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Last year, I launched a game of Poetry Tag in celebration of National Poetry Month (where poets shared original poems, tagged another poet who shared a poem connected with the previous poem, and on and on). It was so much fun it has spawned a whole book of poetry tag for kids—which I’m promoting like a wild woman here, at PoetryTagTime, and at the PoetryTagTime blog. And I’m sticking with my “tag” theme this year, too, as we pause to promote poetry far and wide. However, this time, I’m featuring reviews of poetry books out this year (2011), connected in that same “tag” fashion, from one to another. Plus, I’ve involved my students enrolled in my graduate course in poetry for children as guest reviewers. Some of them even tried creating digital trailers for their selected books. So, here we go: one review a day for the next 30 days, your mini intro to the latest poetry for young people.

Guest Reviewer: Nancy Molina

Featured Book: Hopkins, Lee Bennett. 2011. I Am the Book. Ill. by Yayo. New York: Holiday House. ISBN 9780823421190.

Nancy writes: Hopkins assembles a collection of thirteen poems written by various poets all on the subject of books that celebrate reading. All of the poems are by well-known poets like Naomi Shihab Nye, Beverly McLoughland, and Kristine O’Connell George to name a few. Hopkins includes a table of contents that lists the poem title and poet which is extremely helpful in finding a particular poem. Also, in the back is an “About the Poets” section that gives brief yet interesting information about each poet that contributed to this anthology. While most of the text of the poems is in a bold black font, the titles along with the table of contents and headers of the “About the Poets” section alternate in various classic colors like red, blue, and green. All of these text features makes the collection easy to read and easy to navigate.

Likewise, the illustrations are in bright basic colors inviting the reader to carefully peruse each detail. Using colorful acrylics, Yayo elaborates on each poem to not only add to the meaning, but to prompt wondering as well. It is a fascinating combination. For example, the illustration for the poem entitled, “A Poem Is,” Yayo creates an amusement park out of musical instruments. It is a clever illustration for the poem in that the poem uses the simile “like bumper cars/at a fair” and the metaphor “an orchestra/of sounds.” The reader will find it entertaining to try to name the various instruments and what they represent in the amusement park.

All the poems are simple enough for young children to understand yet meaningful

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It sure did this YA biographer's heart good to see the following reference in the current issue of TIME, in an article on Sacred Harp singing:

Get Lomaxed.
Almost every revived American folk-music form was once recorded for the Library of Congress by musicologist Alan Lomax. He taped Sacred Harp in 1942 and '59. Unlike other finds such as Leadbelly, it failed to spark during the 1960s folk revival, but musicologists were infected. Now the form had imitable LPs and an academic beachhead.

Glad as I am to see this latest indication of Lomax's ongoing relevance, I can't help but point out a factual error. He didn't tape Sacred Harp or anything else in 1942. But when he did tape it in 1959, he did so in stereo, and it's well worth a listen.

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And if that combination doesn't sound like something you'd like to read, well, that's because I've still got quite a bit of work to do on the Lomax chapter for which I just finished a very, very dense first draft.

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It's been a while since my last update along these lines, so the answer must be "not much." But since I just met my final deadline of the year -- three new sample profiles with which Pasta's publisher will try to tempt potential illustrators -- now seems like a good time to get my head clear on what's next:

Making copies of the many, many Lomax materials currently in my possession (Austin-area libraries and Interlibrary Loan have been very good to me) before I go out and get any more. And with an April deadline looming, I really ought to just stop gathering materials for a while, make sense of what I've got, write what I can, and then see what holes in my research still need to be filled.

Saying "no." I'm full for 2008. Can't take on anything else. Not that other folks are asking me to take on a bunch of other things -- most of the opportunities that I'll need to say "no" to will originate within my own head.

Filing!

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The other night I'd thought I'd sort of finished a first draft of Chapter 4 of my Lomax book. Then, yesterday, a source called back with some illuminating information about one of Alan Lomax's many undertakings in the years just after WWII.

Then, today -- and I can hardly believe this -- I remembered that I never had made it all the way through the letters of his that are available here in Austin at the Center for American History. (I'd left off in the mid-1940s back when I was still writing about the mid-1930s, and I guess I got distracted.) So, I spent a late lunch hour there today getting still more clarification about the period covered by Chapter 4.

I'd love to keep this momentum going, but I'm due for a major gear-switching. For several months my plan had been to spend December turning out drafts of three more chapters for Pasta. With the recent change in editors, though, I hadn't been sure whether the original vision and schedule for the project would hold.

Yesterday, I had a enjoying and reassuring first conversation with my new Pasta editor, and the upshot is that all previous plans for the book are still intact. Which means it's time for me to get ready for those additional Pasta chapters. I just need to make sure I remember to go back to the CAH for the rest of those Lomax letters when I'm done.

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Coming up next?
Children's Book Week: November 12-18, 2007, a “celebration of the written word” designed to “introduce young people to new authors and ideas in schools, libraries, homes, and bookstores,” according to the Children’s Book Council, the sponsor of this event since 1919. It’s also the perfect time to gather and share poems about books and reading. As it happens, I have also been invited to offer a regular column on “Everyday Poetry” for Book Links magazine (published by the American Library Association). My column debuts this month and features “Everyday Poetry: Celebrating Children’s Book Week.” Here’s an excerpt:

Poets have been writing about the power of reading and books for generations. With a focus on books and reading, these poems are the perfect way to open a storytime or read-aloud session. In fact, reading or reciting a favorite book poem could become the ritual that gathers children together for these activities. Linking poems about books with books and reading helps underscore the value of literature and making time for reading. Who can resist the following seven activities, great for celebrating each day of Children’s Book Week or any other occasion that highlights the pleasures found in reading and poetry? Just like holding a special party to acknowledge a birthday or anniversary, these moments have a magic all their own and create happy memories related to reading and poetry.

Choral Reading: Upper-elementary students can share “Anna Marie’s Library Book and What Happened to It” by Celia Barker Lottridge from When I Went to the Library: Writers Celebrate Books and Reading (Groundwood, 2002) as a choral reading. This poem begs for multiple readers as many voices detail how one library book is passed from reader to reader to reader. A choral reading of the poem would be appealing for an open house, parents’ night, or any function with readers of various ages. Or, pair up this poem with a reading of Lauren Child’s picture book, But, Excuse Me, That Is My Book (Dial, 2005), about Lola’s search for her favorite library book.

Bilingual Poetry: The poem “Books” by Francisco X. Alarcón in his book Angels Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems /Los angeles andan en bicicleta y otros poemas de otoño. (Children’s Book Press, 1999) is a poetic celebration of books written in both Spanish and English. If you or an audience volunteer speak Spanish, read the poem in Spanish first and follow with a reading in English by another volunteer. Then have both readers read their versions simultaneously. Encourage the readers to pause at the end of each line and start the next line together. The effect is quite stunning and really communicates the music of language.

Poetry Chant: The poem “Good Books, Good Times” by Lee Bennett Hopkins, from his book Good Books, Good Times! (HarperCollins, 1990), first appeared on a Children’s Book Week bookmark and then became the theme for his anthology of book-related poems. This poem is perfect for chanting with two groups of early elementary–age children in a back-and-forth fashion. Performed like a cheer for books and reading, it’s ideal for opening or closing a read-aloud session.

Read the article for the rest of the 7 tips!

One more scoop: Book Week is moving. Beginning next year, Children’s Book Week will be celebrated in May, specifically May 12 – 18, 2008. So celebrate now and again in the spring with bookends of book poetry!

For more poetry at the Poetry Friday Round Up go to A Wrung Sponge this week.

Picture credit: cbcbooks.org

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The way I passed my lunch hour today reminded me of this recent exchange between Joel and Ethan Coen, discussing a scene with Josh Brolin in their new movie:

E.C. The trainer had this little neon-orange toy that he would show to the dog, and the dog would start slavering and get unbelievably agitated and would do anything to get the toy. So the dog would be restrained, and Josh, before each take, would show the dog that he had the toy, he'd put it in his pants and jump into the river ...

J.C. ... without having any idea of how fast this dog could swim. So the dog was then coming after him ...

E.C. ... so Josh came out of the river sopping wet and pulled the thing out of his crotch and said--he was talking to himself--he said, "What do you do?" "Oh, I'm an actor."

"And how did this children's writer spend his lunch hour?" you may cautiously, nervously be asking. Not by visiting a school or trying to pare away each word not absolutely vital to the bunny's character development, but rather with a small pile of binder clips and a big stack of Xeroxes from the Library of Congress and the Center for American History, arranging the papers into thinner, thematic stacks for Chapter 4 of my Alan Lomax manuscript.

Which is not as exciting as swimming down a river with a dog pursuing a toy tucked into my pants, but which does strike me as being nearly as far flung from what most folks must think my line of work is like.

Now, I must get back to my little stacks... Read the rest of this post

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I was on edge this past Saturday afternoon, and I couldn't figure out why. It was a beautiful day in the middle of a three-day weekend, and my kitchen smelled like baking bread, so why on earth was I tense? Why did I feel the need to flee my (relatively) clean house and my (relatively) well-behaved children?

I even considered retail therapy -- going to buy something, a book, even a used book -- just to escape my immediate environs, even though burning fossil fuel for the sake of sheer consumption really isn't my thing. It was an unusually powerful urge, but I managed to resist it.

Finally, while my wife napped, one child played Super Mario, and another watched Franklin, I slipped the lead around one of my dogs and slipped out of the house for a walk. Halfway down the block, the dog began walking sort of funny, so we went back to the house for a plastic bag.

At this time, the other dog, loudly freaking out with jealousy as is his way, teleported through the fence. That's what it looked like, anyway -- like stop-motion video in which there's a fence with no dog in front of it, and then there's a fence with a dog in front of it. I didn't have time to figure out just then what the heck had happened*, because the clock was ticking down to when I had to be back from my walk in time to wake my wife and take the bread out of the machine.

I still really needed to be gone, so I corralled the left-behind dog and stuck him in the garage. With just 35 minutes remaining, the chosen dog and our plastic bag and I went on our way.

And it was wonderful. Just what I needed. And revelatory. As is so often the case when I walk (more so than when I run), my brain figured out the thing I most needed it to figure out: Why I felt so compelled to be away from my house.

Because that's where my research is. A dozen and a half books pertaining to Alan Lomax, and overflowing file folders dedicated to each chapter, and beaucoup electronic documents, and recordings out the wazoo. It was all there, and it was demanding my attention as persistently (though, thankfully, not as audibly) as the dog that didn't get taken for a walk. My research didn't care that I'd written 1,500 words the day before, or that I would be back at it the next night, or that I wanted a day off to bake and play and space out.

Realizing that -- and knowing exactly what it was that I was getting away from -- made all the difference. Well, most of the difference. The remaining difference was made by superpremium ice cream. My point is that I felt a whole lot better. Not twitchy, and not trapped.

But just to be safe, I think I'll plan on spending more of my Saturdays somewhere else for a while.


* Loose board. Three-year-old F and I fixed it Sunday morning.

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I recently bought a certain recording as part of my Lomax research. I placed the order by mail, paid for it by check, and this afternoon my brand-new LP arrived.

Tell me again what century we're in?

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Thing 1: Inspired in equal parts by something I recently read and recordings I've been listening to from 1938-1942, I've come up with a fresh, invigorating -- and maybe even workable -- narrative approach to my Alan Lomax book. Luckily, I've done only two chapter drafts already, so it's not like I'd have to rewrite the entire manuscript. (That may come later, should I go whole-hog with this new approach only to find it doesn't work after all.)

Thing 2: I've taken the first step in researching a potential new picture book project I'm calling D.B. For this one, I'd be getting out and about and visiting with people and getting to know more about a certain type of heavy machinery -- quite a bit different from staying up late with copies of old letters.

Thing 3: I'm on the hook to make a presentation next Tuesday night at a religious-education gathering at my church, and with a week to spare I've already got a draft written. Or rather, I've got several paragraphs written in sequence on several different nights, and it seems that they should add up to a coherent 5-7 minutes of something intelligible, perhaps even inspirational. But I really should confirm that. This will be good practice for the presentations I hope to be doing at conferences in the not-so-terribly distant future. If I get nervous, I'll just look out at the congregation and imagine that they're librarians.

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Tonight I took a break from Woody, Jelly, Leadbelly and the rest of my Alan Lomax research in favor of an honest-to-Pete early-21st-century rock show at Stubb's in Austin -- which probably gave me a lot more in common with my book's YA audience than does my love of the subject matter itself (at least for now).

I sure am glad I went, and seeing as how I'm still stirred up from seeing Rilo Kiley despite the post-midnight hour, I'd just like to remind all loyal Bartography readers of how good it feels to change things up from time to time in what you read, listen to, watch and do.

And if you're able to eat a big plate of something tasty (barbecue, in my case) beforehand, all the better.

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I just finished a complete draft of the first chapter of my Alan Lomax biography, overshooting my target of 2,000 words by a mere, er, 1,266.

I'll take it. On to Chapter 2.

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This evening, among several years' worth of my collected materials on Alan Lomax, I found a note I wrote to myself: "MAYBE IT'S NOT A PICTURE BOOK!"

See? I knew it all along. I just pursued this project as a picture book for five years in order to prove my point.

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Sixteen thousand words. Eight chapters at 2,000 words each. Plus a preface, afterword, bibliography, etc.

That's my very rough estimate of the word count I've got to work with for my Alan Lomax book, based on my quickie analysis the other night of a comparable book, Elizabeth Partridge's Restless Spirit: the Life and Work of Dorothea Lange. (I counted paragraphs in each of its 12 chapters, then counted words in the fourth paragraph of each chapter, then did the math for fewer, longer chapters.)

I couldn't have told you how long I'd expected my text to be, but it would have been more than 16,000 words. (And it may still be. We'll see. Oh, and this just makes my 6,200-word draft of The Day-Glo Brothers seem all the more laughable.) But whatever the length, I'm glad to know these parameters -- they'll help me gauge what to include and leave out as I begin writing.

But more than that, I'm glad just to have parameters -- the physical parameters of a 128 page book printed on paper. There are limits to what I can cover in this book, and that's fine with me. Every day, it seems, I get an invitation via Facebook to try out some new application. It seems so endlessly expandable -- there are no physical limits to what purposes and functions and features can be tried, so why not keep adding, and adding, and adding (and inviting, and inviting, and inviting)?

It makes me crazy. And so I take great comfort in having so simple a purpose: to tell a story, to share my fascination with Alan Lomax's life and make his life and work meaningful to an audience that, with few exceptions, will never have heard of the guy.

And to do it in 16,000 words.

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I'm as surprised as anybody that I managed something resembling a vacation from my writing this past week. I just now took my Folklife photocopies down from the high shelf where I stashed them right after I got home last Saturday.

Now begins the exciting task of printing "American Folklife Center" in grayscale on each sheet, so as to easily distinguish these materials from the stuff I've collected here in Austin at the Center for American History, which puts its brand on the copied materials before I ever get them. And then I'll go through and log my D.C. receipts, for tax purposes.

I think I'll skip this stuff when I get around to making school presentations.

The only vacation I took from my vacation was Thursday night, when I stayed up until the wee hours reacquainting myself with some heavy-duty science for a pair of newly added pages at the back of The Day-Glo Brothers.

My editor and I have removed from the main text the showstopping explanations of how fluorescence and daylight fluorescence work, which has created an opportunity to go into a little more detail -- not quite to the electron-excitation level, but close enough to foresee a likely question from readers.

That question -- Why do some things glow, but not others? -- is trickier to answer than you might think, especially in one 40-word paragraph representing my night's work. I'll save that short version -- or whatever it looks like after we're done with it -- for the book, but if you can't wait for the answer, you're welcome to have a look at some of the raw materials I drew from Thursday night:

• Florida State University's Basic Concepts in Fluorescence
• Invitrogen Corporation's Introduction to Fluorescence Techniques
• Thomas S. Warren Museum of Fluorescence's About Fluorescence
• Fluorescent Mineral Society, Inc.'s Fluorescent Minerals
• UV Systems, Inc. FAQ

OK, fine -- wait for the book.

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I'm waiting at the gate at Washington Dulles with a carry-on bag bulging with a ream or so of photocopies. All that paper is my harvest from a week of researching Alan Lomax within the marble halls of the Library of Congress. Being loaded down never felt so good.

My research in the American Folklife Center wasn't all paper, all the time. I got to see a piece of 1940s-vintage recording equipment -- ostensibly portable, but you wouldn't want to be the one lugging that thing around. I got to listen to the very first recordings of Leadbelly, his showmanship and musical skill gleaming through the gravelly surface noise of the aluminum disc used to capture those sounds in 1933. And I was able to see silent but full-color footage of 1937 Haiti and Kentucky, viewing everyday dancers and musicians through the eyes of my subject. That, especially, was something else.

But for the most part, I read -- old letters, manuscripts, radio scripts, field notes, and so forth. What I'm bringing home is just a sliver of what I saw this week, yet it's a ton more than one might think necessary for a 128-page book about someone whose seven-decade career has been pretty well documented elsewhere. The most important thing I'm returning to Texas with, though, is understanding -- a sense that, through all these materials, I know the person I'll be writing about and that I can finally grasp the way his life is intertwined with the larger story of the cultural shifts and technological advances and global developments that took place during his 87 years.

I'm also returning to Austin with a whole lot of gratitude -- to my family for putting up with my absence this week, and to the generous and truly helpful staff at the Folklife Reading Room for putting up with my presence. I'm going to give them all -- and myself -- a break by taking a week off from this project and most other writing-related stuff. After that, I plan to start putting all this paper to use.

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With my enthusiasm for my Alan Lomax project, I've had no problem motivating myself to make some progress on it every day. And even if I weren't so excited about it, the frightening volume of materials by and about my subject -- and the daunting task of finding, sorting through and synthesizing the most significant of these -- would keep me working on a regular basis.

But if I needed a boost or a strategy for self-boosting, "Jerry Seinfeld's productivity secret" (which I found through Good Experience) strikes me as a good one. Of course, there's no reason why his approach -- "Don't break the chain" -- shouldn't apply to non-creative efforts as well, and goodness knows there are other areas of my life where I could use more of this sort of sticktuitiveness.

There's something to be said for unsticking, too. After years of keeping to a schedule of getting up at 5 a.m. to do my "writing" work (which more often than not involves researching or reading instead of actual writing), I recently realized that my early-to-rise ways weren't getting the job done.

(I'll pause here while you recover from the shock of learning that getting up at 5 a.m. six days a week just wasn't working out.)

Starting about three weeks ago, I've been routinely working after the boys have gone to bed, making progress like gangbusters, shutting things down around midnight or so, and then getting up six or seven hours later sans alarm clock. Often it's 3-year-old F who is waking me up, but I feel much more charitable toward him and the rest of the world than I was when he was disrupting my work rather than mere sleep.

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To the list of Alan Lomax's contemporaries with children's-book biographies, we can, of course, add Lady Bird Johnson, who died this afternoon at age 94. She's the subject of Miss Lady Bird's Wildfowers: How a First Lady Changed America, a splendid collaboration by Kathi Appelt and Joy Fisher Hein.

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The gravitational pull of my current project is such that it's even changing the way I'm choosing U.S. history books for 8-year-old S and 3-year-old F.

This month, we're focusing on biographies of Americans born within a decade of Alan Lomax -- between 1905 and 1925. The subjects are an eclectic bunch:

• Black Cat Bone: The Life of Blues Legend Robert Johnson by J. Patrick Lewis and illustrated by Gary Kelley
• Morris and Buddy: The Story of the First Seeing Eye Dog by Becky Hall and illustrated by Doris Ettlinger
• Clyde Tombaugh and the Search for Planet X by Margaret K. Wetterer and illustrated by Laurie A. Caple
• Rosa Parks: My Story by Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins
• Joe Louis: America's Fighter by David A. Adler and illustrated by Terry Widener
• Rachel Carson: Pioneer of Ecology by Kathleen V. Kudlinski and illustrated by Ted Lewin
• Action Jackson by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan and illustrated by Robert Andrew Parker
• Babe Didrikson Zaharias: The Making of a Champion by Russell Freedman
• Grace Hopper: Computer Whiz by Patricia J. Murphy
• When Everybody Wore a Hat by William Steig

The boys' favorite so far seems to be the Grace Hopper book, because of its deft use of a visual pun. It includes a photograph of the computer bug -- that is, the actual moth, taped to a notecard -- that brought an early room-sized calculator to its knees. Even Jackson Pollock can't compete with that.

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In the past 48 hours or so my research has drawn from books, recordings, an online photo gallery, and a digital encyclopedia, and the dots are getting connected in such a rush that I can barely keep up.

It's exhilarating stuff, but it can't compare to the most exciting development of all: my purchase of a plane ticket to Washington, D.C., where I'll soon spend five straight days here.

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I've put my Alan Lomax research aside for a moment to tend to something more pressing -- further revisions to The Day-Glo Brothers. My editor has made some great suggestions for making the text more readable without sacrificing the story or the science -- strengthening both, actually.

Still, as of this morning, the main text does mention both uranine and anthracene. Yes, I know, these are as overused in picture books as ducklings and baby bunnies, but I hope the public will indulge me.

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I've been writing about James a lot lately, and I'll continue to write about him for quite some time. But tonight's the last time I'll be referring to him as "James," because I've got a couple of announcements to make.

First, "James" is Alan Lomax (1915-2002), the folklorist and ethnomusicologist who preserved countless folk songs from the U.S. and around the world through his travels and recordings in a career that spanned seven decades. His life's work left its mark on everyone from Leadbelly to Moby, and his life's story intertwines with the New Deal, McCarthyism, and the space program. Plus, he was from Austin.

But the big news is this: Bloomsbury USA will be publishing my as-yet-untitled (and as-yet-unwritten) YA biography of Alan. I've been trying to tell his story for more than five years now, and hoping for nearly as long to work with the editor who's handling this project. I can't give enough thanks to my family, to my agent and all of my friends who have read my various picture-book attempts at getting Alan's story told. Your support means the world to me.

Between this deal and S.V.T., the past few months have been an absolute thrill. The next several will be thrilling in their own way, but a lot of work, too. I hope you Bartography readers won't have to wait to long for this book, but however long it takes, why not pass the time with some great music?

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