Children's Literature

JANECZKO COLLECTION POETRY

Janeczko, Paul B. Seeing the Blue Between: Advice and Inspiration for Young Poets. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2002.

Paul B. Janeczko compiled a collection filled with advice to young poets.  The poets, from Bruchac to Yolen along with thirty others, all share poetry-writing advice with readers.  The reader almost senses that the author is talking to them, sharing a snippet from the wealth of their poetry experiences.  Readers are told to use poems, songs, and films to inspire their poetry (Siv Cedering), collect words, sentences, and lines (Robert Farnsworth), and read (Adam Ford, Andrew Hudgins, and J. Patrick Lewis)

Beyond their words of encouragement, poets shared a poem or two with readers to illustrate their advice.  The poems varied in form, an excellent way of showing readers that writing poetry, and the poems themselves, cannot be boxed into any one description.

Many of the poems had rhyme schemes, and most followed the same rhyming pattern.  Kalli Dakos’ “My Writing is an Awful Mess” and Michael Dugan’s “Don’t Tell Me” both show the popular rhyme scheme found throughout the anthology: A-B-C-B.

The various poets shared free verse poems, shape poems, and persona poems, as well as many others.  Ralph Fletcher’s “Playing with Fire” is an example of free verse, with no rhyme and only one punctuation mark, a period at the end.  The shape poem shared by Douglas Florian, “The Whirligig Beetles,” was written in a circle, depicting the motion of the beetle described.  In “Maple Shoot in the Pumpkin Patch,” Kristine O’Connell George has taken on the persona of a maple shoot, writing the poem from the perspective of “helicoptering past your kitchen window last fall.”

Metaphors and similes are found scattered throughout several poems, providing a way for readers to see and feel what the poets are seeing and feeling.  Lee Bennett Hopkins writes, “Subways are people” and goes on to describe what that looks like.  In talking about fog, Marilyn Singer writes, “the sky is a liar” and “the streetlights float like UFOs.”  Janet Wong writes about families and says “Our family is a quilt of odd remnants patched together.”  All of these examples of figurative language give readers the ability to see things the way the poet sees them and yet, at the same time, helps them see things for themselves.

Some of the poems are meant to evoke emotion or take readers to a place in their own memories.  In Bobbi Katz’ poem, “When Granny Made My Lunch,” readers thoughts automatically go back to memories of their own grandparents.  George Ella Lyon takes readers back to their own roots with “Where I’m From.”  Home and family and emotions knock at readers subconscious, bringing memories with them.

The table of contents lists the poets, in alphabetical order, along with the poems included in the collection.  The index lists each of the poems by first line, providing an additional method of searching.  Janeczko also included notes about each author, sharing their background, inspirations, careers, and hometowns.

“Quilt”

by Janet Wong

Our family

is a quilt

of odd remnants

patched together

in a strange

pattern,

threads fraying,

fabric wearing thin –

but made to keep

its warmth

even in bitter

cold.

Before reading this poem:

Bring in a quilt to show students.  Give them a chance to study it: look at it, touch it, describe it, explain why it’s useful, etc.  Write the list on chart paper.

            Ask students:  How could we compare the quilt to a family? 

Follow-up:

Allow students time to choose an item from a box you provide (box might contain any myriad of objects: book, fruit, toy, box of markers, etc.)

Ask students to study it, much the same way they studied the quilt.  Have them keep a list of their observations.

Next, have them choose a slip of paper (papers contain people- friend, grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother, sister, neighbor, etc.).
Ask students to write a poem similar to Wong’s, one in which they compare their person to the object they chose from the box.