Futher adventures in children’s poetry

I think the best part about books of poems written for children is that the poets allow themselves to be unabashedly inspirational or absurd. They let themselves go past the limits of ‘ordinary’, into territory that’s considered too sentimental or ridiculous for grown-ups: When it comes to writing for children – particularly writing poems for children – there are no such boundaries. The less ‘normal’ the better, the more sweet or shocking, the more relate-able, it seems. And someone who’s figured this out pretty well is Colin McNaughton in his book There’s an Awful Lot of Weirdos in Our Neighborhood. In fact, he addresses it head on in his poem “I Wish I Was Normal”

I wish I was normal

Like everyone else.

I wish I was normal

Like you.

I wish I was normal

Like everyone else.

I wish I had one head,

Not two.

I hate being normal

Like everyone else.

Being normal is not

Any fun!

I hate being normal

‘Cause everyone knows

That two heads are better

Than one!

You can’t tell from just the printed poem, but it’s accompanied by an illustration of a person with two heads (or two people with one body: I don’t know which way to say that) on one page, saying the first part, and someone who appears to be a ringleader on the facing page, saying the other half of the poem. Both illustrations are vividly colored, as if all the characters are from a circus.

Half of the fun of these poems are the illustrations (also provided by McNaughton), which range from serene and soothing to disgusting and disquieting.  A poem called “I’m Much Better than You” finds itself interrupted by a grizzly bear not only in text (“who is on the run from the maximum security wing of London Zoo and who has not eaten for three days, leaps behind a tree and swallows up the boy without so much as a “How do you do?””), but also with a furry, sharp-tooth, claw-sharpened illustration of said bear on attack.Or a fuzzy blue bird with the word bubble that says “Tempus Fugit (and so do I).” that accompanies “Absurd Bird Words.” (And his flock of friends, half of whom I had to insert their word bubbles into Google translate because I do not speak Greek, and I’m too nosy not to know what they’re saying.)

McNaughton seems to excel at the play on words type poems “Hide-and-Seek” or “Teef! Teef!”, for example, and they’re the ones my niece likes to read best – the idea that a big run on sentence or two “wonoothreefourfisisernayniten – readornothereIcome” is the whole text of a poem, and that you can play with the sounds of words as well as their meanings is easily illustrated by some of his work here. There are some takes on classic poems (See: “Monday’s Child is Red and Spotty”); some puns and word-plays (“Hair Piece”); and lots and lots of alliteration and onomatopoeia lessons lurking in the midst of the fun and games. You know I’m always on the lookout for a good lesson, particularly when the kid never sees it as one. If I can just let them wander through “The Lesson” on their own, through “Blether, blather, blah-blah, bosh/ Claptrap, humbug, poppycock, tosh./ Guff, flapdoodle, gas and gabble./Hocus-pocus, gibberish, babble.” and let them pick it all up on their own, then that’s even better.

There’s a time or two the rhythm is a beat off, to my ear, and there’s a bit too much violence in the poems themselves (‘Entirely too much slapping happening,’ says the pacifist Kindergarten teacher that the poems are decidedly not aimed towards), but other than that, they’re goofy and just as full of the weirdos as the title promises.