 | Here’s book 9 of the 10 Capstone poetry books I wrote in 2007. If you haven’t already heard about the overall process, and if you’re interested, you can read about it here. After I finished Chatter, Sing, Roar, Buzz: Poems About the Rain Forest, I moved on to the food poetry collection. I wasn’t really looking forward to this one a whole lot. You’d think I’d love it—food and poetry are two of my favorite things! But it seems to me that most successful food poems tend to be rhyming, clever, and funny. |
I was afraid the whole book would end up with such a narrow range of mood/voice that it would get boring. I mean, I could write a heartfelt ode to macaroni and cheese, but would it work for a kids’ book?
Anyway, I got the images, and I did my usual step of just going through them and jotting notes about what kinds of poems popped into my head. And I wrote my editor, Jenny Marks, with a question:
One more question: Do the poems need to be about the item *as* food, or could the food pic be an illustration of the poem in general.
In other words, could I write about a visit to an apple orchard for the apple poem, even though the pic doesn't show the orchard? Or could I write about a kid's birthday, but not necessarily the cake, and have the cake illustrate it?
The answer? Nope, I couldn’t. The product planning team wanted the great majority of poems to be “poems about food as food.”
Shoot.
OK, so I got to work writing first drafts of poems. I wrote poems about pancakes and pizza, donuts and sushi, picnics and the food pyramid.
I wrote haiku, limericks, and even a sijo, inspired by Linda Sue Park’s Tap-Dancing on the Roof. Most of the poems are fun, but it didn’t feel quite as one-note as I had feared.
I got feedback from Jenny and worked on a revision. There were of course plenty of changes and suggestions to consider, but most of them were minor. So all in all, the process was smooth as French silk pie.
Here are a few of the poems from the collection. These are not the images from the book—they’re just to give you an idea of it.
 | Summer Rain I bite into sweet summer—it drips down my chin Watermelon days
[haiku]
|
Can't Spaghetti-nough!
noodles slippery, white sliding, twirling, dangling parmesan, butter, garlic, meatballs rolling, splashing, staining messy, red sauce [diamante] |  |
 | Making Pancakes pour the batter Plip Plop brown both sides Flip Flop spread the butter Tip Top let the syrup Drip Drop eat them all up Don’t Stop! |
By the time I finished the book, I was stumbling toward the finish line of the 10 Capstone poetry books. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to write these books, but I was also looking forward to finishing up the process. 10 poetry books in one year is a lot! I submitted a bunch of possible titles:
Saved by Blueberries
Slurped or Burped or Sipped
Skyscraper Sandwich
Extra, Extra, Extra Cheese
Watermelon Days
Pour the Batter
The Incredible, Edible…Root?
What a Birthday Candle Stands For
No Green Beans Until You Finish Your Cupcake
Slurped or Burped or Sipped (the title of a poem about milk) was my favorite, but Capstone decided on Lettuce Introduce You: Poems About Food. Once I finished this book, I had just one more project on the horizon: transportation poems. I’ll post about that one soon.
Thanks for letting me share about my poetry books here:>) Because I have a bad memory and my work-for-hire books turn into a blur looking back at a bunch I wrote all close together, it's so nice for me to have a little record of the process here.
 | Way back in January I started telling you about my Capstone poetry books. In 2007, I wrote 10 of them! Six came out in the spring, and four more came out a couple of months ago. I just haven’t had a chance to blog about them yet. The overall process for the second batch of four was the same as what I blogged about here. I still worked with the lovely Jenny Marks as my editor, and I still had fabulous photos to write to. The main difference is that I wrote the second set of four faster. I still had four weeks to do each book, but because of some delays with the photo research, and because I needed to finish by a certain date to stay sane of the holidays, I ended up with overlapping schedules. In other words, I had four weeks to write each book, but I didn’t have 16 weeks total for the four books. They overlapped so that I was sometimes working on two at once. It was intense, to say the least. |
A Fuzzy-Fast Blur: Poems About Pets was the first book I did in this set. I wanted to do it first because I knew it would be really fun to write poems about animals. And it was.
I had a great variety of pictures to choose from—variety both in animals and in moods. I turned in 21 poems, more than my required 14 or 15 poems and I was pretty happy with them overall.
One poem I didn’t want to write was for a picture of a snake swallowing a mouse. I know how the food chain works, but I like to live in denial of this harsh reality. Still, I figured the only way to do a good job on that poem was to embrace the predatorial point of view. So I wrote:
 | Come In, Come In! I’ll make it easy I’ll open wide I’ll hope that you will slide inside Snakes eat mice Some find that sad But here’s the truth: They don’t taste bad! And in the picture in the book (none of these are the actual pix from the book), you can see the cute tiny feet of the mouse disappearing down the snake’s hatch. Ick! |
People have asked about the titles of these books. For each one, I submitted a list of titles or phrases from individual poems, things I thought might make good titles. For this book, I submitted:
Two Are Twice as Mice
It’s True My Tarantula’s Terribly Hairy
Shall I Share a Lick with You?
As Long as You Don’t Bite my Toes!
I’m a Rainbow Hermit Crab!
Are You My New Person?
Sleek Sneak Chase-ful Cat
I didn’t even submit A Fuzzy-Fast Blur, but I really like it. It’s from this poem, which goes with a picture of a ferret zonked out by its water bottle.
Flat-Out Ferret bundle of energy slick streak of fur I race and I climb a fuzzy-fast blur I burrow, I chew things I crawl and I leap exhaustion takes over I’m ready to … |  |
As usual, the collection is mix of forms, free verse, and rhyming poems. One of my favorite non-rhyming poems in this collection was this haiku. The dog leaping for the Frisbee is such a wonderful photo!
 | Jumping for Joy tail spinning, whipping, joy meets toy in mid-air catch: leap of summer faith |
This collection was one of the smoothest-going of the 10! It required probably the least revision of all the books. I think it’s because I love animals and it was mostly a real pleasure to write these, putting myself into the minds of both different animals and of the kids who love/fear/want them.
I’m really excited about this one, and it should be fun to share some of these poems with kids at school visits. Of course, then every one of the 120 kids in the media center will want to tell me what kind of pet he or she has!
Anyway, I only have one complaint about these four new books overall, and that’s that the paper or the colors or something is a bit different (to my untrained eye) than for the first six books. Something about the actual production of the books doesn’t feel quite as high. It’s a minor difference, but somehow the first six look more expensive, higher quality.
But I hope they’re fun books that kids will enjoy!
P.S. Don't forget to vote today!
