This article originally appeared in the 1999 issue of The Sampler, the newsletter of the Southern California Children’s Literature Council (formerly the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People (SCCLCYP).

When I was seven years old, I wrote a poem to console my father after the defeat of his favorite hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens. Hearing his shouts of frustration, I was inspired to write:

It’s just a game, Dad
It’s just a game.
It’s not your wife
It’s not your life
It’s just a game!

I was hooked. To this day I remember the thrill of condensing my jumbled feelings into a neat, descriptive package, which my readers’ (alright, my parents) could immediately understand. I was especially proud of the wife/life rhyme.

I did not grow up to be a poet. I write stories, although I like to think I write poetically now and then. I read lots of poetry, however, and do compose a line or two. And I think about poetry. I ponder the words of poets and teachers who write about poetry and the creative process, especially with regard to working with children. Here’s what some of them have had to say:

John Ciardi: “One finds himself more alert to life, surer of his own emotions, wiser than he would have been without that experience.”

Myra Cohn Livingston: “Tell me something old in a new way. Your way.”

 Langston Hughes: “…in the wonder of creation each sea shell, each animal, each tree, and each person is different; so if each person writes as he is, his writing is bound to be different, individual and therefore interesting.”

Joseph Brodsky: “A poem tells its readers ‘Be like me.'”

Be like me. I read that line and shivered, for I realized I had a story. I am always searching for stories. The best ones are born when something outside touches something inside. And it seemed that the idea for this story had always been there, inside my heart. It is the story of a girl growing up as she finds her poetic voice, helped along the way by a sensitive teacher.

In my novel, For YOUR Eyes Only!, the main character, Lucy Keane, lives in Los Angeles in the Seaview Apartments with her divorced mom and two younger twin brothers. She dislikes and fears her neighbor, Andy, who also happens to be in her class. She despises her freckles, misses her father, and worries about being “unlucky in love,” like her mother. Her Secret Love is her new substitute teacher, Mr. Moffat, who has given each student a gift of a journal to write in. Another gift from Mr. Moffat: a weekly poem placed on the chalkboard each Monday morning. These poems are ones I myself love and have learned from, and I used them as a device to inspire Lucy’s development.

To impress her teacher, Lucy presents Mr. Moffat with a haiku, the correct number of syllables duly noted.

Oh, Gladiola (5)
How iridescent you are (7)
Outside my window! (5)

Her mother points out that there are no gladiolas anywhere to be seen, iridescent or not. But Lucy huffily defends her right to use her imagination, especially when there doesn’t seem to be anything really beautiful outside her window to write a poem about.

But then she is introduced to William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” stark beauty revealed in the ordinary detail. She wonders if the dreary Seaview Apartments could ever compare to a pretty country farm and begins to closely observe her own surroundings. She attempts the use of metaphor and simile, noticing for the first time that the relentless, bright sunlight in L.A. makes the sky look like “an old pale sheet.” She listens to the shouts and sirens and cat howls at night and writes a poem called “Old Lady Night.” Sure, her poem is suspiciously reminiscent of Russell Hoban’s “Old Man Ocean,” another poem placed on the chalkboard. But Mr. Moffat assures her it’s fine to mimic the style of accomplished poets. “You will find your own voice soon enough, ” he tells her. She wonders how long that will take.

Then she reads Lilian Moore’s “Message from a Caterpillar” and Myra Cohn Livingston’s “Like It Should Be” and hears how a simple conversational style can be poetic, too. She is inspired to write the poem “I Wish,” a small, sad poem with a slow, sad rhythm, expressing her real feelings in her “own voice.” Valerie Worth’s poem “garbage” shows her how “words can make ugly things beautiful,” as do the poems of Langston Hughs. Indeed, “everything is a poem,” she comes to realize, especially when described honestly with a fresh eye.

By the end of the book, Lucy’s patient observations bring insight and compassion towards the previously disparaged Andy, as well as a recognition of her own worth. Before he leaves them, Mr. Moffat gives one final gift–a carefully selected poem to each student. His poem for Lucy is the magnificent “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Glory be to God for dappled things–
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced–fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim

“Be like me!” this poem sings. Open your eyes to the world. Rejoice in uniqueness. Admire differences among us. See your own special beauty.

Why poetry? That’s why.

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References:

Brodsky, Joseph. “An Immodest Proposal” in On Grief and Reason, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995 (A lecture delivered as U.S. Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress, October, 1991,)

Ciardi, John and Williams, Miller. How Does a Poem Mean? Houghton Mifflin Co., 1989.

Hoban, Russell. The Pedaling Man. W.W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1968.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. ByW.H. Gardner and N.H. Mackenzie, Oxford University Press, 1948.

Hughes, Langston. The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1960

Livingston, Myra Cohn. The Child as Poet: Myth or Reality? The Horn Book, 1984.
_______The Malibu and Other Poems, Atheneum, 1972.
_______When You Are Alone, It Keeps You Capone, Atheneum, 1973

Moore, Lilian. Little Raccoon and Poems from the Woods, McGraw-Hill, 1975.

Rocklin, Joanne. For YOUR Eyes Only! Scholastic, 1997.

Williams, William Carlos. Collected Poems: 1909-1939, Vol. I. New Directions Publishing, 1938.

Worth, Valerie. All the Small Poems and Fourteen More. Michael di Capua Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987.