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Arnold Adoff's poetry
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From: Ginny Moore Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2000 17:13:32 -0500
To begin our observance of National Poetry Monty, we've already suggested that you might want to visit the web site of the Children's Book Council (http://www.cbcbooks.org). If you're interested in secondary and college level poetry, perhaps you have visited the National Poetry Month web site (http://poets.org). The April 2000 issue of the journal Voices of Youth Advocates (VOYA) contains a list of recommended poetry volumes found by VOYA reviewers to be most worthwhile for teen readers; this list was compiled from reviews published from 6/99-4/00.
The National Council of Teachers of English has a formal award process to honor poets for the body of their work. We want to look at selected works of these poets to begin with. Later this month, we'll talk about some of the anthologies you particularly appreciate and why. Poets honored by the NCTE for the body of their published poetry for children are Eve Merriam (1981); John Ciardi (1982); Lilian Moore
(1985); Arnold Adoff (1988); Valerie Worth (1991); Barbara Esbensen
(1994); and Eloise Greenfield (1997). The NCTE Award began as an annual award but now it's given every three years. Is there a poem by any of the above poets you particularly appreciate, keep coming back to, quote or read to others or to yourself? Tell us about it. Remember, for now, we're thinking together about poems by Eve Merriam, John Ciardi, Lilian Moore, Arnold Adoff, Valerie Worth, Barbara Esbensen, and Eloise Greenfield.
I'm thinking today about Arnold Adoff. Some of you know that here at the CCBC we have long appreciated Arnold Adoff's poetry, including his poems in the book "All the Colors of the Race" illustrated by John Steptoe (Lothrop, 1982). These poems can be read separately or as a continuous narrative. Here are words from the title poem: "All the colors of the race are in my face, and just behind my face: behind my eyes: inside my head. And inside my head, I give my self a place at the end of a long line forming itself into a circle. And I am holding out my hands." The amazing thing about these words is that as powerful as they are exactly as Arnold Adoff wrote them, you are not reading them in this message JUSTas he wrote them. Adoff's sense of the space each word must occupy on the page in order to have meaning is completely lost here. You do see something of his unique punctuation here, but it, too, loses meaning without the spacing characteristic of Adoff's poems. Find the book, see the words on the pages, read the poems aloud. You will find you're informed by Adoff's spaces as well as by his poetic reflections. Your reading aloud will be informed by your attention to his uses of space. This most certainly is true in Adoff's newest book, "The Basket Counts" illustrated by Michael Weaver
(Simon & Schuster, 2000). Those poems kept bouncing (sorry, couldn't resist) through my head while I watched the women's and men's basketball tournament games on TV recently. Find that book, too. It's terrific!
Ginny Moore Kruse (gmkruse at ccbc.education.wisc.edu) Cooperative Children's Book Center (www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/) A Library of the School of Education, University of Wisconsin Madison
Received on Wed 05 Apr 2000 05:13:32 PM CDT
Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2000 17:13:32 -0500
To begin our observance of National Poetry Monty, we've already suggested that you might want to visit the web site of the Children's Book Council (http://www.cbcbooks.org). If you're interested in secondary and college level poetry, perhaps you have visited the National Poetry Month web site (http://poets.org). The April 2000 issue of the journal Voices of Youth Advocates (VOYA) contains a list of recommended poetry volumes found by VOYA reviewers to be most worthwhile for teen readers; this list was compiled from reviews published from 6/99-4/00.
The National Council of Teachers of English has a formal award process to honor poets for the body of their work. We want to look at selected works of these poets to begin with. Later this month, we'll talk about some of the anthologies you particularly appreciate and why. Poets honored by the NCTE for the body of their published poetry for children are Eve Merriam (1981); John Ciardi (1982); Lilian Moore
(1985); Arnold Adoff (1988); Valerie Worth (1991); Barbara Esbensen
(1994); and Eloise Greenfield (1997). The NCTE Award began as an annual award but now it's given every three years. Is there a poem by any of the above poets you particularly appreciate, keep coming back to, quote or read to others or to yourself? Tell us about it. Remember, for now, we're thinking together about poems by Eve Merriam, John Ciardi, Lilian Moore, Arnold Adoff, Valerie Worth, Barbara Esbensen, and Eloise Greenfield.
I'm thinking today about Arnold Adoff. Some of you know that here at the CCBC we have long appreciated Arnold Adoff's poetry, including his poems in the book "All the Colors of the Race" illustrated by John Steptoe (Lothrop, 1982). These poems can be read separately or as a continuous narrative. Here are words from the title poem: "All the colors of the race are in my face, and just behind my face: behind my eyes: inside my head. And inside my head, I give my self a place at the end of a long line forming itself into a circle. And I am holding out my hands." The amazing thing about these words is that as powerful as they are exactly as Arnold Adoff wrote them, you are not reading them in this message JUSTas he wrote them. Adoff's sense of the space each word must occupy on the page in order to have meaning is completely lost here. You do see something of his unique punctuation here, but it, too, loses meaning without the spacing characteristic of Adoff's poems. Find the book, see the words on the pages, read the poems aloud. You will find you're informed by Adoff's spaces as well as by his poetic reflections. Your reading aloud will be informed by your attention to his uses of space. This most certainly is true in Adoff's newest book, "The Basket Counts" illustrated by Michael Weaver
(Simon & Schuster, 2000). Those poems kept bouncing (sorry, couldn't resist) through my head while I watched the women's and men's basketball tournament games on TV recently. Find that book, too. It's terrific!
Ginny Moore Kruse (gmkruse at ccbc.education.wisc.edu) Cooperative Children's Book Center (www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/) A Library of the School of Education, University of Wisconsin Madison
Received on Wed 05 Apr 2000 05:13:32 PM CDT
