From: Ginny Moore Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:34:48 -0500

Hello, CCBC-Net Friends -

HALLOWEEN A B C doesn't fit neatly into the "Horror Stories" category. In its own way, it's always been a shock for some adults who become horrified while leafing through and seeing that this shivery ABC book is definitely not a benign seasonal concept book for preschoolers. Not at all.

Eve Merriam's creepy poems accompany Lane Smith's eerie artwork, or perhaps Lane Smith's scary artwork accompanies haunting poetry written by Eve Merriam for HALLOWEEN A B C. Regardless, it's impossible at this point to imagine one without the other.

This 32-page book was first published by Macmillan in 1987. In 2002 a revised edition titled SPOOKY A B C was published by Simon & Schuster, and it includes artwork not included in the first edition.

Here's the CCBC CHOICES [2003] review of SPOOKY A B C: "When illustrator Lane Smith created 26 images for what he imagined would be a wordless book, his publisher solicited Eve Merriam to match poems to his pictures. Her resulting words required that some of the visual images be redone, and the end product was HALLOWEEN A B C/ /(Macmillan, 1987). A fascinating endnote describes this evolution, and states that /Spooky A B C/ is a revised edition of the original, with the reinstatement of some of the original, unused illustrations. Not for the faint-hearted, the dark pages are populated with sinister demons, fiends and vipers, not least of which is simply the "Crawler." "Creepy crawlers / ... creeping from the north / crawling from the south / creeping down your forehead / crawling in your mouth / creeping on your tongue / crawling down your throat / into your gizzard / where they float float float."

I'm thinking about HALLOWEEN A B C (AKA SPOOKY A B C) this week, because I'm one of the invited readers for a neighborhood poetry slam scheduled late in the afternoon on Oct. 31. Each reader has been asked to bring one or more "suitably weird and scary poems for adults and children." The organizer states that this event will be an attempt to "rebirth a poetry society" which, according to a neighborhood archive, began about 120 years ago on October 31.

While musing about HALLOWEEN A B C, I initiated a Google search. Most of the material is useless for my purpose. However I noticed a "Simulated Intellectual Freedom Debate" posted by Denise Agosto http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~dea22/debate.html Although that exercise isn't something I'll delve into during next week's event, I wonder if any of you have used that "debate" in a class or group. If so, please let me know if you recommend it. Please write directly to me: gmkruse at wisc.edu

I also discovered Sylvia Vardell's on-line tribute to the poetry by the late Eve Merriam http://poetryforchildren.blogspot.com/2007/07/eve-merriam-day.html Some of you already realize that in 1981 Eve Merriam received the award for Excellence in Poetry for Children given by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). I'll bet you don't realize that long before this, Eve Merriam had been a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison!

Cordially, Ginny Moore Kruse gmkruse at wisc.edu

Poetry Enthusiast & former CCBC Director, School of Education University of Wisconsin - Madison

 
Received on Thu 25 Oct 2007 11:34:48 AM CDT