From Cover to Cover (9 page)

Since most nursery rhymes are short, they don’t all lend themselves to single-rhyme editions of picture books. However, some do. James Marshall has given us a hilarious interpretation in
Old Mother Hubbard and Her Wonderful Dog
by exaggerating the absurdities in the rhyme itself. Bruce McMillan gave us a completely new vision in
Mary Had a Little Lamb
by illustrating it with photographs of an African-American girl wearing glasses and yellow overalls. Tracey Campbell Pearson has created an engaging series of board books featuring individual rhymes such as “Little Miss Muffet,” “Diddle, Diddle, Dumpling,” and “Little Bo-Peep” that cast contemporary toddlers in the lead roles. In
Little Bo-Peep
, for example, the title character is shown as a baby dropping her stuffed-toy lambs over the side of her crib, only to have them retrieved by her parents when she starts crying. In this case, the brevity of the rhymes have made them perfect choices for board book texts.

HUMOROUS POETRY AND LIGHT VERSE

Nursery rhymes adhere to strict patterns of rhythm and rhyme and would be technically classified as
verse
rather than as poetry. Although the terms “poetry” and “verse” are often used interchangeably, it is fairly easy to draw distinctions between the two, and it’s helpful to do so in order to speak and write more precisely. Both poetry and verse use patterned language to condense thoughts and ideas into a structured form. Verse, however, rarely strays from its regular structure; poetry often does. Verse generally deals in lighter subjects and presents ideas as an open-and-shut case, but poetry opens a window onto a thought or experience through the use of metaphor and imagery.

When verse uses trite ideas and hackneyed language, it becomes
doggerel
, an inferior form best reserved for greeting cards. Verse succeeds on a grand scale, however, when it draws humor from wild incongruity or plants verbal surprises within a rigid structure. The
nonsense verse
of
nineteenth-century writers Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll continues to delight today’s children with its daft impossibilities. There is something about outrageous absurdity bound up in a tight, predictable structure that elementary school-age children find fall-down-on-the-floor funny. Shel Silverstein is a master at this kind of writing, and his collections
Where the Sidewalk Ends
,
A Light in the Attic
, and
Falling Up
are among the best-selling children’s hardcover trade books of all time. The zany nonsense verses of Ogden Nash, John Ciardi, and Jack Prelutsky are also extremely popular with children.

Humor in general holds great appeal, from the classic nonsense of Edward Lear to the more subtle uses of humor we see in light verse and poetry. It can open a door into poetry for children and draw them into a vision that offers new insight and meaning. Note, for example, how X. J. Kennedy uses humor to give children a fresh perspective on an ordinary object in his poem “Lighting a Fire”:

Many writers of children’s poetry excel at using wit and humor to stir children’s interest and imaginations. Rather than telling children what is funny, these poets are able to see the humor and incongruities in life that children themselves may notice and wonder about. Other than poets and children, for instance, how may people stop to reflect on what happens when you strike a match?

Nonsense verse and humorous poetry differ, to some extent, in form and content, but both offer the reader surprises that inspire laughter. In verse, these surprises are generally dependent on the tension between words and structure. Poetry uses this but also adds an intangible element in the metaphorical tension of ideas that lie under the surface of the poem. X. J. Kennedy does not explicitly compare a kitchen match to a lion, for example, but he suggests it with his choice of the word “roar.” As you evaluate humorous verse and poetry, think about the sources of its humor. Does it come from the description of things, people, and places engaged in absurd actions? Or does it come from a more subtle juxtaposition of unlike things or ideas? How does the structure enhance its surprising and pleasurable aspects? Would you look forward to reading the poems aloud to children? Above all, poems are meant to be read aloud—that’s often the best test of a poem.

POETRY COLLECTIONS

SINGLE POETS

Children’s poems are generally published in collections that may contain anywhere from a dozen to a hundred or more poems. Collections of poems by a single children’s poet are quite common, in which case authorship alone may be the one unifying factor. Some poets issue volumes of poetry on a common theme. Douglas Florian, for example, has published separate volumes of poetry on subjects such as winter, dinosaurs, astronomy, and humor. Others issue volumes limited to a certain form. Valerie Worth is known for her collections of very short poems about small things, and Stephen Schnur is known for his acrostic poems about the seasons, such as
Winter: An Alphabet Acrostic
. Haiku is an especially popular form for children’s poets; and there have been many volumes that use this form, including Jack Prelutsky’s
If Not for the Cat: Haiku
and Michael J. Rosen’s
The Cuckoo’s Haiku
. Linda Sue Park introduced
American children to
sijo
, a traditional form of Korean poetry that also uses just three lines, in
Tap Dancing on the Roof: Sijo (Poems)
.

ANTHOLOGIES

Anthologies contain the works of many poets. There is an art to collecting and anthologizing poetry that calls for a closer look on the part of the critic. Skillful anthologists pull together poems on a common theme or topic and organize them in an arrangement that makes them aesthetically and intellectually satisfying.

Paul B. Janeczko describes how he sees his work as an anthologist:

We can see how this careful attention to organization is played out in Janeczko’s
A Foot in the Mouth: Poems to Speak, Sing, and Shout
just by looking at the table of contents:

Poems for One Voice

Tongue Twisters

Poems for Two Voices

List Poems

Poems for Three Voices

Short Stuff

Bilingual Poems

Rhymed Poems

Limericks

Poems for a Group

Note that in the first six sections, Janeczko alternates simple and more challenging forms to encourage children with different skills. Within each section, there is also a logical arrangement of the poems themselves; and there are even links from section to section. For example, the “Rhymed Poems” section ends with a poem that begins “‘What’s your name?’ / ‘Mary Jane’ / ‘Where do you live?’ / ‘Womber Lane’” and the subsequent “Limericks” section opens with the classic form “There was a young woman from…” There is an overall logical progression, as well: The volume opens with three poems that stress individual identity and, as the chorus of voices grows, ends with Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.”

Lee Bennett Hopkins, Nancy Larrick, Michael Rosen, and Jane Yolen are outstanding anthologists of poetry for young readers. Their topical anthologies cover subjects such as animals, family and friends, holidays, science, nature, city life, and bedtime. Both Hopkins and Yolen have compiled collections aimed at particular age groups as well. For
Here’s a Little Poem
, Yolen and coauthor Andrew Fusek Peters selected sixty-one outstanding poems for very young children, arranged into four sections: Me, Myself and I; Who Lives in My House?; I Go Outside; and Time for Bed. Lee Bennett Hopkins excels at creating easy-to-read anthologies for young children on subjects such as pets, school, holidays, and sports. His anthologies include well-known children’s poets as well as some adult poets whose work is surprisingly easy to read.

There are numerous anthologies of poetry collected for older children along similar lines. One of the most remarkable skills of anthologists for this age level, however, is an ability to read works originally published for
adults and select those poems that will speak to the young as well. This skill combines a thorough knowledge of poetry with a thorough knowledge of children and young teenagers. Ruth Gordon, Paul Janeczko, and Naomi Shihab Nye compile stunning anthologies based on poetry from a wide range of times, places, and experiences. These anthologies not only provide young readers with collections of fine poetry but also give them a sense of being connected as individuals to universal human emotions.

Look at the range of poems and poets included in any anthology. Are there new poems as well as older ones? Are the poems selected from a broad range of cultures? Do the poems have a common theme or subject? How are they arranged? Is there an index of titles and/or of first lines?

In the best anthologies the compiler’s enthusiasm for poetry is apparent through the careful selections and arrangements he or she has made.

VERSE NOVELS

It is not always easy to categorize books that use poetic forms as their narrative structure. In the past decade, we have seen the rise of
verse novels
, that is, full-length fiction written as a series of connected poems, generally free verse. Virginia Euwer Wolff is often credited as a pioneer in this area with the publication of her novel
Make Lemonade
, although Wolff herself refers to her own writing as “prose in funny-shaped lines.” That may be an apt description of many verse novels, but others fall clearly in the realm of poetry.

Sharon Creech’s
Love That Dog
and its sequel,
Hate That Cat
, are both written in the voice of young Jack, a boy who claims to hate poetry but eventually finds his poetic voice, thanks to inspiration from a poem by Walter Dean Myers. Throughout both books, Creech plays with poetic forms, as Jack attempts to imitate poems by William Blake, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and, of course, Walter Dean Myers.
Helen Frost is perhaps the most ambitious and the most outstanding author of verse novels for children. Each of her books uses a different type of poetic structure. In
Spinning Through the Universe
, for example, she uses a different poetic form—terza rima, haiku, sonnet, quatern, etc.—to represent each character’s voice in Part 1. Part 2 is comprised of acrostic poems in which the acrostic is made up of one line taken from all the previous poems. Frost uses concrete poetry in
Diamond Willow
; each poem has a diamond shape. Both Creech and Frost use poetry to illuminate and reinforce the themes in their books.

SONGS

One might argue that songs were meant to be sung, not written down; but as long as human memories remain fallible, there will be songs committed to the pages of books. As they appear in trade books, songs share many features in common with poetry; unlike most poetry, however, they appeared at first in some form other than writing.

Songbooks for children typically include musical notation as an accompaniment to the text. If the lyrics to a single song are written out in story form as the text of a picture book, the musical notation may appear at the end of the book. The quality of the notation should be evaluated as carefully as text and illustrations. Is the arrangement simple enough to be accessible to children? Is it in a singable key? Is the notation legible and easy to read? Does it include all the song’s verses? Have the verses been conveniently placed so that it is possible to follow along if one is playing or singing the song aloud?

John Langstaff is noted for his compilations of British and American folk songs and ballads, such as
Hi! Ho! The Rattlin’ Bog, and Other Folk Songs for Group Singing
. The lyrics to each of these songs, drawn from many sources, are accompanied by their musical notation, as well as a brief note that places the song in a historical context. Tish Hinojosa uses
a similar approach in her bilingual songbook
Cada Niño/Every Child
, offering historical background for traditional songs and a personal story for the songs she wrote herself.

Other books of song are highly visual. Ashley Bryan is known for the captivating paintings he creates to interpret songs in his books, such as
Let It Shine: Three Favorite Spirituals
. Picture-book editions of single songs are less common but not unknown. Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s playful visual interpretation of a traditional folk song,
I Had a Rooster
, uses heavy-stock spiral-bound pages of progressively decreasing size to build the cumulative lines of the song on the left-hand side of the page. The volume also includes a CD of Pete Seeger singing the song so that children can listen to the music as they turn the pages.

A critical approach to books of song requires consideration of some of the standards we use in evaluating poetry as we look at the presentation of language in a structured pattern. It also requires the sort of critical attention we give to folklore, as we must think about source notes, organization, and, in some cases, retelling. Overall we need to ask whether or not one art form (music) has made a successful transition to another (art and literature).

Books for young children combine words with illustrations to tell a story. They are meant to be read aloud while children view the illustrations. Picture books present a special challenge to the critic because they require evaluation of art, text, and how the two work together to create a unique art form. In evaluating picture books, it is also useful for the critic to have an understanding of common interests and cognitive abilities of young children at different stages in their development.

Picture books as we know them today are a fairly recent invention. Children’s books that combined short text and illustrations to tell a story were developed by European artists and printers in the mid-nineteenth century; however, it was not until 1928 that the modern American picture book was born with the publication of Wanda Gág’s
Millions of Cats
. While earlier efforts set story and pictures side by side, Gág was the first to take art beyond conventional illustration: Her pictures helped to tell the story by using negative space to indicate the passage of time; she varied page layouts, and some illustrations broke out of their frames to extend across two pages. These innovations were immediately imitated and refined by other artists creating books for young children, and very
soon they were considered conventions of the art itself.

In 1938, ten years after the publication of
Millions of Cats
, the Caldecott Medal was established to recognize excellence in picture book art. The decades that followed are often thought of as a golden age of American picture books, as this new art form attracted the talents of many gifted artists working in the variety of styles that have flourished in twentieth-century art.

During these years, books with color illustrations often required the artist to go through the painstaking process of separating colors by hand for offset printing. An artist was allowed to work with one, two, three, or four colors, depending on the publisher’s budget (the more colors, the more expensive the printing). In three-color art, for instance, an artist might choose to use black, blue, and yellow and would then separate the art by preparing the portions of the picture that were black (generally referred to as a
keyplate
), then painting on separate sheets, called
overlays
, the portions that were blue and the portions that were yellow, so that the finished art would actually be the three sheets, layered one on top of another. This technique required commitment, skill, and patience on the part of the artist, in addition to a thorough understanding of color and an ability to visualize the whole by analyzing its parts. What proportions of blue and yellow, for example, would create the exact shade of green needed? In spite of such constraints (or perhaps because of them), we saw many creative approaches to illustration in black and white or with one or two colors due to the efforts of artists who put their hearts and souls into children’s book art.

Changes in technology in the mid-1980s, however, had an enormous impact on book production, especially in the area of picture books. Advances such as high-speed presses, computer technology, and scanning devices not only allowed for accurate reproduction of
full-color art but also accomplished it at a lower cost. These changes encouraged the entry of many new fine artists into the field, who employed a great variety of techniques and styles. Children’s book art expert Dilys Evans has characterized this as a visual renaissance in which “full-color printing has reached a new plateau of high performance.” Even the slightest, most pedestrian story is given the level of art production that was formerly reserved for established and highly acclaimed book creators such as Ludwig Bemelmans, Maurice Sendak, and Marcia Brown.

In the midst of this ever-changing world of picture books, perhaps the factor that remains most constant is the children themselves. Young children may enjoy being dazzled by the latest bold venture in picture book art, but at the same time they may ask to return again and again to the familiar comforts of
Goodnight Moon
. Just what is it about this book that has ensured its success for more than sixty years? It scores high marks in all the areas that matter when it comes to picture books: outstanding text, excellent illustrations, and successful integration of the two. In addition, it holds enormous appeal for young children whose obvious pleasure is then transferred to adults who share the book with them. But, of course, the child’s chance at experiencing any picture book as a whole is completely dependent on someone who is willing and able to read the text aloud. Because picture books function best as a shared experience between a fluent reader and a prereader—generally an adult and a young child—in order for a picture book to find true success, it must be good enough to spark this symbiotic relationship.

While all these factors work together to create an aesthetic whole, the critic must break the picture book down into its individual parts in order to evaluate how its components fit together. In this chapter we
will look at the picture book in terms of words, pictures, and how the two work together.

TEXT

Anyone who has ever read picture books aloud to children knows just how important the words are. Since most picture books are thirty-two pages in length, and since most of those pages are covered with illustrations, their texts are necessarily short. There is another reason for the economical use of words: Preschoolers simply have limits as to what they can and will take in. Lengthy descriptions and sophisticated abstractions are unnecessary and pointless. In picture books, as in poetry, every word counts. But beyond telling a compelling story in few words, a good picture book text has a distinctive
structure
based on familiar patterns. In order to evaluate picture books, we must ask ourselves not only “What is this story about?” but also “How is this story told?” And when it comes to studying the structural elements of a successful picture book text, we can find no better model than the laureate of the nursery, Margaret Wise Brown.

STRUCTURE

Not too long after Wanda Gág launched American picture books with the publication of
Million of Cats
, writer Margaret Wise Brown entered the scene. As a teacher of two-to five-year-olds in the Bank Street Experimental School during the mid-1930s, Brown was a keen observer of the developmental behavior of her young charges. She was also greatly influenced by the groundbreaking work of her mentor, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who asserted that, when it came to words, rhythm and sound quality were more important to young children than meaning. It was during this time that Brown began to write her picture books.

PATTERNED LANGUAGE

Rhythm and sound are the hallmarks of Brown’s picture-book texts. She accomplishes this by building a pattern with words that are rooted in a young child’s experience and understanding of the world. In Brown’s Noisy Books, for example, routines in the everyday world are made extraordinary as children are asked to consider them from the perspective of a little dog named Muffin who experiences the world by hearing it:

All the elements of patterned language that contribute to the success of picture book texts for young children can be found in the above-quoted passage from
The Indoor Noisy Book
. They are rhythm, rhyme, repetition, and questions.

R
HYTHM

Note the variation in line lengths, which, as in poetry, gives the reader clues as to how to read the words. But even if these lines were written
in paragraphs, they would still maintain most of their rhythm due to Brown’s choice of words; “rattle of dishes” sounds very much like what it describes, and the succession of the three trochees, “very quiet custard,” naturally causes readers to slow down and speak in softer tones. The line “That meant lunch” packs a punch with its three accented beats that grab and hold the listener’s attention. It has the same familiar rhythm as the parental attention grabber: “I said no.” Because young children are often inexperienced listeners, their attention wanders easily. Brown places this sort of rhythmic hook at regular intervals to draw them back.

R
HYME

While rhyme in
The Indoor Noisy Book
is not obvious, as it is in many other picture books, it is in fact there in the pleasing repetition of sounds and sentences that appear throughout the story. In addition to making a text easier for children to listen to, rhyme also enhances the predictability of a story. When young children listen to a rhyming story, they can generally supply the last word in a couplet or a quatrain, provided the subject is within the realm of their experience.

R
EPETITION

Brown skillfully alternates repeated lines with the introduction of words or concepts that may be new to children. By doing so she is using a familiar, expected pattern to make children feel comfortable and ready to face the unfamiliar and unexpected. Once she has set up the pattern with, for example, “Could Muffin hear that?” as soon as children hear the words “raw carrots and steak and spinach,” they begin to think about the sounds each of these foods makes. And once they have entered this realm of creative thinking, they are more than ready to face the imaginative challenge of “very quiet custard.”

Q
UESTIONS

The question-answer mode is a language pattern very familiar to young children. The Noisy Books are filled with questions that inspire children to think about what sorts of sounds Muffin is hearing and the sources of various sounds he hears. In the context of picture-book texts, questions serve a couple of different purposes. Since questions are generally read with a different intonation, they add variety to the sound and rhythm of the text. They can also serve as hooks that will pull in wandering minds and help to keep the audience’s attention focused. In addition, they directly involve the child in the story, something that not only makes a story more interesting for everyone but also enhances the self-concept of the child. With young children, there is no such thing as a rhetorical question: If the text asks a question, you will probably get answers. The answers to some questions may be obvious to some children: “Is this red?” “Noooo! It’s blue!” Others, such as “What kind of noise did lunch make?” require creative thinking and may lead to several possible answers. Lastly, questions help the adult reader silently assess the level of understanding and appreciation on the part of the child audience.

The pleasing sound of patterned language is especially effective in picture books aimed at two-and three-year-olds. It functions almost like a net to catch and hold the young listeners’ attention. It should not, however, overwhelm the story. The most successful uses of patterned language reveal themselves when the text is read aloud. Even when preschoolers become more experienced listeners and are able to rely more on meaning, elements of patterned language can greatly enrich stories aimed at three-and four-year-olds, since children at this age level generally enjoy wordplay a great deal.

PREDICTABILITY

As children gain experience listening to stories, they begin to develop an understanding that stories follow a regular sequence. This idea can be reinforced by repeated readings of the same story (generally at the child’s request), as children become so familiar with the story that they can easily predict what will happen next. Sometimes writers of picture books build predictability into the text with repeated actions or phrases or by using the same sentence structure over and over again. Like patterned language, predictable structures make stories easier for children to listen to and comprehend. They also allow authors to introduce more surprising or unusual elements successfully within a carefully constructed familiar context. The contrast between the predictable and the surprising elements often delights adults as well as children.

In the classic picture book
The Runaway Bunny
, Margaret Wise Brown used predictability in two ways: action and sentence structure. In this story of a small bunny trying to establish a separate identity from his mother while at the same time testing her unconditional love, each action on the bunny’s part elicits a predictable reaction on the mother’s part:

Children hearing this text soon pick up on the pattern of the bunny vowing to turn into someone or something else, while his mother responds by placing herself imaginatively in the same context so she can find him. This comforting predictability is also reinforced in Brown’s repetition of the same sentence structure: “If you…I will…” The pleasantly surprising aspects of the bunny’s playful threats and his mother’s clever responses to them balance perfectly with the predictable elements, so that the text seems fresh, even after multiple readings.