Kids and Poetry...

Speaking of poetry... what do people think of it?

Now, stop yawning! That isn't funny!

Okay, that's a leetle funny, but seriously... I was interviewed the other day, and they asked a question about the first poems I can remember loving. And this was, for me, a very easy question. Because poetry, when I was little, when I read formal poetry and loved the sing-song quality of it... poetry was IT!

I loved poetry.

I remember my dad reading me Yeats and Blake. I remember, by heart, most of the Real Mother Goose, A Child's Garden of Verses, When We Were Very Young, and the Oxford Book of Poetry for Children.

I really can still recite pages and pages of these poems to this day, and that has to mean something. That has to be a HUGE part of how my brain got formed, right? If 30 years later, those fairy poems are still embedded in my skull?

Are they embedded in yours? Can you finish these sentences?

We daren't go a hunting, for fear of little...
The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the...
What immortal hand or eye can tame thy fearful...
It isn't really anywhere, it's somewhere else...
A wonderful view, of geraniums (red) and delphiniums...
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear, there is a hole inside my...

(Some of these may be imperfect, as I'm typing from memory, and not checking myself, but you get the point. If you know these poems, and loved them as I did, you'll recognize them I think...)

So yeah, I love poems, and I always have, and in fact, my middle grade novel is full of this stuff, now that I think about it. Little singsongy poems. I'd show you one, but I'm afeared that the Random House Copyright Ogre would come for me.

At any rate, poetry was a key part of my childhood, and I wondered if other people felt the same way.

Poetry teaches us so much about sound, and rhyme, and the ambiguous nature of language. In poems, words get used most creatively. They get stretched and pulled and twisted, to fit the form. Poems can be silly and playful and engaging to children learning to read (or speak).

I realized this rencently, recognized the power of rhyme, when my 22 month old son began to sing the alphabet with me... but only the rhyming letters. For real! He knows G, P, V, and Z.

It's kind of amazing how they rhyme like that, with a loose meter...

But really, I ramble. What say you about verse?