What I’m loving about having so many visitors to my blog guest blogging about children’s poetry is the wonderful variety of responses. Today’s post is no exception. When I first read it, it made me laugh out loud, then it brought tears to my eyes. Without any further introduction, I’d like to welcome Kim Miller, here to tell you what it is he likes about poetry for children. Welcome, Kim.

The thing I like most about poetry for kids is that kids like it so much themselves. Ask a ten year old boy in school to write an essay on the Prime Minister and he will hold it against you until well into adult life. Ask him to write a poem about the Prime Minister and he will take it as license to be funny and creative and probably what he thinks is a little bit naughty.

There is something about poetry that frees kids into an allowable silliness, which is a good thing in this world that has had to get along without Monty Python’s Flying Circus for such a long time.

The prime minister’s name is Kevin
Some people think he’s from heaven
But if you ask my Dad
He’ll tell you he is bad
Cos he can only count to oh seven.

OK, I just made that one up myself, but if there had been a ten year old boy wandering past I would have asked him to do it. It’s as close to ten year old thinking as I can manage in a hurry.

Of course there are serious poems as well, here’s one from a central NSW school from the 1950s. (Does anyone else remember the 1950s?)

Drought.

Black crows circle in the sky
Waiting for a thirsty sheep to die
When along came a man with a great big gun
And shot the sheep, just for fun.

The crows took first the eyes and then the rest
And then the man relized the sheep was his best.

Crazed with thirst in the blazing sun
He had nothing with him except his gun
The only thing in sight was an old dead tree
And his last words were, “Woe is me.”

I have no idea when that was written, I was probably eight or ten years old, but my mother gave it back to me after cleaning out some very dusty place thirty something years later. It is the only surviving work of my entire schooling, torn from an old school book and written with a nib pen and ink from the inkwell. And it is a poem. It is not an essay on the value of giving a child a good literary education. Oh yeah, the spelling error at line 6 is in the original.

Kids these days are so much better served with poetry than I was, or so I thought when my son Sam and I used to laugh along with Dr Seuss’s ‘Green Eggs and Ham.’ But that same Sam learnt ‘Tiger Tiger’ by heart at about the age I wrote my Drought poem. William Blake wrote Tiger Tiger about two hundred years before my son walked the same earth.

Australian kids’ author and poet, Collin Thompson, has his own reduction of Blake’s masterpiece. ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright. I wonder who set you alight.’ They refused to publish it in the British version of one of his books of poems.

When it comes to publishing there’s nobody like the Brits
They censor the Aussies and give me the spits.
Of course the final word of the previous line
Has been censored already by somebody who thinks things should rhyme but not sound coarse and at least they replaced it with another bodily function.

OK, I just made that one up as well. But when I was in year nine I could have done the same, probably without the skill of creating tension by closing with a line so badly wrong in both scan and metre. (Oh dear, Sally, I do hope your readers get all the irony here.)

And before you start to think that I’m only on about boys and poetry here, I checked with my wife about her experiences of poetry in school. She started rattling off Ogden Nash pieces that were obviously lying quietly but very close to the surface. My wife owns up to the same sixty years as me, so those memories were well planted back in a previous millenium. And Ogden Nash of all people, in his day the ‘bad boy’ poet for polite people.

Before I finish there’s another aspect of children and poetry that I’d like to put before you. Poetry can be the most powerful way for an adult to communicate the experience of being a child to another adult. I have written stuff for most of my life. What I wrote as a child was soon destroyed, but as an adult I have written much poetry about my childhood, which was characterised by periods of severe abuse. For example, one of those poems is titled, ‘There Was A Man with a Camera at a Kid’s Camp.’ Is there any need to spell out the implications of such a title?

My eldest brother is a psychotherapist. He trained in London at Tavistock, one of the great training institutes. He has worked with people in crisis for decades. He has a PhD under his belt and is internationally known as a conference speaker. He is not normally caught up in the emotional life of his patients.

Some years ago we sat talking about our growing years. He was away in boarding school for some years while I was placed in the care of a criminally violent woman. X-rays show broken bones that were never treated from that period of my life.

My brother and I spoke into the night, trying to make sense of our fractured family life. I brought out a poem that I had written about that woman, as there came a limit to my capacity to describe the time. By halfway through the poem he was awash with tears, silent tears but unrelenting.

That poem was written when I was an adult but it was written by a little boy who lived still within my psyche. There was no fun in it, nothing silly or mildly naughty, no irony or deliberate miscontruing of events for effect. There was only poetry, the placement of words on a page so that the emotional state of one person is transferred to another as if by skillful surgery.

I had fearful flashbacks of that woman for many years. But one day they finished. I can remember the day of the final flashbck, it was in church when there was a visiting choir and she suddenly appeared in front of me, screaming until she went into dust. And I can remember the poem that I wrote of that day. It begins;
She came screaming like a banshee
at the heels of singing children
…
The singing children were from the present day choir of the school where my brother had been sent in those long ago lost years. The final verse starts with the lines;
And the children kept on singing
– was that my brother in the middle? –
for they knew not what they’d unleashed in my mind
…
And it closes with;
For when my brother’s choir came singing
the dragon lady died.

I sent my brother the poem. It was the All Saint’s College choir on All Saints day in All Saints Cathedral in Bathurst, NSW.
‘Ah yes,’ said my brother. ‘All Saints day. The day after all the ghosts come out to haunt the living, but they die in the sunshine.’
Poetic, don’t you think? When we consider children and poetry we should not be blind to the link between child and adult that lives in the one person.

And now it’s time to finish with a flourish. My recent YA novel, called ‘They Told Me I Had To Write This’ has a poem by the narrator towards the end. The boy is a bit like me, he’s had to navigate some serious abuse in his life. I thought I’d end with that poem, but I’ve changed my mind.

This is a poem from a collection I’m slowly building called, ‘Poems about snot and other stuff for ten year old boys.’

Sunday Tea Time with David Attenburgh

A crocodile eats an antelope
That’s stooping down to drink.
A lioness eats a zebra
And black and white turns pink.
A grizzly eats a salmon
Before it’s got time to think.
I love Sunday tea time telly
But our set’s gone on the blink.
(And that’s really sad.)

Kim Miller
www.kimmiller.id.au/clem  and  http://scribblygum.wordpress.com/