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  • Poetry Is Poetry Is Poetry
  • Angela Sorby (bio)
Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children's Poetry, by Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2007.

Joseph T. Thomas's Poetry's Playground is a lively excursion into relatively uncharted territory. In five eclectic chapters, he maps—or begins to map—the ways that children's poetry might be taken seriously as a subfield of mainstream (i.e., adult) American poetry. As he points out, most prior studies of twentieth-century American children's poetry have been undertaken by children's literature specialists, who have not always drawn on the much broader archive of literary and critical work available to scholars of adult poetry. Of course, the insularity cuts both ways; critics working on Robert Frost, for example, have been slow to consider his cultural position as a children's poet. Poetry's Playground, then, dissolves boundaries between two scholarly camps—children's literature and adult poetry—that have coexisted, not so much at war with one another as in a state of unproductive ignorance. This book will appeal to a wide audience of readers, including those who study children's literature as well as those engaged with reading, writing, or teaching American poetry.

Thomas's study constructs a critical vocabulary of terms—"official school poetry," "playground poetry," and "domesticated playground poetry"—that are useful because they connote the multiple social functions of the genre. He begins his study with a seminal moment in American literary history: Robert Frost's performance of "The Gift Outright" at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. According to Thomas, the moment marked a shift that elevated Frost as the premier official school poet. By tracing textbook editions, he shows how Frost was privileged over social progressives like Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks. This shift was facilitated by New Critical ideologies that valorized text over voice, complexity over simplicity, and universalism over localism. Frost's long (indeed, ongoing) run as a children's poet was thus the product of adult issues, both in literary criticism and in politics.

Thomas continues his deft blend of children's and adult literary history in his analysis of Randall Jarrell's The Bat-Poet. In the early 1960s, a debate raged in American poetry between what Harvey Shapiro called [End Page 235] the "raw" and the "cooked" schools: should a poem reflect first-thought, best-thought Frank O'Hara passion, or should it be a well-wrought piece of John Hollander craftsmanship? In The Bat-Poet, a children's book, Jarrell imagines straddling and complicating the gap between authenticity (raw) and artifice (cooked). This chapter showcases Thomas's close reading skills as the text is carefully unpacked; he ultimately demonstrates how Jarrell produced both a delightful children's poem and a meditation on wider debates.

In his third chapter, Thomas introduces the category of playground poetry as a vital counterpoint to official school poetry, exploring the oral tradition of often-profane children's rhymes such as "Joy to the World, the teacher's dead/We barbecued her head" (54). He concludes—appropriately if perhaps predictably—that these verses reflect Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, in which hierarchies are symbolically inverted in ways that question (but seldom truly threaten) the status quo. This chapter is compelling partly because it underlines the popular success of at least one kind of poetry: to wit, a poetry that engages the whole body, not just the eye; that is flexible enough to allow for improvisation; and that, above all, retains its sense of play.

Chapter four is crucial because it pulls the logic of playground poetry into the literary realm, adding some needed continuity as Thomas examines the work of domesticated playground poets such as Theodore Roethke and John Ciardi. Through their subversive rhymes and respect for the dark side of childhood, these poets paved the way for smash-hit children's poets such as Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky. While Thomas admires Roethke, he suggests that a poet such as Silverstein drains off the subversive energy of the playground, replacing it with an "adult-controlled" substitute (82). I wonder, though, if the borders between adult-controlled rhymes and...

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