Poetry Month

April is poetry month! One way we are celebrating is with a visit from acclaimed poet Paul Janeczko. Paul will be doing workshops with four classes, on April 16, that have asked me for collaborative help in using the library's poetry resources.

Every April, I do poetry all day, every day, with all the classes. By the time I go home at night, my brain is working in iambic pentameter. I feel like I can recite "Casey at the Bat" or "The Owl and the Pussycat" in my sleep. The 10-11 year olds enjoy hearing about the strange and sometimes creepy lifestyles of the not-so-rich and famous, i.e. Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. I read Poe's "The Raven" aloud to two groups of 10-11-12 year olds this week. Each time, kids were pleased to let me know that they knew about it already from watching The Simpsons. Text-to-text, indeed. I can't begin to list how many children recognize classic books and poems because they have experienced the parody first.

My colleague Anna has done something fun, creating "edge" poems by stacking books whose titles link together to form a poem: check out her blog, The Reticulated Python, for examples.

Poetry is one of the great offerings of our library; I can send my most proficient readers, and my most reluctant readers, to the poetry section. Research shows us that children who can recognize and generate rhymes are on the path to becoming good readers. You can open most of these books to any page at random -- no hard rules about moving sequentially through the book; there's lots of white space, which is comforting to emerging readers; you can choose to read only a page or two; and the payoff, whether with humor or imagery or imaginative language, is enormous.