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More on Poetry and a Special Guest
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From: Megan Schliesman <bogus_at_does.not.exist.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 10:31:50 -0500
Thank you for sharing so many wonderful suggestions on way you are using poetry with children in schools and in public libraries. Please continue to do so! The creativity and enthusiasm you are describing is both encouraging and inspiring. (Personally, I can never get enough when it comes to ideas and stories about poetry and young people--it is like sitting at a table of friends.)
I also want to welcome a special guest to our discussion. Liz Rosenberg, editor of the new anthology Earth-Shattering Poems (Edge Books/Henry Holt, 1998), which started our discussion on poetry this month, and The Invisible Ladder (Henry Holt, 1997), which features interviews with outstanding contemporary poets, is joining the CCBC-Net discussion and is willing to take questions from members of the CCBC-Net community about her books, and about broader issues of selecting and using poetry with young people. In addition to editing these two fine anthololgies, Ms. Rosenberg has written several picture books, and two collections of poetry for adults. She is a professor of children's literature at the State University of New York in Binghamton.
I would like to begin by asking Ms. Rosenberg about the collection Earth-Shattering Poems. I love the introduction to this book, which invites young readers to really take a chance on poetry. I think it is especially inviting for those readers who come to poetry with suspicion that it is too difficult, or too irrelevant to their own lives. You have taken poems from Sappho and Rumi and Basho right through to Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath and many others and emphasized their relevance first by sharing your own personal response, stating that you selected the poems because you found them "earth-shattering" to you in some way, for their beauty or their scathing tone or their romanticism, for example (how can someone NOT want to dive in after hearing that?), and then going on to affirm for young people that a poem's relevance and meaning begins with THEM, what they feel and think about a particular poem, and that "it's all right to be partly confused by a poem; it's all right if you can only grab hold of a corner of it, because eventually that corner may be enough to pull you all the way through."
I'm wondering two things: 1) What was the genesis of this anthology--were these poems that you had been collecting with the idea of some day including them in an anthology and the theme emerged from the poems themselves, or did you have one or two poems that suggested the theme to you and then you looked for others? 2) In your introduction you give readers permission to be confused, which can take a lot of pressure off of both young people AND adults who may be uncomfortable sharing poetry with them. WHen you have shared poetry with young readers, what do you do to encourge them to "grab hold of a corner," and see where it takes them?
Megan Schliesman Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education UW-Madison schliesman at mail.soemadison.wisc.edu
Received on Tue 21 Apr 1998 10:31:50 AM CDT
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 10:31:50 -0500
Thank you for sharing so many wonderful suggestions on way you are using poetry with children in schools and in public libraries. Please continue to do so! The creativity and enthusiasm you are describing is both encouraging and inspiring. (Personally, I can never get enough when it comes to ideas and stories about poetry and young people--it is like sitting at a table of friends.)
I also want to welcome a special guest to our discussion. Liz Rosenberg, editor of the new anthology Earth-Shattering Poems (Edge Books/Henry Holt, 1998), which started our discussion on poetry this month, and The Invisible Ladder (Henry Holt, 1997), which features interviews with outstanding contemporary poets, is joining the CCBC-Net discussion and is willing to take questions from members of the CCBC-Net community about her books, and about broader issues of selecting and using poetry with young people. In addition to editing these two fine anthololgies, Ms. Rosenberg has written several picture books, and two collections of poetry for adults. She is a professor of children's literature at the State University of New York in Binghamton.
I would like to begin by asking Ms. Rosenberg about the collection Earth-Shattering Poems. I love the introduction to this book, which invites young readers to really take a chance on poetry. I think it is especially inviting for those readers who come to poetry with suspicion that it is too difficult, or too irrelevant to their own lives. You have taken poems from Sappho and Rumi and Basho right through to Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath and many others and emphasized their relevance first by sharing your own personal response, stating that you selected the poems because you found them "earth-shattering" to you in some way, for their beauty or their scathing tone or their romanticism, for example (how can someone NOT want to dive in after hearing that?), and then going on to affirm for young people that a poem's relevance and meaning begins with THEM, what they feel and think about a particular poem, and that "it's all right to be partly confused by a poem; it's all right if you can only grab hold of a corner of it, because eventually that corner may be enough to pull you all the way through."
I'm wondering two things: 1) What was the genesis of this anthology--were these poems that you had been collecting with the idea of some day including them in an anthology and the theme emerged from the poems themselves, or did you have one or two poems that suggested the theme to you and then you looked for others? 2) In your introduction you give readers permission to be confused, which can take a lot of pressure off of both young people AND adults who may be uncomfortable sharing poetry with them. WHen you have shared poetry with young readers, what do you do to encourge them to "grab hold of a corner," and see where it takes them?
Megan Schliesman Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education UW-Madison schliesman at mail.soemadison.wisc.edu
Received on Tue 21 Apr 1998 10:31:50 AM CDT
