I have sometimes thought of children's books, especially the very simple board books of those pre-reading years, as sounding and sometimes looking like poems. This article on npr.org talks about that idea.
First, an apology. Okay, maybe apology is a bit strong. An admission of being wrong? Anyway, almost a year ago, I wrote to you all about kids’ book author Mac Barnett, who’d just been named the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, and his argument that kids’ books should be seen as up there with the best that literature has to offer. I was, let’s say, open to the argument, but skeptical (in my defense, that oughta be the baseline for reporters!). But then I started reading more and more to my kid and was slowly, more and more convinced towards Barnett’s side.
Then, I read Jon Klassen’s new book, Your Truck. It’s the first in a series of board books aimed at super young kids, about things. The titular truck in the book is red. It doesn’t do much. A dog gets in the cab at one point. The language in Your Truck is spare and concise, but it packs an emotional wallop.
When you are ready to go,
your truck will go and go and go.
It will take you as far away
from here as you want.
But not right now.
Not yet.
Reading it reminded the article's author, Andrew Limbong, of the modernist poet Ezra Pound, a poet who gave his poetic principles. One was the “direct treatment of the ‘thing," where all of the emotional impact is woven into something concrete.
Klassen told me he didn’t go into this book thinking he’d be writing about a child eventually leaving home when writing a board book about a truck. Those metaphorical considerations are built into the thing itself. Instead, the only question he asked himself when writing was “what’s cool about a truck?”
There’s something about the time and space limitations on books for small kids that lend themselves well to poetic readings. Besides some clear classics like Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon and Brown’s Seven Little Postmen
Any children's book that reads like poetry for you? |
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