When I was a kid, children’s poetry certainly existed but as far as I knew nobody was out there actively promoting the idea that I read the stuff. Our schools didn’t have Poetry Month. Poem In Your Pocket Day was hardly the norm. And the idea of a Children’s Poet Laureate? Unheard of! Absurd! Still, I read a little poetry on my own. There was always Jack Prelutsky, who I considered the poor man’s Shel Silverstein. Now Silverstein THAT was a dude who knew what appealed to kids. Though he had an odd tendency to traipse into the world of cutesiness (his hug poem = an ugh poem), his work tapped into children’s fears and sick twisted humors better than anyone. And books like Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic looked better than the other books too. They were big thick books with black and white illustrations on pure white pages with plenty of space around the words. Variations on this form of published have existed throughout the decades since. Most recently would be Barbara R. Vance and her collection of poems in Suzie Bitner Was Afraid of the Drain. Not tapping into the sheer weirdness of a Silverstein, Vance still provides looks at the familiar aspects of a child’s life and couches those observations in rhyme.
A collection of 124 poems, Barbara Vance explores the ephemera of childhood. Some poems take on the realistic problems lots of kids face. Things like “My Brother’s Bike” or “Bored” or (maybe just a little less common) “Worms for Pets”. Other poems stray into the fantastical, like “Pantry Party”, “A Ghost Who Loves Movies”, and “Don’t Make the Tooth Fairy Angry.” Each poem is couched on pure white space with small interstitial illustrations to accompany. The book also includes an index of the poems, both by title and by first line.
It took me a while as I read this book to realize that Vance’s poetry style stands opposite most of the poems we read for kids today. I’ll tell you how a usual funny poem for children stands. You read about a situation, say a kid raking leaves, a kid with braces, or a kid who likes to dress up. You read through as the kid describes their situation. Then you get to the end of the poem and the last sentence is a funny surprise kicker you didn’t see coming. This is sort of an established form in children’s poetry. We’ve come to expect it. I certainly (and without really realizing it) had come to expect it, so it was with a bit of a shock that I realized that mostly Vance avoids this particular style. The closest thing you’re going to get to a kicker on that poem about the kid who likes to dress up is a suggestion that you might like dressing up too. And this is fine. Vance is totally within her rights to keep her poems from looking like everybody else’s. Sh
“Most women come with a knot” as in “to tie the knot?”
That’s the best guess I’ve heard.
re: the Knot
My guess is they either are married or want to be married, and the knights do not want to be involved with either a distraught husband or a maiden looking for a husband.
I’m puzzled that a woman would write that line. It has always seemed to me that men regard women as anatomically and psychically knotty: a sort of Laocoon of intuition, warring emotions, and Fallopian tubes. (Whereas we, of course, suspect ourselves of being the more reasonable sex.) Perhaps the poet needed the rhyme. Most women do not come with a cot, an apricot or a polka dot, and a reference to being “hot to trot” might seem out of place in a children’s anthology.
I’ve stooped lower than this to make something rhyme.
It was meant to be “to tie the knot” – as in being tied down. I wanted to poem to reflect a child who had seen a lot of swashbuckling, B-movies in which somewhat archaic language is used. It was supposed to suggest a “no girls allowed” mentality on the part of this boys club.
I can remember watching flicks like “Scaramouche” and “The Black Swan” — I got very caught up in adventure stories and would act out my own, so this poem was a kind of nod to that. Hope this solves the mystery!