Emily Dickinson, Children's Poet

Illustration from St. Nicholas magazine for children
that accompanied one of Emily's poems

I learned this week that after Emily Dickinson died, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd were left to handle Dickinson's work. Todd was deeply involved in a love affair with Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother, who was married to Susan, who was a very close friend of Emily.

Emily had been famously hesitant to publish while she was alive.

In an effort to promote the posthumously published volumes of Dickinson's poetry, her editors sometimes positioned the work as children's literature. These edits ranged from changing punctuation to amending the rhyme schemes to be more elementary and even changing entire lines. Todd said she altered some of Dickinson's poems to be more lullaby-like, changing them “in order to have the rhyme perfect."

I still have a tough time as an adult interpreting many of Dickinson's poems, and could not imagine reading them as a child.

One famous example of an edit is in  "I taste a liquor never brewed." Dickinson originally wrote:

Not all the Frankfort Berries

Yield such an Alcohol!

Todd and Higginson published it as:

Not Frankfort Berries yield the sense

Such a delirious whirl!

which substantially changes Dickinson's imagery and rhythm.

Some Dickinson poems appeared in children's magazines in the 1890s. Here is one poem from a children's magazine.

Here is Emily's original version:

Will there really be a "Morning"?

Is there such a thing as "Day"?

Could I see it from the mountains

If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like Water lilies?

Has it feathers like a Bird?

Is it brought from famous countries

Of which I have never heard?

Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!

Oh some Wise Men from the skies!

Please to tell a little Pilgrim

Where the place called "Morning" lies!

You can see that the only changes here are Emily's distinctive capitalizations.

St. Nicholas was the premier magazine for children's literature and it serialized some of the most famous classics in children’s literature, including: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain, Little Men by Louisa May Alcott, and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The purist in me objects to changes made to her poems after her death, but the example above does read fine as a poem for children. 

What are your feelings about what the editors did with her work?

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Board Book Poetry

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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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: Like a Seuss

“From there to here, and here to there,

funny things are everywhere.”

- from One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss

For this month, we are writing poems in the style of Theodore Geisel - better known as Dr. Seuss. Is he a poet? We certainly think of him as a children's book author and we know he uses rhyme, but few people think of his books as poems. If you take a look at one of his books in its entirety, using his line breaks, it certainly looks and sounds like a poem. Take a look at Oh, The Places You'll Go  as one poem.

Dr. Seuss came into being partly because of a 1950s report on illiteracy among American school children called "Why Johnny Can't Read." That report placed part of the blame on boring children's books. Random House and Houghton Mifflin commissioned a young author and illustrator named Theodore Geisel to create a new vocabulary primer that would inspire and excite its readers. He wrote The Cat in the Hat and became Dr. Seuss.

Rhyme and repetition were clearly two of the poetic tools Seuss used. In One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish Seuss uses words that rhyme exactly. These straight rhymes create a simple rhyme scheme.

Did you ever fly a kite in bed?
Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?
Did you ever milk this kind of cow?
Well, we can do it. We know how.
If you never did, you should.
These things are fun and fun is good.

Dr. Seuss did not always use straight rhymes. He sometimes played around with words by using half rhymes - two words that sound alike but don't rhyme exactly - to add a different rhythm to a book. We can find an example of this in Yertle the Turtle.

"You stay in your place while I sit here and rule.
I'm the king of a cow! And I'm the king of a mule!
I'm the king of a house! And a bush! And a cat!
But that isn't all.  I'll do better than that!

My throne shall be higher!" his royal voice thundered.
"So pile up more turtles! I want 'bout two hundred!"

If you say 'thundered' and 'hundred' out loud, you can hear their sneaky half rhyme.

The beauty of many of the rhymes is that the words are unexpected.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)
     From: Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

‘Maybe Christmas,’ he thought, ‘doesn’t come from a store.
Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!’”
     From: How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

I meant what I said, and I said what I meant…
An elephant’s faithful, one hundred per cent!
     From: Horton Hatches the Egg

Using the same words and phrases was one way he was able to get young children to read his books on their own. Green Eggs and Ham is a good example of his use of repetition. (This was one of my youngest son's favorite books, though I must admit the repetition drove me a bit mad on the hundreth reading.)

I will not eat them in a house,
I will not eat them with a mouse,
I will not eat them in a box
I will not eat them with a fox,
I will not eat them here or there
I will not eat them anywhere.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them Sam I Am.

Dr. Seuss had a 53-year career and is one of the most beloved authors of children's books. His clever rhymes, humor, invented words and colorful illustrations continue to capture readers. His books have sold over 220 million copies and have been translated into 15 languages, and beyond the books are the films and merchandise that has no poet competition.

In that first book,The Cat in the Hat, there is less repetition and more of a narrative, which might be the approach you take in your poem this month.

Then our mother came in
And she said to us two,
"Did you have any fun?
Tell me. What did you do?"

And Sally and I did not
know what to say.
Should we tell her
The things that went on
there that day?

Well... what would YOU do
If your mother asked you?

His book The Lorax has become an environmental classic that is read by children and adults. Though it is a light-hearted story, it is also a cautionary tale. It has a message about taking collective responsibility for the stewardship of the environment. Not doing so would mean our own world will soon be like the one that the Lorax left behind.

I am the Lorax.
I speak for the trees.
I speak for the trees,
for the trees have no tongues.

I meant no harm.
I most truly did not.
But I had to grow bigger.
So bigger I got.

Oh, the Places You'll Go! (1990) is his last book to be published during his lifetime. The book concerns the journey of life and its challenges. It has become a popular gift for high school and college graduates and also for retirees.

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You're off to Great Places!
You're off and away!

Though it has much of Seuss' style, it also has a narrator and the reader as characters. A young boy, the "you", is the reader and it is written in second person and uses future tense. YOU is setting forth on an adventure which may be starting kindergarten or college or a new job or retirement.

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.

The book is very much about making good choices as you choose the "streets" you will go down, and hopefully avoid ones that are "not-so-good."

You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.
About some you will say, 'I don't choose to go there.'
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And there is also the possibility that none of the usual streets will be to your liking (a road not taken?) and so you have the option to head "out of town."

And you may not find any
you'll want to go down.
In that case, of course,
you'll head straight out of town.
It's opener there
in the wide open air.
Out there things can happen
and frequently do
to people as brainy
and footsy as you.
And then things start to happen,
don't worry. Don't stew.
Just go right along.
You'll start happening too.

This month's prompt is to write in the style of Dr. Seuss. Does that mean a "children's poem?"  Not at all. We would expect rhyme, some half rhyme, some repetition, perhaps some invented wordplay. Be clever with your theme or message, if there is one. Of course, all that cleverness can be used to entertain too.

Submission Deadline: March 30, 2019

The Young People’s Poet Laureate

Margarita Engle is the national Young People’s Poet Laureate, and the first Latino to receive that honor. She is the Cuban-American author of many verse novels, including The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor winner, and The Lightning Dreamer, a PEN USA Award winner.

Margarita Engle was born in Pasadena, California, to a Cuban mother and an American father. She earned a BS from California State Polytechnic University and an MS from Iowa State University, and she studied for her doctoral degree in biology at the University of California, Riverside.

The Poetry Foundation announced in May of this year that Engle has been named the Young People’s Poet Laureate. Awarded every two years, the $25,000 laureate title is given to a living writer in recognition of a career devoted to writing exceptional poetry for young readers. The laureate advises the Poetry Foundation on matters relating to young people’s literature and may engage in a variety of projects to help instill a lifelong love of poetry among the nation’s developing readers. This laureateship aims to promote poetry to children and their families, teachers, and librarians over the course of its two-year tenure.

Official website margaritaengle.com

Children's Poets Laureates

Most of us think of THE Poet Laureate as the one that represents our country. For the U.S., that is Natasha Trethewey who was recently appointed to serve a second term as U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.
But many U.S. states and cities have also been designating laureates on a local level.

I'm pleased that there have also been more appointments for children’s poets laureate. Here are three recent appointments.

Children’s Poet Laureate for Wales named at National Urdd Eisteddfod" from Wales Online

“Former Urdd Eisteddfod chair Aneirin Karadog has been named as Wales’ next Children’s Poet Laureate. Mr. Karadog said, ‘The role involves working with young people during their formative years, when the imagination is so alive.... One of the appealing factors is a chance to re-light my own imagination through theirs.’”

"UK’s first black children’s laureate: new history curriculum could alienate pupils” from The Guardian (UK)
“Ted Hughes, then poet laureate, and his friend and fellow author Michael Morpurgo devised the laureateship—first awarded in 1999 to illustrator Quentin Blake—to mark a lifetime’s contribution to children’s literature and highlight the importance of children’s books. Previous children’s laureates include Jacqueline Wilson, Anne Fine, Michael Rosen, Anthony Browne and Morpurgo.... Blackman is the eighth children’s laureate, inheriting the role from the Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson.”


From The Los Angeles Times "Poetry Foundation names Kenn Nesbitt its children’s poet laureate

“The Poetry Foundation announced Tuesday that Revenge of the Lunch Ladies author Kenn Nesbitt will be its next children’s poet laureate, a position the foundation created in 2006 to recognize that ‘children have a natural receptivity to poetry and are its most appreciative audience.’... This honor is not related to the U.S. poet laureate, who is named by the Library of Congress. Nor is it connected to regional poets laureate, such as Eloise Klein Healy in Los Angeles or Juan Felipe Herrera, California’s poet laureate. Nesbitt succeeds J. Patrick Lewis as the fourth poet to hold the position. His numerous books for children—all of them full of child-appropriate silliness—include The Tighty-Whitey Spider, My Hippo Has the Hiccups, and My Foot Fell Asleep. In an interview with outgoing laureate Lewis, Nesbitt listed influences including Lewis Carroll, MAD magazine, and ‘that greatest of all children’s poets, Anonymous.’”

Salting the Ocean

"How should we use poetry?" people sometimes ask poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

She responds, "Read it! Share it with one another! Find poems that make you resonate. Different poems will do this for every person. We 'use poetry' to restore us to feeling, revitalize our own speech, awaken empathy."

Over the past 25 years Nye has "used poetry" in classroom workshops in schools all over the country. In this lush, amusing, and touching anthology, Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets, she gathers 100 poems and divides them into four groupings: "My Shadow Is an Ant's Night" (poems about the self and the inner world), "Think How Many Stories Are in Your Shirt" (about where we live), "My Grandma Squashes Roaches with Her Hand" (about family), and "Silence Is Like a Tractor Moving the Whole World" (about the imagination). Students in grades 1 through 12 are represented in this anthology, brilliantly illustrated by the talented Coretta Scott King Honor recipient Ashley Bryan.

These young poets have mostly grown up, now, to become dentists and actors and construction workers, but the purity of their work lives on.

from an Amazon.com Review by Emilie Coulter

Sample poem:

"One" by Butch McElroy

We had a
'Most commonly misspelled word'
Spelling test
Yesterday in English,
Fourth Period.
I commonly misspelled them all.
Except one.
Loneliness
Was the only one I got right.

Escape to the Library

I'm passing this information from my colleague and friend, Dana Maloney, who is coordinating this year's NJ Council of Teachers of English 2008 High School Writing Contest. She would like to reach as many teachers and students in New Jersey as possible, so I offered to post about it on several of my blogs.

It's a NJcentric contest, but the rest of you may be curious about the personal essay prompt and our model. It sent me back to a childhood memory that may be one you share.

The contest categories are: poetry, short story, and personal essay. More contest details at the end of this post. The personal essay submissions must respond to this year’s prompt.

Where do you live? Use descriptive language to give the reader a virtual experience of your world. As you do this, let us hear your voice. Share the thoughts, feelings, questions and concerns that arise out of your view of the world around you. Bring your space – your town, your school, your home, your room, your web - to life for your reader. Where you live can be interpreted in many ways, including both literal and metaphorical ways, and we encourage you to take liberty with interpretation.

Of course, you could use that for poetry too. As a model of a personal essay, Dana suggested an essay by another friend, teacher and poet BJ Ward. You might want to read his essay about his youthful home-away-from-home at his local library - it is available online. Escaping to books is probably something that many readers of this post can admit to from their youth.

"During the internet-less, video-game-less, and seemingly endless summers of my childhood, I could ride my bike to the Washington Borough Public Library and within one minute be transported to the world of Dr. Doolittle; The Hardy Boys; and Babe Ruth, All-American Hero. Each book was a planet with a spine. The librarian was an organizing star, keeping all those spheres in their places for future explorers to discover. The library itself was a universe—a macrocosm between paint-chipped walls, below a roof paid for by bake sales, sandwiched between a tattoo parlor and halfway house. It was the most fecund place I knew—a greenhouse for my imagination, where fluorescence had to do with my mind’s branches spreading. O the joyful fire in the astronaut’s skull when divination led to apprehension. "

I was one of those people who had a corner of the children's section of my public library that I considered to be mine. A big, fat, old leather chair in a corner with a dirty window and a wall of books for protection. When they built the new town library - a bigger, brighter, glass-walled
version - I never found a special place there. (The modern chairs discouraged getting comfortable anyway.) Of course, by then I was out of the children's section which almost always is the more inviting part of a library anyway.

I had ventured a few times to the "big library" in my part of New Jersey - the Newark Public Library. It was impressive. Too impressive. I felt lost. Too many echoes in the halls, though I did like seeing in pop up in books like in Phillip Roth's Goodbye Columbus that I was reading. (My own hometown, Irvington, had shown up in some stories and in Portnoy's Complaint and I rode that same bus as

Perhaps, some student will write an essay for the contest about some private place of escape in their world. Do kids still escape to the library? My office is within a college library and it seems to be the place to study and use computers, but escape...?

BJ Ward's poem "Filling in the New Address Book" was featured on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac. (listen to Garrison Keillor reading it). His latest collection of poetry is Gravedigger's Birthday. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Warren County Community College in New Jersey.

CONTEST DETAILS

• Each participating teacher may submit up to 10 entries in each category. Submissions must be accompanied by a signed entry form.
• Entrants must submit four paper copies and one electronic copy of each submission.
• Download the entry form which contains information on where to submit the entry.
• The student’s name must not appear on the submission itself – only on the entry form.
• Postmark and Electronic Submission Deadline: December 15, 2008
• At least one student from every participating school will receive an award. Award categories are “Outstanding,” “Prize-worthy” or “Certificate of Merit.” Students in grades 10, 11 or 12 who are named “Outstanding” winners may be eligible for a New Jersey Governor’s Award in Arts Education.
• Winners will be announced by April 15, 2009.

Terrance Hayes: Two Poems in The Same City

This blog post allows me a little room to expand on the prompt for November that uses Terrance Hayes' poem. I have to admit that I did not first read this poem. I had it read to me, which happens more and more these days. No, I didn't go to a reading (though I did hear him read at the 2006 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival)

I heard him read it on a podcast from the Poetry Foundation. The podcast itself is called "A Straight Man's Epiphany in a Gay Bar" but it's really about Hayes exploring relationships between men - in the case of our model poem, a father and son.

You can listen to the poem online, but I'll put a recommendation in here to encourage you to subscribe to the entire series in iTunes.

Not that this is the "answer" to the poem, but I found what Terrance Hayes says about the origin of this poem on the podcast very interesting. It opened up the poem for me and inspired this month's prompt.

As I said on the site, I don't really care if Hayes ever really jumpstarted his father's car battery as he does in the poem, because I'm really taken with that image.

I also love the lines:

But to rescue a soul is as close
as anyone comes to God.

and

Think of Joseph,
raising a son that wasn’t his.

I decided to focus on the poem's 2 part structure. It's written to appear that the poet writes his poem and then decides midway to start again.

It's not just two poems linked together. The poem works because of the interplay between the two stanzas. The second echoes the first. They bounce images off each other.

This is not a totally unique approach in poetry. Many poets will do multiple takes on a line or question within a poem the way they have described something. Mark Doty comes to mind. He often asks questions in his poems, and sometimes questions himself.

So our new prompt is to write a poem that contains two versions of the same poem. I'm afraid that I'm going to get a handful of submissions that are just two conjoined poems that might easily stand alone.

You need to consider the reasons we might restart mid-poem and allow the original to remain. Hayes is partially reconsidering what he wants to say. I get the feeling reading the poem (and this happens when I write) that we are discovering something as we read (write) that forces us to reconsider whre we are headed.

Usually, when writing, you would go to draft#2, but might there be a case where a reader needs the "false start" to understand the new direction?

I'm not sure if this prompt is very easy or very hard. I'm sure that this might work with a poem that has more than two parts too.

And I admit that there's a more complex writing prompt in Hayes' poem that would involve fathers, sons, children, forgiveness and other themes. I hope you'll try that one some time too.

Tales of Stubborn Children

For July, we are looking at Peter Murphy's poem "The Stubborn Child" from his book Stubborn Child which was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. The poem has its inspiration in a fairy tale of the same name from the Brothers Grimm.

I never liked fairy tales as a kid. They scared me. I don't like them much now either. I still find them creepy, and I never felt they were stories well told. Someone gave my son a book of Grimm's tales when he was very small and I read a few looking for ones I might read him at night.

That was one of the few books in my life that I threw out. I didn't even want to give it to a used book sale.

Try reading this one to a kid before he goes to sleep. This is the Grimm Brothers' version of "The Stubborn Child."

Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him and let him become sick.

No doctor could cure him, and in a short time, he lay on his deathbed.

After he was lowered into his grave and was covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out.

So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.

from The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Jack Zipes, translator, 1987

The puns on Grimm and grim are just too easy.

The Brothers Grimm began collecting folk tales around 1807 and produced a manuscript collection of several dozen tales, which they had recorded by inviting storytellers to their home and transcribing what they heard. It wasn't an academic undertaking and there has been some highly critical re-assessments about their sources and methods. That doesn't affect us in our reading. Actually, I like that their collecting was not so different from someone today collecting the campfire horror stories of kids. That's what some of the Grimm's tales seem like to me anyway.

Sometimes the title of this particular little tale is translated as the "willful" child. I realize that willful is basically the same obstinate child, but I think the Murphy poem might be the willful rather than just the stubborn child.

In his version, the child emerges from the grave, lives on and has a daughter to pray over and protect. He resurrects the willful child who is more than stubborn, and who still loves his mother who he knows loves him.

Of Peter's book, Stephen Dunn has said: "Stubborn Child unflinchingly enacts and examines his own painful childhood, then moves to the often damaged and compromised lives of the high school students he teaches. Like the best delineators of unhappiness, he also brings humor to his task, the dark humor of a survivor. And indeed this is a survivor's book, both transforming and transformative — in the end, Murphy the man able to love and affirm, Murphy the poet able to raise the unruly and the tawdry to the level of art."

Transformation is a key word for this prompt.

In an email to me about the poem's creation, Peter said:

"I had a deprived childhood in that I never read a fairy tale till I was in my late 30's, and when I did, I fell in love with the surreal, violent and familiar families portrayed by the Brothers Grimm. This was not Disney. This was Cinderella's evil stepsisters lopping off their heels to squeeze their fat feet into that impossibly tight glass slipper. Perverse entertainment till I came across "The Stubborn Child," perhaps the shortest Grimm tale. "Damn," I thought. "That's my childhood!" And it was, so I proceeded to write 40 or 50 drafts trying to get it right. Somewhere in this frenzy, I realized my own stubborn child was asleep in the next room, and that's when the poem found its ending and its shape, the transformation of the speaker from abused child to wounded father, trying, perhaps too hard, not to repeat the mistakes made on him.

Many stubborn children of all ages inhabit my book Stubborn Child as the poems branch away from my childhood and adolescence to the students who taught me for 30 years in Atlantic City, to other stubborn children, friends and family, who ghost the adult years of my life."

Murphy is not the first to try this self-imposed writing prompt of starting with a Grimm fairy tale. One popular anthology, The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales, is an entire collection of these poems. The poets use the themes, motifs, and characters from Grimm. (poets include Anne Sexton, Carol Ann Duffy, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Denise Duhamel, Randall Jarrell, Jane Yolen and Allen Tate. (Here is the table of contents)

Our prompt for this month is to take the story, characters, title, theme (as much as you need) from one of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales and transform it for your own purposes. I would not be opposed to other fairy tales, but there's a lot of material in those strange tales from Jacob & Wilhelm.

If you want to try the prompt yourself, you can check a book of the tales, or Google a Grimm title that you know, but a good site to start with is SurLaLuneFairyTales.com. It includes tales that we are all familiar with like "Goldilocks and the 3 Bears", and ones I had never read, like "The Girl Without Hands". The tales there are all annotated, so you get some good background information that might well serve as your inspiration. There's a list of the Grimm tales on Wikipedia too.


Here are 2 links where you can read several other poems by Peter Murphy, and hear him reading online.

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The Poet Laminate Becomes a Poet Laureate

Jack Prelutsky, a popular children's poet, met then-U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky in 2000.

Prelutsky said, "I'm something you're not."
"What's that?" Pinsky asked.
Prelutsky visits hundreds of schools and libraries where his poems are laminated and posted on the walls. "I'm the poet laminate."

Now, at 66, Prelutsky has been named the nation's first children's poet laureate by the Poetry Foundation.

I know that children's poetry doesn't get much respect from the "grownup" poetry world. They don't get invited to the Dodge Poetry Festival.

But my boys really loved Shel Silverstein and Prelutsky when they were new readers, and even wrote their own imitations, and for that I thank them.

He has published more than 40 books, including Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant and Other Poems, and has more than 1 million copies in print. The folk singer turned poet recites and sings on the audio version of his latest books.

In his 2 years as laureate, he will give speeches, recommend other poets online and, something I don't recall any laureates doing, he plans a contest to give away part of the laureate's $25,000 award. (He'll ask children to write why their school libraries need more books.)

Jack Prelutsky's web site (a work in progress as of now)

Info & poems at The Academy of American Poets

Prelutsky info on Wikipedia