“If I were in charge of the world, you wouldn’t have lonely.”

In order to pass on my love of poetry to my niblings (and expand our horizons a tad bit beyond Where The Sidewalk Ends), my niece and I have recently spent some time exploring the 810s at our local library. One of our very first finds – and one of the biggest hits – is Judith Viorst’s If I Were in Charge of The World (and other worries). For my niece and I, the best kind of poetry is nonsense poetry – we’ve spent a lot of time with the king of all things kooky, Shel Silverstein, but, I knew there were other books, other poems, and other authors out there that we could enjoy as well.

Viorst – probably best known for Alexander of the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day fame – is one of the ones that’s definitely worth searching out. (The book is from 1981, and I’m surprised I hadn’t read it as a child myself, because this would have been exactly the kind of thing a girl who memorized “Sick“ would have enjoyed, but I had never heard of it before.) The titular poem is my favorite, by far, with the author listing off things that would be out of here if s/he were boss – including allergy shots, bedtimes and Monday mornings- with a few things she’d like more of – like chocolate sundaes that count as vegetables – thrown in for good measure. That’s my favorite, but there are still many more worthwhile poems to be found in this book.

There are descriptive poems (“Stanley the Fierce/Has a chipped front tooth/And clumps of spiky hair…. And I hear that he goes for seventeen days/Without changing his underwear./But I don’t think I’ll ask him.); and poems about enemies and poems about best friends; poems that sum up the experience of being told it’s time for bed (I hear eating./ I hear drinking./ I hear music./ I hear laughter. /Fun is something/ Grownups never have/ Before my bedtime. /Only after.). There are poetic takes on fairy tales and fantasies and forgetting to brush your teeth. There’s a few poignant ones scattered throughout – about a broken heart mending, or apologizing, or growing up. Oh my gosh, there’s the Teddy Bear Poem, which nearly made me weep, which I will include for you here, so you can also almost weep:

I threw away my teddy bear,
The one that lost his eye.
I threw him in the garbage pail
(I thought I heard him cry.)

I’ve had that little teddy bear
Since I was only two.
But I’m much bigger now and
I’ve got better things to do

Than play with silly teddy bears.
And so I said good-bye
And threw him in the garbage pail.
(Who’s crying – he or I?)

Right??
In addition to tugging on the heartstrings and making you chuckle, Viorst also uses space and text creatively – she squishes words here, lays them flat there.  And there’s her spectacular take on weirdness, which is my niece’s favorite. It lists how all the people in the family are acting different than they normally would, then proclaims them all weird, while the text of the entire poem is upside down, emphasizing the point, but also illustrating that, perhaps, the author is a little bit weirder than s/he may have thought.

And I’m saying s/he here for ‘the author’ even though I know full well that Judith Viorst is a woman, because the best thing about this kind of poetry, this first person perspective, is that kids are easily able to place themselves into the author’s shoes, to make believe that the poet is, in fact, them. So when she’s talking about her “Thoughts on getting out of a nice warm bed in an ice-cold house to go to the bathroom at three o’clock in the morning”, it’s easy enough for a kid to see themselves in that place, to agree with her conclusion “Maybe life was better/When I used to be a wetter.”

The poems are short, most of them have a simple pattern and rhyme scheme, and almost all of them have an early-reader level vocabulary (My niece is 8, and there were only a few unfamiliar words, so I’d say 3rd grade independent level reading, probably, but you could read them with kids younger than that). Our only complaint was that there were far too few of them. But, after a bit of research, I found out that not only are there more Judith Viorst poems for kids (Sad Underwear & Other Complications), but she also has written quite a few books of humorous poetry for adults, which I will also be checking out (It’s Hard to Be Hip Over 30 & Other Tragedies of Married Life;How Did I Get To be 40?;When Did I Stop Being 20 & Other Injustices: Selected Poems from Single to Mid-Life; Forever 50 & Other Negotiations; Suddenly 60 & Other Shocks of Later Life; I’m Too Young to Be 70 & Other Delusions; Unexpectedly Eighty & Other Adaptations). I’m definitely going to be checking those out soon, and I recommend the poetry in this book for everybody (technically it’s for kids, but who cares about that: they’re good poems).