But I love it!
Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;…..
Congratulations Sally on the release of Toppling. I wish you every success.
Poetry has always captivated me – in particular, children’s poems. This could be because I was a primary and kindergarten teacher many moons ago, and my love for it has remained.
I also remember the first poem I ever wrote.
‘Mr Whippy
One, two, three
Mr Whippy
You’re not he.”
I was about nine or ten years old when I made this ditty up at home one weekend as part of a tag game I was playing with my sister, and a friend. You can image my utter disappointment when I turned up to school next day to find the exact verse being recited for tag games.
When it comes to children’s poetry I sometimes feel like Alice in Wonderland. Once I enter the rabbit hole of wonderful children’s poems I am literally thrown into a myriad of other worlds. These worlds can be explored through a variety of forms – lullabies, nursery rhymes, haiku, daimante, cinquain, rhyming, non-rhyming, metrical, free verse, bush ballads, raps, limericks, sound poems, verse novels, to name just a few.
Children’s poetry (like any poetic forms) can take you on a journey (short or long), pull at your heart strings, be pure fun and nonsensical, a mode of teaching through metaphors and similes, used for language development, or be a means of creating artistic pictures.
SOLITUDE
I have a house where I go
When there’s too many people,
I have a house where I go
Where no one can be;
I have a house where I go,
Where nobody every says “No”
Where no one says anything – so
There is no one but me.
(A.A. Milne Now We Are Six)
I love this poem by A.A. Milne as it reflects what poetry means to me – the creation of my own world, as well as allowing me to enter another world, or reclusiveness, regardless of where I am physically.
I also love writing children’s poetry, particularly in rhyme. My published poetry to date hasbeen in rhyming verse but when I teach poetry workshops in schools I try to include some exercises covering rhyming and non-rhyming styles. Children are so open to all styles, and their creations and interpretations should never be underestimated.
Writing a good poem or verse can take hours and hours of hard work, but it is always so satisfying to see its transformation from a chrysalis into a beautiful butterfly.
Some poems of course require little or no interpretation. They may have simply been created for learning numbers or letters of the alphabet. But interpretation of some children’s poetry can be like peeling apples – removing the skin and taking a bite can expose a variety of delightful sensations.
Thanks for dropping in, Helen.
Helen Ross is a Brisbane-based writer/poet and children’s author/poet. She is also known as Miss Helen.
You can view some of Helen’s giggle poems on her website at: http://www.misshelenbooks.com
Helen also blogs about her writing journey – the good, the bad, the ugly, and the crazy, as well as particular writing issues. Her blog is: http://misshelenwrites.wordpress.com
By Kathryn Apel
the body builder
pumps
flexes
tones and
tautens
as
snip
snap
snip –
the gardener
prunes and shapes
and
whoosh!
the very
clumsy clown
colours the sky
with brightly bobbing
balloons of
thought
I often think that poets paint pictures with words, but when I’m writing poetry, I get three distinct visual images – and they’re all of me! Let me put you in the picture…
Okay – so this is a bit of a joke, because in reality I can’t lift more than a bar of chocolate. BUT – The Body Builder tones up by pumping iron. As a writer, I tone up by pumping poetry. Composing poetry flexes creativity. It hones vocabulary. It pinpoints weaknesses and forces me to focus on specific ‘muscles’. The more poetry I write, the greater my control of my writing muscles – of words.
a topiary artiste, intent on pruning and shaping; looking at the bigger picture and trimming it into a recognisable form. There is a certain ruthlessness in laying bare a thing of beauty. Poetry is a lot like a topiary tree – each word carefully placed to create a sharp, clear image. Excess words snipped away. There is no room for clutter. Each word must earn its place.
Thirdly, I see myself as The Clumsy Clown clutching fistfuls of colourful helium balloons…
but can she keep them all in her grasp? Poetry has a way of releasing thoughts to, float, fly, drift and swirl like a bunch of brightly bobbing balloons.
When writing poetry, I am carried away by my imagination…
Congratulations Sally, on the release of your second verse novel. ‘Pearl Verses the World’ was stunning. I know that ‘Toppling’ will be another rich, warm story to touch the heart. Hugs to you! And thankyou for letting me share your blog space.
Thanks, Kat. I feel inspired to go pump some iron now 🙂
Rhyme and alliteration are a natural part of baby babble. Infants respond to rhymes recited and sung, too. The excited bouncing of a six month old to a familiar rhyme demonstrates this.
My two children began with nursery rhymes – some sung, some recited. They had favourites almost at once. ‘Baa baa black sheep’ was always responded to. The book used first was Brian Wildsmith’s Mother Goose, though there were several other nursery rhyme books soon added to their book collection, including Raymond Brigg’s extensive Mother Goose Treasury. Strong rhyme begs to be joined in. Rebecca at 1-8 (one year eight months) chimed in with ‘hop’, ‘stop’ ‘tail’ and ‘flew’ in the nursery rhyme ‘Once I saw a little bird’ before she had the words in her vocabulary.
The pattern of the rhyme tells a lot too. At 1-6 Rebecca would demand ‘more-ee’ just before the end of each rhyme. On a long car trip, being entertained by singing nursery rhymes, she allowed three repeats of each rhyme, but none thereafter. If I ran out of inspiration and started ‘Twinkle twinkle’ again, I was severely reprimanded.
Quotes from nursery rhymes made their way into speech as well. From ‘There was a lady loved a swine’ both acquired a useful phrase. Ralph at 2-8, stuck on a fence, begged ‘help me or my heart will break’ and, rather older, at 3-6 Rebecca, who still occasionally used her baby term for ‘pick me up’ asked plaintively ‘Uff uff me, or my heart will break’.
It was rhyme that inspired their earliest joke. A familiar rhyming text had a stanza ‘here’s a white kitten, soft and sweet, / and here’s a white lamb with four little black …’ ‘WHEELS’ shouted Ralph to the amusement of us all (2-3).
When Rebecca was two, I decided she needed a different type of poem, moving on from the rhymes (by this stage Milne was very familiar too) so I found Keats’s illustrated collection of haiku In a Spring Garden. She took to them with great enthusiasm, even the adult collection I had borrowed, and began making them herself, insisting that we write them down: ‘The hibiscus sits in the tree, and waggles his head, head, head’ was one, and there were others about frogs and birds.
Later they both enjoyed learning poems by heart, though they were always humorous rhyming ones – Ogden Nash or Doug McLeod, usually. They enjoyed listening to others, but as Rebecca remarked at 10 that ‘Poems are meant to be funny, or there’s no point to them’. She enjoyed listening to serious poems, but she never chose to learn them.
I maintained a record of my own two children’s responses to books from birth to eight, and kept the record sporadically from then to adolescence. From it came Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two children tell, published by Routledge in 2007. It is, to date, the only record that includes a male child; that looks at their reality-understanding at length; covers the sibling influence; and almost the only one that begins at birth – certainly in as much detail. Its aim is to convince people not to underestimate very young children – they can reason as well as you and I, it’s just their knowledge which is less.
There weren’t verse novels around at the time, but these have lately become very popular, started by Steven Herrick, but continued by Catherine Bateson and Sally Murphy. I’ve just read Sally’s Toppling, and loved it. It’s a study of friendship in Grade 6, four boys. It’s a wonderful read, with the short lines of the verse making it look very approachable. It’s an interesting fact that verse novels are usually shorter than prose ones – you can tell so much more in a short space by using metaphorical language – not having to spell everything out. But the converse is true of verse picture books – they usually have more than the recommended 500 words, because to make the metre and rhyme work (and they are usually rhymed – most authors having Dr Seuss as their model) you find you have to use extra words not entirely germane to the story.
I have been around children’s books since first becoming Children’s Librarian at the new Mooney Valley Regional Library in 1966. Since then I have lectured at university in children’s literature and English, been Judge for the CBCA Book of the Year Award and a school librarian. For the last fourteen years I have run the manuscript assessment agency Create a Kids’ Book – we also do workshops, writing e-courses, mentoring, and send out a free monthly bulletin on writing for kids and children’s literature generally. www.createakidsbook.com.au or contact Virginia on Virginia@createakidsbook.com.au if you’d like to go on the Bulletin distribution list, or if we can assist in any other way.
Thanks Virginia. Lots to think about there!
Merry Monday! It’s time for this week writing quote – and, as always, it’s a good one:
Good stories are not written. They are rewritten.
(Phyllis Whitney)
How are you at editing? I know I find it one of the hardest bits of the job. The story flows out of me during the first draft – but when I’m finished the hard slog starts. But it’s the editing that turns a story into a manuscript – and that makes the difference between it staying an unpublished manuscript or being snapped up by a publishing house and becoming a book.
Have a great week.