Tradition and Revolt: Recent Poetry for Children

Shaken only a little by those winds of change that in the 1960's and 1970's swept the mainland of American literature, poetry for children today seems an offshore island doing its best to stay serene. Although there are still a few distinguished practitioners of poetry for adults who continue to write in the traditional disciplines of stanza, meter, and rhyme—Helen Adam, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Howard Nemerov, W. D. Snodgrass, Richard Wilbur and, among the young, Timothy Steele and Gjertrud Schnackenberg—the main action, at the moment, is elsewhere. "Farewell, pale skunky pentameters (the only honest English meter, gloop! gloop!)," said Kenneth Koch, heralding a new era of formally open verse.¹ Still, in recent children's poetry one has yet to see any whole-scale turning away from the old devices and strategies. The island seems practically a sanctuary for meter and rhyme—on the mainland, endangered species. We find much to cheer and a little to deplore in this situation.

Even among poets who, in their work for adults, wouldn't be found dead in rhyming form, there seems a consensus that, as long as one's audience is immature, the old-fangled music is permissible, even to be desired. From working with schoolchildren, the West Coast poet Gary Snyder arrived at this conclusion, much to his surprise:

If you start poetry teaching on the grade school level, use rhyme, they love it. Go with the flow, don't go against it. Children love word play, music of language; it really sobered me up to realize that not only is rhyme going to be with us but it's a good thing.²

Even Nikki Giovanni, another radical antiformalist, in her latest collection for children, strikes a contemporary note in jingling stanza form:

Yolande the pandasat with Amandaeating a bar-be-cue rib

They drank a beerand gave a big cheer"Hooray! for women's lib"³

This has the engaging brashness of skip rope rhymes, and Giovanni's collection, Vacation Time, contains a few other pieces that children will easily beat time to. Unfortunately, like many another poet for children who isn't at home in traditional verse, Giovanni too often writes in a careless, condescending way. In formal verse, a writer's incompetence and self-indulgence are hard to conceal. These appear in rhymes coupled by violence, lines crammed with extra words in order to fill up a metrical pattern, things said not for the sake of meaning anything but to pay lip-service to symmetry. And so Giovanni lets herself describe a grandparent: "In her rocker she does stay/Neat and prim throughout the day" (italics ours, to indicate only one word of unnatural stuffing). A boat is "locked up in a moat," the only visible need for the word moat being that it supplies a rhyme.

Such slack workmanship in formal verse for children isn't rare; and in too many recent children's collections there is casual doggerel, hell-for-leather rhyming, and a seeming inability on the poet's part to observe a regular beat. From a nonsense book:

My grandmother's two gold teethWere stolen by a sneak thiefHe took them straight homeAnd cast them in stoneBut they didn't look good in relief.⁴

If a limerick can't fulfill its own laws, what hope for lyrics? (How many younger children, by the way, know what it means to cast something in relief?) Such work cries for a stern editorial blue-pencil, but the implication seems to be: It's only for kids, why work on it?

Luckily, poetry for children is being written, too, by poets of remarkable industry and competence. It is a safe bet that a greater quantity of excellent rhymed, metrical verse is currently being produced for children than is being directed toward American adults. Whether every child will go for the poems of David McCord is questionable, for he sometimes places high demands upon children's powers of analysis, and often upon their...