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I planted a whistle
And grew a flute,
I planted a shoelace
And grew a boot,
I planted a button
And grew a blouse,
I planted a whisker
And grew a mouse.

"Mole" 

Tunnel! I tunnel!
I never see my tunnels,
Yet they comfort me. 

As Jack Prelutsky passes the mantle of Children’s Poet Laureate to Mary Ann Hoberman, it’s a good time to take a quick look at some of his new poetry out this year:

My Dog May Be a Genius (Greenwillow)
Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry; How to Write a Poem (Greenwillow)

Billed as a collection of “more than 100 silly poems,” My Dog May Be a Genius is Prelutsky’s fifth collection of humorous poems in the vein of The New Kid on the Block, his best-selling collection of 100+ poems illustrated by cartoonist James Stevenson with understated comic genius on every page. With poems that are nearly childhood standards now, like “Homework! Oh, Homework!” and “Bleezer’s Ice Cream,” the music of Prelutsky’s verse is irresistible and continues in My Dog May Be A Genius with “bookend” poems such as “Homework, Sweet Homework” and “Sandwich Stan.”

Since the publication of New Kid, equally popular companion books followed, including Something Big Has Been Here (1990), A Pizza the Size of the Sun (1996), and It’s Raining Pigs & Noodles (2000). My Dog May Be a Genius is a fitting successor to this comic legacy and includes concrete poems, puns, and even two poems about reading and the library (and you know how I love those!). [Indices to titles and to first lines are also included.] Here’s one sample poem that I think kids will love. What about putting it on a valentine next February?

If You Were a Rhinoceros
by Jack Prelutsky

If you were a rhinoceros,
I still would be your friend.
And if you were a platypus,
our friendship would not end.
I’d like you as a walrus,
camel, cat, or kangaroo.
It doesn’t matter what you are—
I’ll still be friends with you.

From: Prelutsky, Jack. 2008. My Dog May Be a Genius. New York: Greenwillow, p. 42.

Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry; How to Write a Poem is Prelutsky’s offering to young, aspiring poets out there and to readers of all ages who might be interested in the back story behind many of his popular poems and his poetry writing process. This reader-friendly volume (targeting ages 7-10) consists of about 20 autobiographical anecdotes, 20 stand-alone writing tips, connected with poems referenced in both. Each is written in his inimitable, humorous style incorporating his personal experiences as well as responses from kids over the years. He also introduces poetry terms and concepts such as voice, scansion, meter, etc. with helpful sidebars. Most of the poems trade on his humorous rhyming verse, but he includes haiku and concrete poems, too.

The book ends with 10 “Poemstarts” that offer kids a formula for building poems based on patterns. A glossary and index are additional tools included. Teachers will appreciate Prelutsky’s emphasis on keeping a poetry notebook (or journal) and on the need for constant rewriting. Librarians will appreciate his sending young readers to the library for the thesaurus and other tools. One note for parents: Prelutsky offers a smorgasbord of food pranks (and others) that he and his brother pull on their parents. It’s hilarious, but… :-) This is an excellent addition to books on poetry writing for young kids, particularly since it helps us get in the head of a poet, so to speak.

Here’s one tiny excerpt from his first essay, “My Father’s Underwear” which ends,
“One of the things that I did to make my father so mad at me was to pin his underwear up on the wall. Before I did that, though, I decorated it. You see, my father wore really boring white underwear, and I wanted to make it pretty, so I painted it with finger paint. THEN I pinned it to the wall. My father didn’t like that at all.

Once I put a bug in his coffee cup, and another time I put breadcrumbs in his bed. I did lots of other stuff too. I made a list of all the things like that I could remember, then picked some of them to put in a poem called “I Wonder Why Dad Is So Thoroughly Mad.”

From: Prelutsky, Jack. 2008. Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry; How to Write a Poem. New York: Greenwillow, p. 3-4.

For more on Prelutsky, look for my birthday posting about him and his work on September 8, 2007, or my entry for him in POETRY PEOPLE; A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO CHILDREN'S POETS (Libraries Unlimited, 2007).

For more Poetry Friday treats, go to my fabulous former student's blog: Becky's Book Reviews.

Picture credits: cdn.harpercollins.com

Uncle Shelby's Zoo: Don't Bump the Glump! and Other Fantasies by Shel Silverstein originally published by HMH Publications Inc. (Playboy) 1963 HarperCollins 2008 My Dog May Be a Genius by Jack Prelutsky HarperCollins / Greenwillow 2008 In these waning days of his tenure as Children's Poet Laureate, Jack Prelutsky and his publishers (who also happen to be Silverstien's

Poems by Alan Katz Drawings by Edward Koren Margaret K. McElderry / Simon & Schuster 2008 Okay, once again just to make sure we're all on the same page: do not give your book a title that can be used against you in a review. You would think editors would be the first to understand the rules of making a book review-proof. Of course, it's also a good idea to make sure the content followed the

Tomorrow is Jack Prelutsky’s birthday, so I’d like to send him a happy shout out and celebrate his life and work with a brief post.

He was born on September 8, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Hunter College in Manhattan and worked as an opera singer, folk singer, truckdriver, photographer, plumber’s assistant, piano mover, cab driver, standup comedian, and more. He is married and lives in Seattle. He enjoys photography, carpentry, and creating games and "found object" sculpture and collages. He collects frog miniatures, art, and children’s poetry books of which he has over 5000.

Prelutsky has garnered many awards in his long career including citations as: New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year, School Library Journal Best of the Best Book, International Reading Association/Children's Book Council Children's Choice, Library of Congress Book of the Year, Parents' Choice Award, American Library Association Notable Children's Recording, an Association for Library Services to Children Notable Book and Booklist Editor's Choice, among others. In 2006, he was honored as the first Children’s Poet Laureate by the national Poetry Foundation which included a $25,000 prize. His combined works have sold over a million copies and been translated into many languages.

Jack Prelutsky is a prolific writer, with many collections of poetry to his credit, including enormously popular anthologies he has compiled of other poets’ works, such as The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (Random House 1983), Read-aloud Rhymes for the Very Young (Knopf 1986), The Beauty of the Beast (Knopf 1997), and The 20th Century Children's Poetry Treasury (Knopf 1999). In addition, there are many collections of his own popular poetry available including books organized around topics such as Tyrannosaurus was a Beast: Dinosaur Poems (Mulberry 1993) and The Dragons are Singing Tonight (HarperTrophy 1998). His holiday poems are also very appealing: It’s Halloween (HarperTrophy 1996), It’s Christmas (HarperTrophy 1995), It’s Thanksgiving (HarperTrophy 1996), and It’s Valentine’s Day (HarperTrophy 1996), also available in one single audio anthology from HarperChildrensAudio (2005). And for younger children, he created a kind of “American Mother Goose” with nursery rhymes that reference cities and places in the United States, rather than European sites such as “London Bridge” or “Banbury Cross” in his collections, Ride a Purple Pelican (Greenwillow 1986) and Beneath a Blue Umbrella (Greenwillow 1990).

Jack Prelutsky became established as a poetic dynamo with the publication of The New Kid on the Block in 1984, his best-selling collection of 100+ poems illustrated by cartoonist James Stevenson with understated comic genius on every page. With poems that are nearly childhood standards now, like “Homework! Oh, Homework!” and “Bleezer’s Ice Cream,” the music of Prelutsky’s verse is irresistible. Since the publication of New Kid, he rivals Shel Silverstein for name recognition in the field of children’s poetry. Equally popular companion books followed, including Something Big Has Been Here (1990), A Pizza the Size of the Sun (1996), and It’s Raining Pigs & Noodles (2000). A fifth installment is slated for publication in 2008: My Dog May Be a Genius.

Many of Prelutsky’s poems lend themselves to choral reading and poem performance in a variety of ways. For example, his poems with repeated lines or refrains provide a natural opportunity for group participation on the refrain. One of my favorite strategies for performing Prelutsky’s poetry is singing. Count the beats in the first line or two of the poem; then count the beats in the first line or two of the song to see if they match. Many of Jack Prelutsky’s poems, in particular, match song tunes, which may not be surprising when one remembers he was a singer and musician before turning to poetry. Try his poem “Allosaurus” (from Tyrannosaurus was a Beast: Dinosaur Poems), a poem describing the ferocious qualities of this dinosaur sung to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” It’s a hilarious juxtaposition of lyrics and tune. Challenge the children to match other of his dinosaur poems to song tunes.

Allosaurus
by Jack Prelutsky

Allosaurus liked to bite,
its teeth were sharp as sabers,
it frequently, with great delight,
made mincemeat of its neighbors.

Allosaurus liked to hunt,
and when it caught its quarry,
it tore it open, back and front,
and never said, “I’m sorry!”

Allosaurus liked to eat,
and using teeth and talons,
it stuffed itself with tons of meat,
and guzzled blood by gallons.

Allosaurus liked to munch,
and kept from growing thinner
by gnawing an enormous lunch,
then rushing off to dinner.

From Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast
[Sung to the tune of “Row, row, row your boat”]

For more about Jack, his life, and his work, check out his new web site and look for Poetry People; A Practical Guide to Children's Poets (Libraries Unlimited, 2007).

P.S. As always, I'm glad to participate in the Friday Poetry Round Up, hosted this week by Semicolon. (Thanks!)

Picture credit: www.nssd112.org

The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Author: E.L. Konisburg
Publisher: Atheneum
ISBN-10: 068985322X
ISBN-13: 978-0689853227



When I reread The Mixed-Up Files, I can hardly believe it was written in 1968. Though the amount of Claudia's allowance and the price of The New York Times reveal its age, few books from that era retain such a contemporary feel.


For those who aren't familiar with the book, The Mixed-Up Files is about Claudia and Jamie Kinkaid, two suburban siblings who, fed up with the rest of their family, run away to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The adventure becomes a mystery when they become determined to discover the true origin of a statue named angel, reputed to be the work of Michelangelo. Claudia's careful planning makes their escape and survival plausible. Jamie's practical nature and eye-rolling attitude keep Claudia from getting too romantic. The siblings complement each other and form a partnership that is at first grudging, later affectionate, making this a book with both boy and girl appeal.


I still think this is a nearly perfect premise for a middle-grade novel. It may not grab immediate attention, but in its simple plot, there are elements to appeal to many different segments of child readers: mystery lovers, kids intrigued by the romance of big cities, kids who like art and museums (such kids exist; I was one of them), and the nearly universal appeal of a story about running away.

And yet The Mixed-Up Files is so much more than its plot. Konigsburg works philosophy into these pages: ideas about secrets, learning, our need for comfort, and the isolation of modern life. Most importantly, she explore what make someone an individual rather than a member of a school class, a member of a family, or someone who defined simply by the motions of their daily lives.

Each detail in The Mixed Up Files is carved as carefully as Michelangelo's fictional angel. I remember precisely such images as the strip of white flesh between Jamie's jacket and sagging trousers when he fills his pockets with change, the deep black tub with golden faucets, the meals they eat from the Automat. The language is equally thoughtful. Decades after I first read this book, sentences such as, "Bedtime is the worst time for organized thinking," still ring in my mind.

Far from being outdated, The Mixed Up Files becomes increasingly relevant. Jamie and Claudia are described as siblings who were so busy with activities that they never really spent much time together, a situation that is certainly even more common today than in the sixties. They're suburban. They're consumers, with Claudia's spending of her paltry allowance described as "her biggest adventure each week." And they feel the emptiness of their busy lives. That is why they run away—as Claudia puts it, to "come back different."

By the end, she is different, and so are we.