Headpiece Filled With Straw

Silverstein

It's Dark in Here

By Shel Silverstein

I am writing these poems
From inside a lion,
And it's rather dark in here.
So please excuse the handwriting
Which may not be too clear.
But this afternoon by the lion's cage
I'm afraid I got too near.
And I'm writing these lines
From inside a lion,
And it's rather dark in here.

My mom read Shel Silverstein poems with her third graders for years, so she first turned me on to them years ago (and she agrees that kids just devour his books), but thanks for the tip to the Wondering Minstrels site, and through the member's commentary, I found the most WONDERFUL children's lit site! Wow, I could crawl in there and live for days!

The treasure trove is courtesy of Jim Trelease, my new hero. I must read more by him, but for starters, here's a bit from his What's Right or Wrong with Poetry. His site on kids and reading is something you also do not want to miss. Jim Trelease on Reading.

If "lobster" were an important subject in the curriculum, we would have lobster classes for twelve straight years: where to find them, how they live, and, of course, how to catch, prepare, cook, and eat them. But if, after graduating from school, the end result was a lifelong loss of appetite for lobster, there would be a general reassessment of the lobster curriculum. And this is precisely what has happened to poetry in the United States--except no one is reassessing the poetry curriculum.

The contrast between how children respond to poetry and how adults do is seen most strikingly in two facts:

1. Until The Road Less Traveled surpassed it, Shel Silverstein's collection of children's poetry, A Light in the Attic, held The New York Times record for the longest time on its bestseller list (186 weeks).
2. The worst-selling department in bookstores is adult poetry; it sells so poorly, many stores no longer even stock it.

Poetry dies for most people on graduation day. The thickest coat of dust in a public library can be found in its poetry section. Considering how much time is spent in secondary classrooms dissecting poetry, one would expect graduates to be ravenous poetry consumers. Wrong. Why is this so?

One of poetry's strengths is its brevity. A poem is not a novel or a short story, yet it can be very revealing in its smallness--like one of those see-through Easter eggs. A poem should add up to something, a slice of life. One expert put it this way: "Unless a poem says something to a child, tells him a story, titillates his ego, strikes up a happy recollection, bumps his funny bone--in other words, delights him--he will not be attracted to poetry regardless of the language it uses."

Therefore the choice of poets and poems will have everything to do with how children react to poetry. But the American approach ignores those factors. It is more interested in "covering the core curriculum" than creating lifetime interest. The higher the grade level, the more obscure and symbolic and less humorous and understandable the poetry becomes. Because all the poetry is obscure, every poem must be dissected like some kind of frog in biology class, and we end up making poetry appear so unnecessarily complicated, people like children's author Jean Little decide not to stop the next time they come to the "woods on a snowy evening."

[...]

Where the Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein, is so popular with children, librarians and teachers insist it is the book most frequently stolen from their schools and libraries. Over the last eight years I've asked eighty thousand teachers if they know Where the Sidewalk Ends (two million copies in print), and three-quarters of the teachers raise their hands. "Wonderful!" I say. "Now, who has enough copies of this book for every child in your room?" Nobody raises a hand. In eight years, only eighteen teachers out of eighty thousand had enough copies in their rooms for every child.

I continue, "Do each of you know the books in your classroom no child would ever consider stealing?" They nod in recognition. "Do you have enough copies of those books for every child in the room?" Reluctantly, they nod agreement. Here we've got a book kids love to read so much they'll steal it right and left and we haven't got enough copies; but every year we've got twenty-eight copies of a book they hate.

If we wish children to believe poetry is important, the worst way to teach it is to develop a two week poetry block, teach it, and then forget it--because that's what children will do with it. The best way is to incorporate meaningful poetry throughout the day. The question of which poems to read has already been answered for you by the anthologists included in the poetry section of the Treasury (see below), who pored through tens of thousands of children's poems to come up with children's favorites.