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183 20 Poet in the News, Cartoonist on TV And me I am writing a poem for you look! No hands— —Ruth Krauss, “Drunk Boat,” There’s a Little Ambiguity over There among the Bluebells (1968) In that same January 1959 letter, Ruth Krauss announced, “I have become a Poetry Nut. I’m not kidding. It has become the major interest of my life—at this point.” She was reading and writing poetry for an adult audience and wondered whether Nordstrom would be interested in a book of children’s verse. It would “have every kind of poem in it from strict ballad form to dramatic poems, looser narrative forms, little couplets just coupled (honeymooners ), rhyme, unrhyme, assonance, alliteration, strict meters of every kind and no meters of every kind too.” She knew that it would“never sell like a Hole in the Head, but it will probably amble along and gather its own moss.”1 To pursue her new interest, Krauss began taking Kenneth Koch’s poetry courses at Columbia University in 1959. Though he joined the faculty only that year, Koch was an up-and-coming poet of the literary avant-garde, a founder (with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara) of what would be known as the New York School of poetry. Some of his students (and Krauss’s classmates) in the early 1960s included Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, Gerard Malanga, and Daphne Merkin. As a teacher, Koch promoted the aesthetic sensibilities he would later summarize in“The Art of Poetry”(1975):“Remember your obligation is to write, / And, in writing, to be serious without being solemn, fresh without being cold, . . . Let your language be delectable always, and fresh and true.” While “poetry need not be an exclusive occupation,” Koch wrote,“You should read / A great deal, and be thinking of poetry all the time. / Total absorption in poetry is one of the finest things in existence.” Krauss considered dropping out of the children’s book field so that she could immerse herself in poetry.2 184 Poet in the News, Cartoonist on TV Krauss, who turned fifty-eight in 1959, was the oldest student in Koch’s class but also one of the most active participants, poet and filmmaker Gerard Malanga remembered. She“spoke up”in class, unafraid to“put [her] two cents in.” She was “really the best one in the class.”Although Koch and other teachers knew of Krauss’s successes in children’s books, most students did not; they were impressed by her poetry.3 Crockett Johnson remained immersed in an impressive array of projects. Though earlier attempts to adapt Barnaby for a weekly television show never got off the ground, in March 1959 Johnson found that it was “so live a TV property that I am almost constantly involved with some packaging outfit, network, or sponsor claiming to be on the verge of bringing it to the idiot’s lantern in a big way.” He suggested that Harper add a reference to Barnaby on the dust jacket of the forthcoming Ellen’s Lion, since a TV Barnaby“just might possibly happen about the time the book comes out.”The jacket was already in production, but Barnaby kept making progress toward the small screen, and Johnson worked on a new, more philosophical book for children.4 In October 1958, Nordstrom had asked if Johnson would be interested in writing a Harold story for the I Can Read series, Harper’s response to the Why Johnny Can’t Read crisis. Nordstrom had been planning this series for years, but Random House beat Harper into the field of reading instruction with Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat (1957), published four months before Harper’s first I Can Read book, Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak’s Little Bear (1957). At the time that Nordstrom suggested that Johnson write an I Can Read book, Harper had just published Syd Hoff’s Danny and the Dinosaur and was recruiting other authors: Both Esther Averill’s The Fire Cat and Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham’s Harry and the Lady Next Door would be published in 1960.5 Johnson said he would be interested. Working to keep his vocabulary at a slightly lower reading level than he had for his other Harold tales, he began work on a Harold I Can Read book. Inspired by the legend of the Fisher King, however, Johnson found himself writing not about Harold but about loss and imagination in...

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