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  April is National Poetry month so to spice up my interviews I decided to talk to internationally renowned poet and anthologist, Lee Bennett Hopkins.  In 1989 he received the University of Southern Mississippi Medallion for “outstanding contributions to the field of children’s … Continue reading →

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To give the Chinese proverb in its entirety, ‘Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come’ – and to extend the metaphor (or revert it … Continue reading ... →

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Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here.

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Born of Naomi Shihab Nye’s childhood fascination with Oman and a visit there five years ago, The Turtle of Oman is that rare thing in current children’s book publishing: a deliberately low-key story in which the climax is — well, read below. After Naomi and I swapped sympathies for how old we were now after our many years of acquaintance, we settled in for a good talk about her new novel.

Roger Sutton: How do you keep your enthusiasm?

Naomi Shihab Nye: I think it’s hanging out with kids all these years. I was visiting a school last week, and they were so incredible. Just being with them for the whole day and listening to their questions and looking at their writing and going into their art classes and seeing the pots and photographs they were making, I thought, “It’s okay to get old if you can still hang out with young people and feel that great energy. Because we still have it. It just gets sort of muted.”

RS: What do you think that does to your writing? Or for it?

NSN: We hear a lot of voices every day, but for me the most touching and tender voices continue to be those of kids. They’re the most direct, the most unadorned. It calls forth your own kid voice. It keeps it alive. It nourishes it. I agree with people who say you never lose that kid spirit in yourself no matter what age you are.

RS: Oh, hell, I never had it.

NSN: I think you have it right now.

RS: Making up for lost time. The Turtle of Oman is a story about a boy who’s moving. Was moving a big thing for you as a child?

NSN: It was, but I really did not think of the boy, Aref, as me, ever, when writing the book. Its source was my childhood fascination with the country of Oman. I saw a National Geographic story about it when I was around eight. At the time it was a closed country; no one could visit. I talked to my father. Did he know about it? Had he ever been there? He, too, was interested, so it was a topic we talked about together. And also, as I told kids in Oman when I did go there, my first name, juggled, becomes “Omani.”

RS: Huh.

NSN: As a child, I was always juggling words and names. So a fascination with a place. And then when my father died seven years ago, I remember thinking that I was not only going to miss him so incredibly much, but I was really going to miss the relationship he had with our son. They had a very precious bond. My father could walk in and my son would light up, and they would just take off. I wanted to honor that bond between a boy and his grandfather.

RS: It really made me wish I had known my grandfather.

NSN: That’s touching, Roger. A couple of adults have written to me that this book carried them back to their own relationship with a grandparent. So those were the two impulses. Not moving. Moving just kind of came on. When I was in Oman it was staggering to learn how common it was for Omani kids to do what Aref does in this book. I talked to a bunch of them. They said, “Oh, yeah, I lived in England for two years while my parents got their graduate degrees. I lived in the U.S. for three years. I lived in Australia for two years.” It was interesting because they’d all gone away and come back. Education is highly valued, and they don’t have — or they didn’t have, five years ago when I was there — graduate degrees. You had to leave the country to get one. But Oman has a very fine style of life, a very good economic stratosphere, so people want to go back after their schooling. And it’s a very gracious, hospitable place.

RS: It does seem very gracious and hospitable from your book. When I look at the details in the story, I think, “This is such an alien landscape to what I know.” But they’re so comfortable in it, the boy and his grandfather.

NSN: I’ve sent a few friends to Oman, people who are on their way to India. They’ve all had fascinating reports afterwards.

RS: Oh, I’d love to go. Even before your book, I knew it from childhood stamp collecting.

NSN: So did I! The Tourism Bureau of Oman has a new slogan: “Beauty has an address. Oman.” It really is a beautiful place in a striking and rather odd way, because of the mountains being tones of brown, and the city being pale colors. White, butter yellow, beige buildings; and they’re all low, because the sultan does not like skyscrapers. And then the sea is so intensely turquoise. So you have these three stripes of color, and then sunrise and sunset above that — it’s gorgeous.

RS: Let’s just bag this talk and go.

NSN: Yes, let’s. And we’ll stay at the Chedi Hotel. Look that up.

RS: You did a really good job of letting us know these kid-focused details about that landscape, but in a way that wasn’t touristy. It felt like it was coming from the inside.

NSN: That’s nice. Thank you for saying that.

RS: Do you know how revolutionary this book is?

NSN: No. What do you mean?

RS: Here we have a book about a kid who’s going to move. And by the end of the book he hasn’t even moved yet. It’s so quiet.

NSN: I was speaking about The Turtle of Oman to some kids at the school library a beloved friend runs, and I said to them at the very end, “You realize who the turtle is?” They all just stared at me. And then afterwards my friend said, “Aref’s the turtle! I didn’t realize that.” I said, “Yes, he’s the turtle.”

I really long for the slow time of childhood. I think most of us who live in this era do. I wanted Aref to live in slow time, for the book to feel as if it was almost in slow-motion. Like, oh my God, we’re back to the suitcase and there’s still only two things in it? I wanted it to be weird that way. The head of the Academy of American Poets said, “Poetry is slow art.” To me that poetry of daily life that we yearn for is the slow artfulness of movement. I keep this little German quote on my desk: Weniger, aber besser. “Less, but better.” Less stuff, less clutter, less things in a day, but better relationships with those things. I wanted there to be some sense of that with Aref and Sidi.

RS: How do you think we can convince our publishers and librarians that there is room for this kind of slow book? Everything now is super high-concept.

NSN: Yeah, there’s all this melodrama and vampire stuff. There’s a lonesomeness that human beings exhibit sometimes: I have all this stuff, I have everything at my fingertips, I’m going in all these different directions at once, and I’m lost. Whereas children have a willingness to pause and turn something over and over in their minds. I worry about what happens when you bombard children with too much stuff all the time, too many activities, too many events, too many things. I remember my kid, when he was young — he’s now a professor — coming home from school one day when he was in about fifth grade, and I asked him about a certain friend of his. I said, “Do you want to have so-and-so come over after school tomorrow?” And he looked at me, and he said, “Oh, Mom. He’s ruined.” And I said, “What do you mean, he’s ruined?” And he said, “He’s just scheduled all the time. He has no free time anymore.” I think of that sometimes when I’m feeling frustrated or frazzled, when I haven’t spent enough time with something to make it feel meaningful. That’s something that teachers, librarians, parents know kids need.

RS: The climax of the story is that they catch a fish and throw it back.

NSN: The little things that happen are really little. The threads are delicate, but they’re also strong. I did thirteen drafts, Roger. In the first draft, the baby pillow that Sidi throws into Aref’s suitcase was the star of the book. In my second draft, Aref’s house and Sidi’s house were the stars. Virginia, my editor, told me, “I don’t want a book about a relationship between two houses. They’re not even on the same street.” So I had to bring people into the book.

RS: Oh, God forbid, Naomi.

NSN: In talking to kids at schools I’ve visited, they all seem to have had experiences similar to Aref’s, even in the second and third grade. They’ve moved, their friends have moved, their grandparents have moved, they’ve changed schools. I often do events with refugee resettlement communities. In some cases I ask people to bring a poem from their country, or just a few lines from a story, or to tell us a story and then translate it. So I hope that readers would feel somewhat at home with Aref, somebody who is being challenged to face this whole new culture and who wonders: where do I find my gravity in it?

RS: That gives you a narrative line throughout. He is dealing with anxiety. It’s not just a pleasant little wander with Grandpa. There’s this fear of what the new place will be like, and as a reader you want that to be resolved.

NSN: Right. And the metaphor of going away and coming back, which so many creatures do in their lives. There’s this essential tug of home gravity. Aref is going to come back, but it’s still scary to think about being gone.

RS: Right.

NSN: My favorite line in the book is when Aref asks Sidi: “What if they make fun of my hat?” The hats of Oman are so distinctive, and so beautiful. And Sidi says, “Then you can let them try it on.” Become me, and then you won’t make fun of me.

RS: When you’re writing a novel, do you ever have to say to yourself, “Wait, I’m being too much of a poet”?

NSN: Probably when I overwrite a passage and make it too descriptive. But my poems have always been fairly plain, I would say, and always had a narrative thread in them. My poems enjoy conversation, and they try to incorporate it. But I did end up cutting back a lot of description and then trying to build up conversations or scenes with a little more velocity or energy rather than some kind of dreamy metaphor.

RS: I read poetry so differently from the way I read prose. I read a poem through quickly, then look more closely, then go back, and then look at the thing at the end and the thing at the beginning. It’s a much more singular moment than the chronology that you involve yourself in when you’re reading a piece of fiction.

NSN: Right. I wanted there to be little chunks in every chapter that feel poem-like somehow, that carry your mind in that same way, deeply, into a focus, into a moment, and then kind of drift around and blur. But I try to keep it also moving a little bit, even if it’s slow-moving.

RS: Have you seen any slow TV? It’s my new passion.

NSN: I have never even heard of it. What is it?

RS: It’s from Norway. There are these shows — there’s one I really love. It’s a train. It’s nine hours long. They just mounted a camera on the front of the train.

NSN: Oh my God. This is amazing.

RS: I’ll send you a link.

Your book kept reminding me of Little House in the Big Woods.

NSN: Oh, that’s interesting.

RS: Again, very small dramas, just “here’s what it’s like to live in my little house in the big woods.” And the anxieties of oh, Pa’s gone, is he coming back? That tends to be the climax of a lot of the chapters. It has so much respect for those small moments that do make up a kid’s life. So many books now are trying to distract kids from those moments.

NSN: That’s right. And I think they’re distracted enough, and there’s enough that will distract them. Sometimes kids will say to me, “What is the one thing that made you a poet as a child growing up?” And I would say it was an apprehension that there was so much around us that we could easily overlook, it would just slip by. I felt really haunted by that as a child. And by the way, Roger, did you know I grew up in Ferguson, Missouri?

RS: No, I didn’t know that.

NSN: I was born in inner-city St. Louis, and when I was almost three my parents moved out to Ferguson, because it was a suburb, with more trees and little parks, and a quieter pace. So all of this news and all of these images from Ferguson are very haunting to me, because in the time of childhood where I grew up, the whole town of Ferguson belonged to kids. We rode our bikes everywhere. We were really curious about what this black-white line was. It was very, very invisible, but very well known to adults, and we didn’t understand it at all. Anyway, that’s just a digression. But it has made me think a lot about slow time and that need as a child to be in spots that feel as if they will outlast you, outlive you, be there in some physical way.

RS: I like the way that the end of the book makes us wonder what it’s going to be like for Aref in Michigan. You can carry this story forward in your head because you get to know this boy really well and hope that things will work out. It’s almost as if you can write your own sequel.

NSN: A couple of people have bugged me already about writing a sequel, in first-person, of Aref in Michigan, but I thought, “Wouldn’t that undercut all the possibilities for him?” I don’t know if I would want to do that. People are still bugging me to write a sequel to Habibi.

RS: Get busy, girl. It’s been a while.

NSN: I don’t want to write a sequel. I want you to write a sequel. You figure it out.

RS: I’m really into standalone books these days. There are too many sequels.

NSN: I am too. I’m really into everyone else’s capacity to imagine what happens next. I like standalone books. There’s something intact about them. And I think poems try to trust us in that way too. It’s why poems don’t like explanation. What happens next? Where does it go? Poems have that subtlety of ending in air, hinting, suggesting, but now you take it and you go with it.

RS: And those are the poems you keep going back to. When you find the one that creates that story inside yourself, that won’t let you alone, that’s the poem that speaks to you.

NSN: It keeps living.

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More on Naomi Shihab Nye from The Horn Book

• “Alive”: A Poem
• “Spiral Staircase.” From the Horn Book Magazine Special Issue: Poets & Poetry
• Snapshots: “Delicious rhythms.” From the Horn Book Magazine Special Issue: Family Reading

The post Naomi Shihab Nye Talks with Roger appeared first on The Horn Book.

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Happy National Poetry Month! All throughout April, we will interview poets about working in this digital age. Recently, we spoke with author Naomi Shihab Nye.

Throughout her writing career, Nye has penned short stories, fiction books, and poetry collections. Some of the honors she has received include the the Jane Addams Children’s Book award, the Carity Randall Prize, and the The Pushcart Prize. Check out the highlights from our interview below…

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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A team of authors have joined Book Wish Foundation‘s What You Wish For: A Book For Darfur project. Book sale profits will be donated to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), an organization building libraries in Darfur refugee camps in Chad.

Penguin Group’s G.P. Putnam’s Sons imprint will release the collection in September. If you make a donation of $20 or more before April 30th and your name (and your child’s) will be included in the book’s acknowledgment section.

Actress Mia Farrow, who serves as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, has written the forward. The participating authors include: Cornelia Funke, Meg Cabot, R. L. Stine, John Green, Ann M. Martin, Alexander McCall Smith, Cynthia Voigt, Karen Hesse, Joyce Carol Oates, Nikki Giovanni, Jane Yolen, Nate Powell, Gary Soto, Jeanne DuPrau, Francisco X. Stork, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sofia Quintero.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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30-Second Video:

April is National Poetry Month! Join LitWorld, A Global Literacy Organization, in celebrating the power and spirit of words by helping to compose a Global Poem for Change:

The wonderful poet Naomi Shihab Nye got us started with a first line:

I send my words out into the air, listening for yours from everywhere.

 

Submit a line of your own at litworld.org/poem

and watch our Poem GROW at litworld.org/poemblog.

We need Your Words to Change Worlds.

Share our announcement

and help our poem soar around the world…?

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by

Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.



The loud voice is famous to silence,

which knew it would inherit the earth

before anybody said so.



The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds

watching him from the birdhouse.



The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.



The idea you carry close to your bosom

is famous to your bosom.



The boot is famous to the earth,

more famous than the dress shoe,

which is famous only to floors.



The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it

and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.



I want to be famous to shuffling men

who smile while crossing streets,

sticky children in grocery lines,

famous as the one who smiled back.



I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,

but because it never forgot what it could do.



From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995).

Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.

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"A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket."

--Naomi Shihab Nye, The Poetry Paper, no. 3, 2006

I love this definition of a poem. And today, Inauguration Day, something about it fills me with hope. I went looking for a quotation about hope this morning, actually, but found this one instead. A quotation about possibilities. Maybe they're the same thing, I don't know. But I kind of feel like the U.S. is a country of hearts open to the sky right now, and we're ready for winds of change and the freshness they bring.

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Naomi Shihab Nye's poetry and prose poems in Honeybee, her newest collection, will draw readers to the page as surely as bees are drawn to nectar to start the honey-making process.From the moment Nye began studying the behavior of bees in a college linguistics course called “The Nature of Language," she found herself fascinated by the activity of bees.“I buzzed about the campus for a happy

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It’s Poetry Friday and I could not find the time to blog about a poem or poetry book. And since I didn’t want the day to end without my contributing something to this beautiful, collective blog celebration of poetry, I decided to go back to a piece I wrote for PaperTigers in celebration of Poetry Month (back in April), inspired by an interview I read with the incredible poet Naomi Shihab Nye. The piece, called “Waking Up on the Right Side of The Poetry Bed,” is a tribute to poetry and reading aloud.

Poetry Friday’s lovely round-up this week is at Charlotte’s Reading. Enjoy!

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You may have heard of Linda Sue Park. She picked up a little thing called the Newbery Award for her book, A Single Shard, a historical novel set in twelfth-century Korea. But for the upcoming Texas Library Association Poetry Round Up she dons a different hat, that of poet. But first, a bit of background info. She was born in Illinois, is a Stanford grad, married an Irishman, is the mother of two, worked as a journalist and teacher, and is an avid reader, reviewer and blogger. Her previous works include: the novels: Seesaw Girl, The Kite Fighters, When My Name Was Keoko, Project Mulberry, Archer’s Quest, the unique collaboration Click, and her latest book, a "sports" novel set in 1950’s Brooklyn, Keeping Score. She also has several picture books to her credit including The Firekeeper’s Son, Bee-Bim Bop, and Yum! Yuck!

When it comes to poetry, she has long been a contributor to literary journals and has now published her first work of poetry for young people, Tap Dancing on the Roof; Sijo Poems—a unique collection of traditional Korean poems with surprises in the last line. Her extensive author's note at the end is especially wonderful and offers history, advice and encouragement. Here’s a lovely sampling:

Wish
by Linda Sue Park

For someone to read a poem
again, and again, and then,

having lifted it from page
to brain-- the easy part—

cradle it on the longer trek
from brain all the way to heart.

From: Park, Linda Sue. 2007. Tap Dancing on the Roof; Sijo Poems. Clarion.

Isn't that beautiful? It reminds me of other poems about poetry-- a topic I love. Here are two other favorites:

The Poem as a Door
by Eve Merriam

A door
is never
either/or.
A door
is always
more.

You cannot skip over,
you cannot crawl under;
walk through the wood,
it splits asunder.

If you expect it to be bolted,
it will be.

There is only one opening:
yourself as the key.

With a sigh of happiness
you pass through
to find on the other side
someone with a sigh of happiness
welcoming you.

from Merriam, Eve. 1992. The Singing Green: New and Selected Poems for All Seasons. New York: HarperCollins.

and

The Bridge
by Kaissar Afif
translated by Mansour Ajami

Poetry is a river
And solitude a bridge.

Through writing
We cross it,
Through reading

We return.

From Nye, Naomi Shihab. comp. 1998. The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings From the Middle East. New York: Simon & Schuster.

What are your favorite poems about poetry?



Picture credit: search.barnesandnoble.com

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I recently fielded a question from a student about sharing poetry with senior citizens. This is an interest area of mine, too, since I have older family members who have found poetry to be meaningful to them. Several years ago, I read about a nursing home project in which people were invited to share memories and stories from their younger years and then guided in writing about them through poetry—almost a “found” poetry approach, placing key words, ideas and phrases in poetic arrangements. One of my favorite resource books that includes activities used with seniors is:

Morice, D. 1996. The Adventures of Dr. Alphabet. New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative.

Dave Morice provides options for creating poems in unusual formats with people of all ages, but he also specifically shares examples of working with seniors. His ideas are generally quite playful and unorthodox, but can be lots of fun, too. Here is just a sampling of the 104 choices:
*Autumn leaf poems
*Postage stamp poems
*Rolodex poems
*Thumb book poem
*Poetry poker
*Poetry checkers
*Poetry mazes
*Social security poem
*Shakespearean sonnet maker
*And many more

Another resource book that sounds promising is From Deep Within: Poetry Workshops in Nursing Homes (New York, NY. Haworth Press, 1989) by Carol F. Peck.

And if you're looking for a few poetry books for young people that might also be particularly appealing to seniors, you might consider:

Harrison, David L. 2004. Connecting Dots: Poems of My Journey. Honesdale, PA: Wordsong, Boyds Mills Press.
Heard, Georgia. 2002. This Place I Know: Poems of Comfort. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick.
Hoberman, Mary Ann. 1991. Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers: A Collection of Family Poems. Boston: Joy Street Books.
Hopkins, Lee Bennett. 1995. Been to Yesterdays: Poems of a Life. Honesdale, PA: Wordsong, Boyds Mills Press.
Lansky, Bruce. 1994. If We'd Wanted Quiet, We Would Have Raised Goldfish. Meadowbrook Press.
Mora, Pat. 2001. Love to Mama: A Tribute to Mothers. New York: Lee & Low Books.
Nye, Naomi Shihab, comp. 1992. This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World. New York: Four Winds Press.
Steptoe, Javaka, comp. 1997. In Daddy's Arms I Am Tall: African Americans Celebrating Fathers. New York: Lee & Low Books.
Willard, Nancy, comp. 1998. Step Lightly: Poems for the Journey. San Diego: Harcourt.
Wong, Janet. 1999. The Rainbow Hand: Poems about Mothers and Children. New York: Margaret K. McElderry.

Here’s one “grandma” poem that really speaks to me—across the generations and across cultures. It’s by a Pakistani poet and comes from Naomi Nye’s amazing collection, This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World (Four Winds Press, 1992).

Grandmother
by Sameeneh Shirazie
(Pakistan)

I hadn’t asked her much,
just how she felt,
and she told me all about her day,
and how she’d washed the sheets,
and how she could not understand
why the towel got so heavy
when it was wet.
She’d also sunned the mattresses,
such tired bones and so much to do,
and my eyes filled with tears
when I thought of how I was simply
going to say “Salaam” and walk away
and so many words would have been
trapped inside her.
I would have passed by as if
what lay between those bedclothes
was just old life
and not really my grandmother.

[Note: “Salaam” meaning “peace,” is often used as a greeting.]
From: This Same Sky collected by Naomi Shihab Nye (Four Winds Press, 1992)

For more poetry, join the Poetry Friday crew at my former student's blog (go, Becky!) Becky’s Book Reviews.

Picture credit: www.blushbutter.com

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I recently read Naomi Shihab Nye's Honeybee, and I really enjoyed it. I admit that parts of it felt too preachy for me, and other parts a bit inaccessible. But so many poems from it really struck my heart. Here are just a few favorites out of the 80+ poems in this collection.

The United States Is Not the World

 

and this I was reminded of by
            mamas in silk saris
            grandpas in burgundy turbans,
                        smoky overcoats
            Sikh boys with powder-puff topknots
            braided girls munching Belgian chocolate
            and a gloomy little lad with a strange golden cone on his head

            Thank you, I said. O thank you Gate
                        D-4, Amsterdam to Delhi
            months of smug Americana dissolving
                        quickly
            as tiny white no-jetlag pills
                        on the tongue

 

--by Naomi Shihab Nye, all rights reserved

 

Don’t Say

 

God said.

You made it up

then put it in God’s pocket.

God may have thrown it out already.

 

--by Naomi Shihab Nye, all rights reserved

 

To One Now Grown

If we could start over, I would let you get dirtier.
Place your face in the food, it's okay.

In trade for great metaphors,
the ones you used to spout every minute,
I'd extend your bedtime,
be more patient with tantrums,
never answer urgency with urgency,
try to stay serene.

In one scene you are screaming
and I stop the car.
What do I do next?
I can't remember.
I have buried it in the drawer of small socks.

Give me the box of time.
Let's make it bigger.
It's all yours.

 

--by Naomi Shihab Nye, all rights reserved

The Poetry Friday roundup is at The Simple and the Ordinary!

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In honor of Valentine’s Day coming up next week, I’d like to feature a poem from Naomi Shihab Nye’s amazing new collection, Honeybee (Greenwillow, 2008). Her new anthology includes 82 poems, including many prose poems, on school, war, families, landscapes and bees… the connecting thread that buzzes through the poems with nectar and implication. There are many selections about words and books and libraries (one of my favorite poem topic that I have featured previously). She takes us along with her in her travels through Texas (her home state and mine) and Egypt and childhood and airports and beehives. It’s a striking variety of vignettes and anecdotes and observations all threaded through her unique poetic voice. Honeybee is political, personal, and powerful. I marked at least eight poems that I just had to keep in my “favorite poems” notebook. Here’s one small sampling about love and marriage from the point of view of a two year old!

Accuracy

Lydia Rose walked through our front door and said.
“Where is the sock monkey? I need him.” This surprised
me. She had never shown any interest in the sock mon-
key before.

We began digging in the tall basked where the stuffed animals
live.

Lydia Rose said, “I am two and a half now, did you know
that? Where is he?”

We threw out the snake, the yellow bunnies, battered
bears, a strange small eagle wearing a blue T-shirt, a soft
camel, and the bird that makes a chickadee sound if you
press its belly.

Sock Monkey was buried at the bottom.

Lydia Rose clutched him to her chest. “My husband!” she
said, closing her eyes dreamily.

I was astonished. “Your husband? When did this happen?”

She spoke clearly and definitely. “I thought of him and
I married him in my mind.”

She ran around the dining room clutching her husband
tightly, singing the song of a chickadee trapped in a
human body.

“How great! I am happy for you both! I said,
following her.

She did not answer, lost in a newlywed’s swoon.

I said, “It is so nice that you love him now!”

And she stopped dancing, staring at me
disapprovingly.

“I didn’t say I love him! I said, he is my husband!” *

p. 79-80

Poignant, funny, unsentimental, crystal clear and child-sincere. What a gem!

And don’t forget to join the Poetry Friday Round Up at AmoXcalli.
Picture credit: amazon.com

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The Academy of American Poets has introduced a new feature on their already awesome Web site—it’s a poetry map of the U.S. with clickable links to each state featuring poetry info for each state. For my state, Texas, for example, you can locate “poetry-friendly” bookstores, poetry events, facts about the state poet laureate and other featured poets in the state, literary organizations and centers, writing programs and colonies, literary journals and small presses, and poems about Texas. I’m particularly pleased to see Naomi Shihab Nye featured there because she is completely fabulous in every way (have you ever heard her SPEAK?) and because she is one of the poets featured who also works with children and young people and has published collections for young readers, as well as for adults. Her work includes anthologies of Texas poetry, international poetry, poems by children, and her own work, of course, such as:

This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World (Four Winds Press, 1992)
The Tree is Older Than You Are: A Bilingual Gathering of Poems and Stories from Mexico (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings From the Middle East (Simon & Schuster, 1998) [adapted as The Flag of Childhood: Poems from the Middle East (Aladdin, 2002)]
What Have You Lost? (Greenwillow, 1999)
Is This Forever, or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas (Greenwillow, 2004)
Come With Me: Poems for a Journey (Greenwillow, 2000)
Nineteen Varieties of the Gazelle (Greenwillow, 2002)
Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets (Greenwillow, 2000)
A Maze Me (Greenwillow, 2005)

One of my very favorite poems about the topic of books and reading is hers from A Maze Me:

The List
by Naomi Shihab Nye

A man told me he had calculated
the exact number of books
he would be able to read before he died
by figuring the average number
of books he read per month
and his probable earth span,
(averaging how long
his dad and grandpa had lived,
adding on a few years since he
exercised more than they did).
Then he made a list of necessary books,
nonfiction mostly, history, philosophy,
fiction and poetry from different time periods
so there wouldn’t be large gaps in his mind.
He had given up frivolous reading entirely,
There are only so many days.

Oh I felt so sad to hear such an organized plan.
What about the books that aren’t written yet,
the books his friends might recommend
that aren’t on the list,
the yummy magazine that might fall
into his hand at a silly moment after all?
What about the mystery search
through delectable library shelves?
I felt the heartbeat of forgotten precious books
calling for his hand.

Nye, Naomi Shihab. 2005. A Maze Me; Poems for Girls. New York: Greenwillow, pp. 76-77.

In this collection, Nye’s powerful free verse poetry celebrates girls, particularly the dreams and worries that straddle childhood and adulthood. From topics as mundane as spotting a friend in the school cafeteria to as serious as coping with anger and argument, Nye challenges readers to “feel your thinking springing up and layering inside your huge mind.”

Picture credit: www.myonlinemaps.com

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I have been working on a collection of poems about growing up between cultures. Having grown up in Thailand, but being fully American, I have always felt like a part of me belonged in more than one country. Much of what I have written about my experiences have been vignettes of things that have happened. I began writing them one of the vignettes down as a poem one day, and it occured to me--this is the form that these stories should take. So, I've been working on that everyday.

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