I have found that sometimes introducing youth to new and
different forms of poetry can be daunting.
It can be made much easier by introducing to the mix an element of
fun. This is what editor Paul B.
Janeczko and illustrator Chris Raschka have accomplished with the collection A
Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms.
Janeczko collected poems to exemplify 29 different poetic
forms, from the familiar (the haiku, the sonnet) to the somewhat less familiar
(the aubade, the villanelle). Some forms
have only one representative poem, but some have two, often to present a
contrast. For example, in the case of
the limerick, the first poem offered is from Edward Lear:
“There was an Old
Lady whose folly
Induced her to sit in
a holly;
Whereupon, by a thorn
Her dress heing torn,
She quickly became
melancholy.”
To illustrate how poets can play within a form and break the
rules, Janeczko contrasted this classic limerick with a selection from Steven
Herrick:
“There once was a
limerick called Steven
whose rhyme scheme
was very uneven
it didn’t make sense
it wasn’t funny
and who’d call a
limerick Steven anyway?”
I really appreciated these contrasting examples, as they
illustrate very well the axiom, “First learn the rules, then you can break
them.” I think these poems will help
readers realize that those some forms of poetry have rules, the beauty of
poetry is that once you understand these rules, they are fluid.
Janeczko’s selections for poems are varied. He highlights classic poems from William
Blake, Edward Lear and William Shakespeare, as well as modern poets like Alice
Schertle and Gary Soto. There were even
some poets with whom I was not familiar, such as Penny Harter.
The arrangement of the poems works very well. Janeczko starts with the simplest forms, such
as couplets, then moves to more complicated forms, both in length and in
style. Poetic forms that are
considerably visual, such as a concrete poem, are found towards the end of the
collection. Every spread is beautifully
illustrated with lively paintings from Chris Raschka. For every poetic form, Raschka includes a
small icon to represent the form, and to signal to the reader that something
new is coming.
Janeczko includes a very helpful introduction to prepare readers
for the collection to follow, along with suggestions as to how to the read the
book. Backmatter includes more detailed
information about each poetic form than is included throughout the book. A list of acknowledgements at the end give
credit to each of the contributing poets.
There are so many opportunities for poetry breaks given
throughout this book, but one idea that struck me the most had to do with a
found poem. According to Janeczko, a
found poem “is taken from a piece of writing that wasn’t written as poetry…and
arranged on the page as a poem.” The
example given in the book is “The Paper Trail” by Georgia Heard:
“They fluttered from
the sky like a sweet and peaceful snowstorm:
sheets and scraps – a
crumpled page of cleaning instructions
with a reminder to
damp-wipe smudges and smears;
a woman’s cell-phone
bill;
a hand-written note
on aper decorated with kitchen herbs read:
‘…it would be nice to
have another pot-luck dinner for parents’;
a blank check
numbered 3746 neatly torn from a check-book.
Bits of paper floated
into the open classroom windows,
drifted into a second
floor apartment window on Liberty Street.
At St. Paul’s
Cathedral, in Lower Manhattan,
three inches
blanketed old graves.”
In the backmatter, Janeczko admits that this is not a true
found poem, as it is made largely of Heard’s own words, but the idea is still
the same. I have seen other examples of
found poems, and one I have seen that I would love to try with students
involves taking a page from a discarded or damaged book (and in a library, we
have no shortage of those) and selecting words along the page to create a poem,
highlighting them through artwork on the page itself. I think a project like this would resonate
with my older patrons.
Janeczko, Paul B., ed.
A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms. Illustrated by Chris Raschka. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2005. ISBN:
9780763606626
No comments:
Post a Comment