It Should —— Scan

The New York Times coverage of the new picture book for frazzled parents, You Have to —— Eat, reminds me of why I didn’t see the first one as worth noticing.

There’s this thing in verse called metre. If you’re going to write parody picture books, you should get to know that.

This quoted passage from the new book starts out anapestically enough but stumbles in the second line.

The sunrise is golden and lovely,
The birds chirp and twitter and tweet,
You woke me up and asked for some breakfast,
So why the —— won’t you eat?

And the third. And the fourth.

These books come from a small press that hasn’t specialized in the form, so perhaps its editors don’t notice the problem.

The sunrise is golden and lovely,
The birds in their nests chirp and tweet,
You woke up and asked me for breakfast,
So why in the hell won’t you eat?

But it’s really not that hard.

“But I Have to Drop the Name ‘Bud’ in There!”

"Otherwise, how will everyone know that we're dear, dear friends?"

In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviewed Calvin Trillin's book of verse about the recent US election with rhymes of her own:

There once was a poet named Bud Trillin,
Who cast George Bush as his villain.
He sounded like a new Ogden Nash,
Writing doggerel with real panache,
Chronicling the reign of Bush Two,
And Rove’s quest to wipe out the blue.

Which illustrates my primary rule for writing verse: rhyme is easy, rhythm is hard.

My secondary rule is that you shouldn't write verse at all if you can't understand rule #1.

Sonnet to My Lady’s Eye

Since it's Friday, and Poetry Friday eases the need for blogging inspiration, I'm sharing one of the verses from L. Frank Baum's By the Candelabra’s Glare, recently reissued by Pumpernickel Pickle Press.

A SONNET TO MY LADY’S EYE

If inspiration comes, I’ll try
A sonnet to my lady’s eye--
Her black eye.

And yet, there seems a woeful lack
Of proper words to rhyme with “black,”
And black eyes savor of attack--
I’d best abandon black.

I’ll start again, and this time try
A sonnet to my lady’s eye--
Her gray eye.

And yet, what color does convey
So passionless a sense as gray?
And tigers’ eyes are gray, they say–
My lady’s can’t be gray.

Ah, now the idea comes! I’ll try
A sonnet to my lady’s eye--
Her violet eye.

And yet, unless I much forget,
No lady’s eye was violet
Since time began; so, with regret,
Adieu to violet!

And so at last I’m forced to try
A sonnet to my lady’s eye--
Her blue eye.

And yet, what can I say that’s new?
The whole world knows blue eyes are true;
Besides, I must confess to you
My lady's eyes are blue.

Technically, this isn't a sonnet. But then the difficulty of writing a poem is what this poem is all about.

Rhythm, Rhymes, and Gzonks

Though we remember Dr. Seuss for his narrative books, such as Horton Hears a Who and The Cat in the Hat, he also wrote a number of plotless picture books that relied on the sheer power of accumulating nonsense. These include If I Ran the Circus, If I Ran the Zoo, and the venerable And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.

In the latter category, my favorite was probably On Beyond Zebra!, which took the normal form of an alphabet book but discussed letters no other author had used. (Other alphabet books I recall vividly from childhood were those by Richard Scarry, P. L. Travers, and H. A. and Margaret Rey.)

Tony DiTerlizzi plays similar tricks with the alphabet book form in G Is for One Gzonk! Each letter of the alphabet introduces a creature not found anywhere else, such as the eponymous gzonk. The pages show of DiTerlizzi's creature-creating talent, honed from illustrating Magic cards and co-creating the Spiderwick series.

The young bespectacled stand-in for the author-illustrator vows to make his alphabet different by not pointing out anything else on the page that begins with the crucial letter. Though he can't resist ponting out what he's not pointing out. And then some Woos, who resemble hovering water balloons with numbers attached, keep invading the pages, trying to turn the alphabet book into a number book. Their contributions to the text appear in a different color and type style from the narrator's.

With all the arguments and twists, G is for Gzonk! requires 80 pages to get through twenty-six letters of the alphabet and one number. That's an unusually large investment for a picture-book publisher, reflecting DiTerlizzi's success with Spiderwick and The Spider and the Fly.

Unfortunately, the book's rhyming text is just as irregular as its alphabet, and less intentionally. As I always say about stories in verse, rhyme is easy; rhythm is hard. Here are the book's first two stanzas, with the naturally emphasized syllables in capital letters:

HelLO! And WELcome TO my BOOK!
A BOOK THOUGHT up by ME.
I am the AUTHor and ARTist
(as SOON you'll PLAINly SEE)

of this ALphaBET of CREACHlings!
A TWENty-six-LETter menAGerIE!
But I MUST conFESS,
as you MAY have GUESSED,
it WON'T teach you A b C.

The lines never settle into a steady rhythm, iambic or otherwise. Compare the bumpy patterns above to "and to THINK that I SAW it on MULberry STREET." The most solidly metrical lines, such as "(as soon you'll plainly see)," add little to the text's meaning.

Dr. Seuss's nonsense texts showed his mastery of language, but I fear Gzonk's verse, like the Woos, show language overwhelming the author.

Longfellow Bicentennial Concert, 25 March

On Sunday afternoon, 25 March, there will be a free concert at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s birth in 1807.

Longfellow was the most popular American writer in the world in the late 1800s. Because so many American schoolkids memorized and recited his poetry, and because he wrote rhyming, metrical, and often narrative verse that went out of fashion in the early 1900s, people started to associate his work with children. There have been some excellent picture-book editions of his poems while some of his longer and more mature work faded.

Long out of favor, Longfellow now seems to be gaining a bit more respect from the academic world, especially because his interests dovetail with two current broad concerns:

• internationalism: Longfellow was a professor of languages, a translator, a traveler, and a correspondent and champion of poets around the globe.
• multiculturalism: For his time Longfellow was unusually interested in minority cultures within the US, researching and writing poems about Acadians, Ojibway, Jews, and African-Americans. (Longfellow supported Abolutionism while his father-in-law, who paid for his mansion in Cambridge, was a major textile mill-owner, making family discussion of the issue somewhat awkward.)

This concert, in the same site as a centennial celebration of Longfellow one hundred years ago, will feature:

• The Boston Landmarks Orchestra, under Charles Ansbacher, performing musical works Longfellow enjoyed and Julian Wachner’s musical setting of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”
• Christopher Lydon, host of the WGBH radio discussion show Open Source, as master of ceremonies
• Matthew Pearl, author of the historical crime novel The Dante Club, featuring Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Lovell, and other Boston literary figures
• David Connor in the role of Paul Revere
• Baritone Brett Johnson performing “A Psalm of Life”
• A local children’s chorus singing a setting of Longfellow’s poem “Snowflakes”

This free family concert starts at 2:00, with the theater open at 1:30. Seating is not reserved.

Bats at the Beach takes off

Daniel Pinkwater and Scott Simon maintained their role as the Oprah Winfrey of picture books this weekend, producing top sales with one rave review broadcast to millions.

The Saturday-morning pair focused their sonar on Brian Lies's Bats at the Beach. Before the day was out, the book was #3 at Amazon. All of us Lies fans here in New England are thrilled for him.

You can hear the radio segment here. Here's Brian's website.

Bats at the Beach also gives the lie to a "rule" of writing picture books that a lot of newcomers think they've heard: "Don't write in rhyme." BatB is in verse, as are many other successful picture books, new and old. Verse requires both rhyme and rhythm. Rhyme seems easy, but rhythm is hard.

So I think newcomers should interpret "Don't write in rhyme" as:

• Don't write in rhyme just because you think all picture books have to be written that way.
• Don't write in rhyme unless you can manage the rhythm as well.
• Don't expect writing in rhyme to make up for a weak story, flat characters, wordiness, cliches, or other problems.

Brian's text actually shifts from iambic to anapestic rhythm for some couplets, which might trip up readers until they realize the pattern. Stick with it!

The Night Is Singing too quietly?

Fantasy literature depends on children's imaginations, but sometimes that imagination can be too energetic--it can make a young child anxious about a dark night and an empty bedroom. That's what The Night Is Singing, a new picture book from Jacqueline Davies and Kyrsten Brooker, responds to.

Jackie's a good friend, and I saw her text for this book in a critique group and then through several stages to print. So I don't claim this is an unbiased opinion about The Night Is Singing.

I simply mention hearing that the two big U.S. bookstore chains have passed on stocking this picture book because it's "quiet." I'm not a parent, but I'd think that quiet is a good quality for helping a child go to bed. And the advance reviewers seem to agree.

• Horn Book: a "welcome contrast to the monster-under-the-bed genre"
• School Library Journal: a "perfect bedtime read"
• Kirkus: "gratifying and readable night after night"

So even if the two big chains don't (yet) carry The Night Is Singing in their regular stock, we can find it at Powell's and other independent retailers. Dial offers a look at a couple of page spreads, and Jackie's own site gives a hint of the rhyming text.