. In the mean time, for teachers (and kids) who are looking for other poets who specialize in experimentation with form, look for the work of Paul Janeczko (Poetry from A to Z: A Guide for Young Writers and A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms) and Avis Harley (Fly with Poetry; An ABC of Poetry and Leap into Poetry: More ABCs of Poetry), among others.

And if you're interested in more poetry creation activities, check out poet David Harrison's blog. He is hosting a poetry writing contest each month based on a single word ("dirt" for October) with a chance to vote for your favorite-- and help select Hall of Fame winners, one per month. Next up, David will be posting the word for November on Monday.

Finally, it’s not too late to join the Poetry Friday round up hosted by Jennie at Biblio File.

Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2009. All rights reserved.

Image credit: research.haifa.ac.il; zenoroth.com