Enigmatic Magic

Page 18 American Book Review Playground Poets Karín Lesnik-Oberstein Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary Children’s Poetry Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. Wayne State University Press http://wsupress.wayne.edu 196 pages; paper, $24.95 Joseph Thomas begins by stating that his book “has the…modest aim of simply broaching the subject” of contemporary US children’s poetry. But he immediately adds that he will also “try to avoid two interrelated problems that are common to most studies of children’s poetry,” namely that the poetry is “usually treated in isolation, as something wholly apart from the poetic traditions of adult poetry” and that the extant studies on it “are somewhat insular, referring largely to other studies of children’s poetry or, more broadly, to other studies of children’s literature, drawing only infrequently on the critical and historical conversations surrounding adult poetic texts.” Not only does Thomas do an excellent job of “broaching the subject,” but, in part of his book at least, he also does an excellent job of indeed discussing children’s poetry in terms both of its involvement with wider poetic, historical , and critical conversations, as well as demonstrating the involvement of adult poetic, historical, and critical conversations in children’s poetry. In doing so, Thomas not only has written one of the most interesting and thoughtful books on children’s poetry that I have read in several years, but also one of the most interesting and thoughtful books on children’s literature overall. For the issues Thomas rightly notes concerning the isolation of children’s poetry (criticism) apply to children’s literature overall too, with little work still done on the mutual implicatedness of texts, authors, history, and criticism, between adult and children’s literature and criticism. Thomas’s first two chapters are wonderfully illuminating discussions of debates in North American poetry about developments in themes and style and how these affected canon formation through the inclusion of poetry in anthologies, both for adults and children. Through discussing specifically the emergence of first Robert Frost and then Randall Jarrell as “the U.S.’s official school” poets, Thomas demonstrates how certain ideas of poetry and certain ideas of childhood interlocked. Thomas fascinatingly analyzes, in the second chapter, how Jarrell’s critical writing and children’s poetry both negotiated and disrupted the polarizations at stake in the “anthology wars” between the “raw” New American Poetry (1960) and the “cooked” New Poets of England and America (1957). In these sections, Thomas manages to explain different ideas that were circulating about poetry and its values and roles, showing how one can indeed very fruitfully use both readings of children’s and adult poetry, context, and criticism, without isolating one from another, but instead assessing how ideas and debates in one area also emerge in the other. These first two chapters, in my opinion, are a rare and inspiring example of how criticism (children’s/ adult) can develop forward in this way. Thomas does, however, unfortunately run aground on substantial problems in his third chapter, and these also affect his further chapters, particularly the fourth chapter. For, by endeavouring to include a serious consideration of “Child Poets and the Poetry of the Playground,” Thomas effectively contradicts his prior aims and methods. Thomas here attempts to argue that “any comprehensive study of American children’s poetry—and, more broadly, poetry in general—is ultimately insufficient insofar as it fails to acknowledge and consider playground poetry.” This “playground poetry” Thomas defines as “what children often do with language while outside grown-up supervision” and reveals that “children have a poetic tradition of their own, a carnivalesque tradition that signifies on adult culture.” Thomas, entirely now in keeping with much prior children’s literature criticism, therefore reinstates the “separate” child and its “true” “own” poetry, that he had precisely put into question in his first two chapters. Now, it turns out, those various, competing, poetic, and pedagogical definitions of childhood he discussed so illuminatingly in the first two chapters were after all merely secondary to a true, real child and its poetry, which Thomas can retrieve and describe here. This child, it further transpires, is a version well known...