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  • Is There Poetry in Children's Poetry?
  • Janice M. Bogstad (bio)

In his brief comments on children and modern American culture which make up part of chapter 2 of False Promises (McGraw-Hill, 1973), Stanley Aronowitz divides children's cultural experience into two worlds. The first is an overt one, in which the child is raised through institutions and socialized to structures of ownership and domination. In the second, more covert world, the child's desires are followed through self-structured play. This latter is experienced by the child as pleasurable but non-essential, the part of the child's make-up that institutions try to purge from his or her memory. In reading some recent books of children's poetry, I asked myself several questions related to Aronowitz's idea: Which of his two worlds did the poetry in these books call to mind? Which group of class expectations do they represent? What group expectations do they implicitly reflect as choice of audience? How do they relate to the larger world of all children's experiences? How do they stand up as poetry? Do they oversimplifiy or condescend unduly to the child reader? Are they didactic or unpoetic? How do they compare to other children's or adults' poetry? How do children like them?

The most positive of the six books of poetry under consideration here, with regard to all my initial questions, is called Lullaby (Harper & Row, 1980). It is a print adaptation of Faith Hubley's film Step by Step and contains a small record of the international lullaby constructed and charmingly illustrated by her. Words for the lullaby were written by Elizabeth Swados and they are also sung by her. Containing less than 75 short lines of text, the book speaks to the very young child, verbalizing in non-sense sounds, as well as in words, the private human relationship between child and parents. [End Page 83]

You wanted meSo here I amYABABABAO YABABAM

is illustrated with a mother, father and child of African or South American origin.

Learn says the wind1 sing only for youTOO LOO TOO LOO TOO LOOOOOO

captions an illustration of an Andean mother wearing a bright purple serape with a child on her back.

The book does not attempt to mimic adult poetry or oversimplify or didactically intrude into the child's world. In fact, it assumes that a child has not developed expectations for poetry and can thus simply enjoy it for sounds and references to her or his hopes and thoughts. Nor does it avoid the fears of the young child. "If I sleep forever, who will wake me? A HAH HUM MM MM O YAH HAW OOO." Though the major portion of the text is in English, the book's pictures and nonsense sounds address children of many cultures. It is a work for parents and their young children to read together.

Aileen Fisher is responsible for two very different selections. Anybody Home? illustrated by Susan Bonners (Crowell, 1980) is actually just one poem with irregular rhythm and end rhymes, while Out in the Dark and Daylight illustrated by Gail Owens (Harper & Row, 1980) is a collection of over 125 short poems which concern the everyday life of children who have access to a natural environment.

As is often the case with books for very young readers (4-7 and 5-10, respectively) both of these carry on a narrative in part through pictures that accompany the poetry. Anybody Home? is more illustration than text, and Bonners' illustrations are delightfully descriptive. The subject of the poem is the homes of creatures such as squirrels, badgers, raccoons, and other mammals. Illustrations, corresponding to the lines of poetry, [End Page 84] show a young girl visiting these homes.

I'd like to see,near the top of a treea house made of leaveswith rounded eaves,where a squirrel might beasleep in his clothes,with his tail for a blanketacross his nose.

In this particular example, each set of four lines is the occasion for a full-page drawing, the first of a girl climbing the tree to see her squirrel's house...

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