Review: A World Full of Poems

Selected by Sylvia M. Vardell

Illustrated by Sonny Ross

Available now from DK Children

Review copy

It can be easy to think of poetry as boring and stilted, though I think Amanda Gorman provided a recent reminder of the power and vitality of poetry. A World Full of Poems aims to introduce children to a range of poetry. Family and Friends, Feelings, Science and Art, and Body and Health are just a few of the topics covered.

In addition to the variety of content, the poetry is appropriate for very young children to elementary school children. (Though more lean to the very young side.) The authors come from many countries and represent several different ethnicities. There's classic poetry from Emily Dickinson and Robert Louis Stevenson next to new poetry by Linda Sue Park. Many different forms of poetry are represented, especially those that appeal to children. Shape poems, sound poems, silly rhymes. 

Sylvia M. Vardell is a professor of children's literature and clearly has a depth of knowledge in the field. Though I'm sure parents reading to their children will find poems they like collected within this anthology, these poems seem selected strictly for child appeal. The illustrations by Sonny Ross are also very child friendly. They're bright and bold and I'm sure many children will be captivated by a picture and drawn into the poem the picture was created to accompany.

Although A World Full of Poems is grouped into thematic categories, I think it is best encountered by browsing to random pages and reading a few poems at a time. I do have a few small quibbles. For instance, the Family and Friends section includes three poems that are specifically about fathers and none about mothers. Overall, however, I think this is a wonderful introduction to poetry for young readers.

There's also a helpful index as well as several activities included in the back.

Review: The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

By Kate Hattemer
Available now from Knopf BFYR (Penguin Random House)
Review copy

When NetGalley sent out an email of hot upcoming titles, I was instantly drawn to THE VIGILANTE POETS OF SELWYN ACADEMY.  I wanted to know what a vigilante poet was.  Add in that those vigilante poets' nemesis is a reality television show (a very current YA trend), and I was there.

Ethan and his three best friends, Luke, Jonathon, and Elizabeth, are students at Selwyn Academy.  It's an arts academy, where the halls are filled with conversations such as Monet versus Manet.  But lately, the only conversation is about For Arts' Sake.  FAS is a new reality TV show filming at Selwyn, featuring Selwyn students.  As they discover just how fake the show is, they decide to do something about it.  They'll write, print, and distribute a long poem (inspired by Ezra Pound's Cantos) to protest FAS and rile the student body.  Things don't go as planned when ringleader Luke joins the show and Ethan, Jonathon, and Elizabeth are left to fight alone.

This book is insane and I love it.  Debut author Kate Hattemer does an amazing job of keeping the plot from tipping too far into unreality.  The characters are studying the Cantos in English, which is why they have long poems on the brain.  Ethan doesn't actually get the Cantos all that easily and has to think about one the language means.  (And of course this all means that Pound gets quoted frequently, and his language is as lovely as ever.)  Then there's the poetry by Luke and the others, which is appealing and clever, but not too much so for high school students.

I also really loved the characters of THE VIGILANTE POETS OF SELWYN ACADEMY.  Several of the antagonists are just good people who could have done better.  (The vice principal is cartoonishly evil, but what vice principle isn't?  And one of the contestants doesn't have any redeeming features, but that's clearly because narrator Ethan loathes him.)  Ethan is a talented, nice kid, but he clearly has a lot to learn about interacting with people, particularly those he likes.  (Sometimes the book isn't subtle as I'd like about that point.)  The two girl characters are fantastic.  Elizabeth (who I assume is black due to her dreads) is as involved in the plans as any of the boys, makes sure that her point of view is heard, and drives recklessly.  Maura, a contestant on the show and Ethan's crush, really doesn't care how the show portrays her because she just wants the scholarship money to go to Julliard since she can dance.  Maura doesn't think twice about trashing her reputation for her arts' sake. 

I think THE VIGILANTE POETS OF SELWYN ACADEMY is a seriously great book.  It delivers and fast and funny story about teenage rebellion while contemplating the many ways reality TV is totally fake, friendship is hard (especially because people change or are never who you thought they were), and the tragically short lives of pocket pets.  It earns that "poets" in its title as well.  The poetry in the book is accessible, but not dumbed down.  THE VIGILANTE POETS OF SELWYN ACADEMY revels in how poetry can be a force.  I am all for that, and all for this book.

Review: The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist

By Margarita Engle
Available now from Harcourt (Houghton Mifflin)
Review copy

THE LIGHTNING DREAMER: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist is the story of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, called Tula.  She grows up to be a poet, novelist, and playwright who combined abolitionist and feminist views in her writing.  As Margarita Engle wrote in her historical note, Tula "helped readers question the way they viewed slavery, interracial marriage, and the broader issue of voluntary marriage" (171, ARC).  Engle's novel in verse goes back to when Tula was a child to explore how she became interested in storytelling and radical subjects.

Using poetry to tell the story of a poet is a terrific choice.  The poems alternate between character's voices and the verse feels like the rhythm of internal thoughts.  It lends immediacy and potency to the emotions felt by the narrators.  It's also a good way to bring many points of view to the story without the head hopping becoming too confusing.  And the subjects addressed are full of nuance.  Tula's immediate concern is her impending marriage.  She's fourteen, old enough.  Marriage means giving up her freedom.  She isn't even supposed to be literate, but her brother and nuns helped her.

Tula's Mamá is one of villains of the novel.  She wants Tula to marry an old, rich man and will likely use the money from the marriage to buy slaves.  But the marriage is what she thinks is best for her daughter.  "Tula needs a wealthy husband/now,/right now,/before she tries to choose her own,/the way I did, without any regard/for her family's/finances" (79, ARC).

Engle, a Newbury Honor recipient, has strong control of the language.  Look at the excerpt above - the emphasis on time, on family versus family finances.  But it's not distracting language.  They're easy to read and clear, delivering a complex history in bites perfect for a young audience.

I found THE LIGHTNING DREAMER fascinating, even though I had never heard of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda before.  Her story is sometimes harrowing and often inspiring.  I looked up some of her work as soon as I finished THE LIGHTNING DREAMER, eager to read her poetry.  I think the weakest part of the novel was a love triangle with a boy named Sab who was already in love with a girl named Carlota, which comes into play near the end of the novel.  Turns out they where made up based on speculation that the characters in Tula's first novel Sab where based on real people she'd met while exiled to a country estate.  It's not a terrible bit, but somewhat sappy compared to the rest.

THE LIGHTNING DREAMER is a lyrical, poignant look at an influential woman and artist.  This is the sort of book that could be broccoli (as in, "Eat your vegetables!"), but the style makes it quite palatable.  (Note: I actually love broccoli, but you know what I mean.)

Be sure to check out Clear Eyes, Full Shelves' Novel in Verse Week.

Review: Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry

Edited by Dorothea Lasky, Dominic Luxford, and Jesse Nathan
"Poets in the World" series editor Ilya Kaminsky, director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
Contributions by Jim Trelease, Matthea Harvey, Jack Collom, James Kass, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, Theodore Roethke, Eileen Myles, Phillip Lopate, Jesse Nathan, Jordan Davis, William Stafford, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Karen Volkman, Dorothea Lasky, Dave Eggers, Bertha Rogers, Michael Cirelli, Amy Swauger, Martin Farawell, Terry Blackhawk, Megan McNamer, Terri Glass, Pamela Michael, Kevin Coval, Jeff Kass, Matt Mason and Andrew Ek,  Patrick Oliver, Bob Holman, Robin Reagler, Susan Grigsby, Mimi Herman, Michael Dickman, Elizabeth Bradfield, Yusef Komunyakaa, Meghan and Liam O'Rourke, Eric Baus, Valzhyna Mort, Alex Dimitrov, Anthony McCann, Michael McGriff, Katie Ford, Matthew Zapruder, Debora Landau, Christina Davis, Dara Wier, Travis Nichols, Laura Solomon, CAConrad, Vicki Vértiz, Adam O'Riordan, Qurayash Ali Lansana and Georgia A. Popoff, Rebecca Lindenberg, Harriet Levin, Emilie Coulson, Stephen Burt
Available April 23, 2013 from McSweeney's and The Poetry Foundation
Ebook available here
Review copy

"How wonderful the struggle with language is." - Theodore Roethke

April, as you may know, is National Poetry Month.  You might follow Savvy Verse & Wit's blog tour and keep an eye out for Clear Eyes, Full Shelves Novel in Verse Week starting April 21.  This month two books are being released in a partnership between McSweeney's Books and The Poetry Foundation.  OPEN THE DOOR: How to Excite Young People about Poetry is the one that first caught my eye.  The blurb promises that it will be "useful for first-time and veteran teachers, as well as parents, babysitters, MFAs with no job, and anyone else with an interest in poetry's place in the lives of our younger citizens."  I count myself in a few of those groups and decided to give it a chance.

OPEN THE DOOR is divided into three sections:  essays, roundtable discussion, and lesson plans.  The essays are a mix of new and reprinted material about experiences working with children focusing on what worked and what didn't.  This section comes first and is the best place to start - it's very motivating.  One idea that came up more than once and made quite a bit of sense to me is to not force children to focus on spelling or grammar when writing poetry.  Get them to write and then help them to revise after.  Focusing too much on rules limits them.  Plus, there's value in revision.

The second section, the roundtable discussion, is a question and answer session with several people working in nonprofits providing poetry programs for children and teens.  The advice within will be most useful for people looking to start poetry programs, but I found it surprisingly interesting.  I particularly liked one answer that refutes OPEN THE DOOR's subtitle:

I'm not interested in exciting students about poetry so much as I am in giving them experiences of genuine substance and in helping them investigate the emotional turmoil of adolescence, which will allow them to mature into adults whose inner lives are rich enough to endure difficulties, challenges, and even tragedies . . . They have plenty of diversions in their lives . . . They have enough excitement . . . What they need is something that helps them not to turn away, but rather to turn toward the conflicts they face in their everyday lives.  This is what art, what poetry, does.  - 237, ARC, Amy Swauger

The third section is self explanatory.  The lesson plans included are short but sweet.  The majority provide a reading and a writing portion, although some suggest pieces of music or such instead of readings.  I think this section is of more use to teachers than the layman, although some guardians who want to bring poetry to their kids might prefer such clear guides.  All in all I think that OPEN THE DOOR will appeal most to teachers, but I don't think the blurb is wrong.  There is wide appeal here.

OPEN THE DOOR presents a wide range of perspectives.  Most of the contributors are American, but not all.  They are women and men of many sexualities, races, and social classes.  It's nice to hear a range of voices in a discussion of how to empower others to use their voice.

I also like that OPEN THE DOOR provides clear answers to what to do next.  There are suggestions of other books and poets to read and organizations to investigate in addition to the exercises provided within the pages.  It's a terrific starting point for anyone who wants to share poetry with the young.  I think OPEN THE DOOR does a wonderful job of accomplishing its goals.

National Poetry Month Blog Tour: The Romantics

Serena, of Savvy Verse & Wit decided to create a blog tour in honor of National Poetry Month. You can find a list of all the participating blogs and their topics here. Today, I'll be discussing the Romantics.

Nowadays, when asked to think about poetry, most people's minds will leap almost immediately to the Romantics. Blake, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats . . . you can't escape school without reading at least some of them. But, you might not really be reading them.

The Early Romantic Period lasted from the French Revolution (1789) to the electoral victory of the Whigs (1830). During this time, a monarchy would be overthrown, then there would be a counterrevolution, and then a monarchy restored. The Industrial Revolution was just gaining steam. It was the beginning of what we think of as modern times. People couldn't believe how quickly things were changing. It was a new world.

A new world needed new literature. The Romantics were the rebels of their day. It's all in the name: At its most positive, romantic means natural, optimistic, ideal. At its most negative, it means dangerously deluded by an illusions. Neoclassical writers, like Thomas Gray, used high diction, personification, and frequently alluded to the classics. The Romantics wanted, instead, to speak to everyone in a direct manner. Do not think of the Romantics as boring, the most poetic of poets. They were outsiders determined to change the system.

So how do you read the Romantics?

1. Read Milton. I'll be honest, I've only read some of his sonnets and excerpts of PARADISE LOST. But while the Romantics had many different ideas about what made good poets and good poetry, they'll all agreed that Milton was the biggest thing since sliced bread. Reading the Romantics without knowing Milton is like reading a hagiography without knowing the Bible. You may enjoy the story, but you'll have no idea how many allusions are being made. (Alluding to Milton is totally different from alluding to the Greeks, y'know.)

2. Learn the poetics. All of these men approached poetry from different ideas about theory, and each of their theories are key to interpreting their poetry.


William Blake:

-Check out the incredible Blake Archive. There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One lay out his basic theology and argumentative process well.
-Blake was an engraver by trade. He never printed his poetry without the accompanying image; the visual and text were one. Sometimes the picture is an important clue not to take his words at face value.
-Blake had what some would consider a blasphemous view of Christianity. He felt that redemption could be achieved during life, not after death. The first stage of life is innocence, wherein naivety lies in bed with ignorance, then experience, wherein disillusionment can blind one to the world's good. The ideal is to move beyond experience and realize we can all be Christ on Earth. (When you get down to it, Blake is a little wacky.)

William Wordsworth:

-Preface to LYRICAL BALLADS, 1802 edition
-After he split with Coleridge, Wordsworth rearranged the LYRICAL BALLADS and added a preface, which details his desire to be a man speaking to men, in the language of men. He used common, rural subjects because he felt they had an inherent morality lacking in the city.
-Wordsworth had a thing for nature. It was one of the sources of imagination, though superseded by human connection.
-His sister Dorothy also wrote, though she didn't think of herself as a writer. Her GRASMERE JOURNALS often detail the same occurrences as some of Wordsworth's poems. Much can be determined about their priorities by comparison of their accounts.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

-In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge calls BS on Wordsworth. He also manages to formulate what will be modern literary criticism, including coining the term "willing suspension of disbelief."
-Coleridge believes the principle object of poetry is pleasure, which is greater than truth. The power of a poet is an ability to see the connections between two objects and transform them into each other, using imagination. (Think metaphor.)

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

-In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley answered his friend Thomas Love Peacock's satirical essay ("The Four Ages of Poetry") seriously.
-For Shelley, language is not just what separates men from beasts. It is the essence of how people think and needs to be constantly renewed as old phrases die. Poets keep language alive.
-Our thoughts develop through metaphor, through imagination. Shelley believed "the great secret of morals is love," or empathy, and thus we need poetry to treat our imagination so that we can be good.

John Keats:

-Though Keats died before he could write a coherent treatise on poetics, his letters show the evolution of his thoughts on poets and poetry. The letters to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgina Keats, are particularly important as they most often contained the drafts of Keats' poems.
-One of the important concepts he introduced is "negative capability," or the ability of a poet to accept the uncertainties of life.
-Keats really, really hated didatic, polemical poetry. He felt that poetry should seem like the reader's own thoughts. As such, he was not impressed by Wordsworth. (Shelley also disliked Wordsworth, because of Wordsworth's change in feeling after the Reign of Terror.)



I highly recommend THE LONGMAN ANTHOLOGY OF BRITISH LITERATURE, VOL. 2A. It works to give a full picture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century through its literature. It includes a wide range of writers, including the less studied Charlotte Smith and Felicia Hemans. I was going to recommend a good YA text on the Romantics, but it is unfortunately out of print.

Now, I'll finish with my favorite romantic poem.

The Sick Rose

O rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

--William Blake

Ask yourself: is the worm destroying the rose's life, or is the rose destroying the love of the worm?

ETA: I forgot to add important #3. Yes, the Romantics had a lot going on behind their words. Reading their poetry can be an incredibly rich experience. But there are many ways to enjoy it, even just reading aloud and hearing the sound. Wordsworth particularly believed in the resonant power of meter. So have fun!