Papa Is a Poet: A Story About Robert Frost by Natalie S. Bober

Papa Is a Poet: A Story About Robert Frost by Natalie S. Bober, illustrated by Rebecca Gibbon

Rating: 4.5 stars

Sometimes I think I'm overdoing it just a bit.  I mean, how many serious-ish nonfiction books do kids really want to read?  I rationalize my filled-to-the-brim-with-books household by telling myself that I pick out books and leave them lying around, available, in case curiosity motivates one or two or all of my children to pick it up and read it. I also let them choose plenty of books on their own; they are not left to my nerdy selections.

Papa Is a Poet is long and wordy and serious, so it is definitely in that last category.  Bober tells the story of Robert Frost--as told from the perspective of Lesley, one of his daughters.  She tells us, the reader, of the day they returned from a two year, poetry-writing stint in England, when her father saw at a newsstand a published collection of his works, North of Boston.  He was surprised! Frost hadn't been told by any American publisher of its creation, but was overjoyed to have met success on this side of the Atlantic.

Lesley thinks back to simpler times, before her family sold their farm to raise the funds to go to England.  They lived on a farm, and Robert Frost was a poultry farmer.  Theirs was a nature-filled childhood, with streams and flowers and trees and each other to play in and around and with. Robert and his wife home schooled their children, and their life was full of books.  Their days were "ordinary but meaningful. The cupboard was often bare, yet life was filled to the brim."

Poetry--playing with words, finding the humor or beauty in simple things, and creating metaphors--ran through his veins, but he felt that it wasn't an acceptable pastime for a father of a large family.  He felt he was a "disappointing failure" in the eyes of neighbors and family, so they sold the farm and moved. They flipped a coin to decide where to go. The coin landed on heads, so they went to England--if it had landed on tails, they'd have gone to Vancouver. Choosing to be a full-time poet was a crazy, almost reckless decision, but he did it. And look, he did it so very well.

Why tell this story, read this book to young girls and boys like Lorelei (age 7)?

1. Robert Frost is one of the greatest American poets, and now she has a little background, a little context to the lesson she'll soon get from a teacher. She'll know he was a dad and had kids and made up little rhymes for his family, and maybe...maybe his poetry will be not be so intimidating.
2. I don't love how Bober sprinkles in Frost's poetry.  I think she feels obligated to, and I appreciate her attempt. While I don't think it usually works, I love that his most famous lines (see below) are in there, and that Lorelei knows about them and we can talk about them when making choices.
3. Speaking of choices, I really like that this story is about one man struggling to make a choice--and it's a tough one for a man with poems in his head but mouths to feed.  I'm always telling Lorelei and her brothers that there are lots of choices, but no perfect one, but you have to trust your gut, take a risk, and then give that choice your all. Robert Frost did that.
4. Personally, poetry didn't make a lot of sense when I was in school.  I realize now how fun it can be, how poets play with words and say things in tricky ways that challenge the reader to think, and I want to introduce that concept to my kids little by little, stanza by stanza.
5. Their days were "ordinary but meaningful." The book is worth it for just that--a reminder that we don't need lots of gizmos and gadgets.  The simple things, especially when done with humor and appreciation, sure do mean a lot.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Other books on poetry you might want to check out:
Guyku: A Year of Haiku for Boys (Raczka)
Poem-Mobiles: Crazy Car Poems (Lewis)
Runny Babbit (Silverstein)
And pretty much anything by Dr Suess, of course!

Guyku: A Year of Haiku for Boys by Bob Raczka

Guyku: A Year of Haiku for Boys by Bob Raczka, illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds

Rating: 5 stars

This book is a whole lot of awesome.

Raczka wrote a year's worth of haiku poems especially for boys--each season gets about six simple-yet-so-clever poems inspired by the outdoorsy play and crazy behavior that is mostly associated with boys.  Here are my favorites (yeah, I know I did two for summer. I couldn't choose!):

Spring:
In a rushing stream,

we turn rocks into a dam.
Hours flow by us.

Summer:
Pine tree invites me

Ba ha ha!!

to climb up to the sky.
How can I refuse?

Penny on the rail,
you used to look like Lincoln
before you got smooshed.

Fall:
From underneath the
leaf pile, my invisible
brother is giggling.

Winter:
How many million
flakes will it take to make a
snow day tomorrow?

Love, love, LOVE!

Haikus are so accessible for kids--they are so easy to come up while hiking along, eating breakfast, taking a walk around the block, or driving in a car, which is when Lorelei and Ben and I often do them. It's fun and there's no rhyming necessary and the sillier the better. During Lorelei's Spring Break, when she was encouraged to journal every day, she wrote a haiku every day instead.  On the first day we all got in on the haiku fun...I have one of mine written down--our whole family, including our two weimaraners, were in the car heading to West Virginia and the dogs' smelly gas leaking from their rears was filling up the car.  That was the subject of my poem, which had me in stitches (I often crack myself up).

Back to the book.

I think two opposite things, strongly, at the same time: First, I wish that this was for all kids, not just boys.  Lorelei was the one who enjoyed this the most; I was happy she agreed to forget the subtitle of the book and read it.  She loves thinking up haikus any old time.

Second, I love that this is just for boys. I love that a whole book is full of what I hope my boys are always full of: curiosity and energy, laughter and outdoor play, silliness and exploration.

I know, I know.  I'm a card-carrying member of the Want it Both Ways Club.

Either way, this book is a whole lot of awesome!

Poem-Mobiles: Crazy Car Poems by J. Patrick Lewis

Poem-Mobiles: Crazy Car Poems by J. Patrick Lewis, illustrated by Jeremy Holmes

Rating: 5 stars

Last month at the SCBWI Winter Conference we conference-goers got to choose two break-out sessions in which we'd learn, in a small group, some specific things about a specific topic.  I chose to attend a nonfiction picture book session and a poetry-writing session with the one and only Jane Yolen.

Me?  Poetry?  Honestly, in high school and college poetry was beyond me.  I felt stupid wading through stanzas trying to figure out the meaning.  I felt as if my whole class was staring at one of those pictures where a design pops out at you if you stare long and hard enough--and they, in unison, appreciated the neat thing that they could easily see through the patterns while I was left just staring.  I could either fake it or admit defeat.

But I love poetry in children's books.  Rhyming makes the books even better, I think.  My kids--and I, too--have always gravitated towards books with a rhythm and a rhyme.  So I thought it was high time to get over my bad self and dive into the world of poetry.  Among other things, Jane Yolen suggested to us scribbling note-takers, writing wanna-bes that we needed to read more poetry if we wanted to write more poetry.

J. Patrick Lewis was at the top of her list of poets to know about and read.  J. Patrick Lewis actually went to Lorelei's school last year, so she feels like she knows him.  We bought World Rat Day around that time, and both Lorelei and Ben have thoroughly enjoyed the silly holidays that he brings to light in short, clever, funny poems.  Honestly, they got into this poetry thing before I did--they'd read World Rat Day a bunch of times, laughing out loud as kids do so easily, before I wandered over and grabbed the book to read.

And holy smokes!  It was so good!  This was poetry I could get and enjoy--a great place for me to start, and I could start enjoying poetry along with my kids.  A win-win situation, for sure.

So I did what I usually do when I find an author I like and Jane Yolen tells me to: I check out every single book I can find by him/her.  I'm an all-or-nothing person, what can I say?  It was in this way that we stumbled across his latest book, Poem-Mobiles: Crazy Car Poems.  They are fantastic, and all three of my kids enjoy it in three very different ways:

Kiefer loves the illustrations by Jeremy Holmes.  There is so much to look at in each of these intricate, silly cars that J. Patrick Lewis has thought up and Homes has drawn up!  The kids fought over this book on the way home from our family trip to West Virginia last week; Kiefer, our youngest, easily won.  He pored over the illustrations slowly and carefully.  The grass taxi that requires mowing is his favorite, by far.

         Grass Taxi
I need to mow the glass,
I should Weedwack the visor,
I'm blanketed in grass.
My wax is fertilizer.
And when my gas tank's low,
I fill up on Weed-B-Gone.
My wormy engine's slow.
Check underneath my lawn.

Kiefer gets the first turn a lot of the time...

Ben does his best to read the poems and can read them literally but doesn't quite get the twists and turns of J. Patrick Lewis's wit.  He loves the wacky illustrations but the poems come alive when I read them to him (like how I patted myself on the back right there?).  By putting an emphasis on this word over that one, and by stopping and explaining what's so funny, he gets the joke and becomes a better reader.

Lorelei gets it all.  One of her fellow first grade classes just did a little performance/explanation of the word and literary concept of "inference."   She's happy for the challenge to infer, to read between the lines, to take the time and figure out the point and the joke.  She's a strong enough reader, curious enough girl, and funny enough kid that she eagerly looks for the jokes in poems like these. And even though cars are traditionally "boy toys," these poems are for either gender, trust me. This one cracks her up:

       Jurassic Park(ing)
You thought the dinosaurs were dead?!
The cars behind our school
Are big Tyrannosaurus wrecks
That run on fossil fuel.

I'm pretty sure that this book and other poetry collections by J. Patrick Lewis will be our gifts of choice at birthdays this year!

Runny Babbit by Shel Silverstein

Runny Babbit by Shel Silverstein

Rating: 5 stars

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I sat in a hotel lobby in Seattle, Washington, listening to some former Peace Corps Volunteers talk about the country they had served in, which was the same country to which I was traveling to the very next day: Thailand.  The language is crazy! they said.  It is so different!  It is so difficult!  All you can do, they said, is have fun with it.

Before that moment, my idea of attacking something difficult included putting on a ridiculously serious face, giving it my all, and being really hard on myself if I didn't get it right (the first time, of course).  Luckily for me, my light-hearted approach to learning Thai turned out to be invaluable in many ways.  I learned to attack something super difficult with effort and humor, and I learned to love a language in a way that fundamentally changed my approach to teaching my own language to my own kids.

Dr. Seuss' approach to writing was similar to this light-hearted, give-me-a-chance-to-laugh-while-I-learn approach.  He wanted to grab kids and pull them into his books with his silliness while still turning them on to the magic of reading and, often, teaching a pretty important lesson.  Shel Silverstein's books of poems--think A Light in the Attic--were a part of my childhood, as I'm sure they were a part of yours.  But Runny Babbit, which we happened upon in our local library, is more in line with Dr. Seuss than his other anthologies.  Silverstein worked on it for decades, and it was published posthumously.  I think it is, by far, his best stuff.  It is WONDERFUL. Truly all-caps worthy!

Read a few stanzas of one poem, "Kugs and Hisses," and you'll agree, I think:

Runny said, "I'm lonesome,
I feel so glad and sooty.
I need some kugs and hisses--
Now, who's gonna give 'em to me?"
"I will," said Polly Dorkupine,
"'Cause you're cute as a rug in a bug."
Said Runny, "Well, I'll kake the tiss,
But never hind the mug."

So clever!  Genius, really!  So hilarious!  Giggle-worthy!  Side-splitting!  Turn-the-page-I-want-more stuff!  And isn't this the sort of book we want our children to read (especially in our lap, thankfully putting down whatever we're doing on our endless to do list and, instead, giggling right alongside our kid/s, understanding what Silverstein is doing here, and then creating our own Runny Babbit-language for days and weeks and years to come)?!

Oh this page is so funny!  Enlarge it and you'll agree!

The book is a collection of poems, yes, but really each poem is like a new little chapter in Runny Babbit's life.  This adds to the turn-the-page-I-want-more-ness of the book.  Lorelei was the first one to sit and read it, laughing like crazy, saying, "Oh Mom, you've got to read this!" until I did.  Months later, after we had a personal copy of the book, Ben got in on the joke and we slowly read and explained the jokes to him.  He laughed, but as he's only a beginner reader (and perhaps also a little less of a language-lover than Lorelei and me), so he hasn't yet applied the twists and turns to his own language.

Lorelei, on the other hand, can't be stopped.  Bappy Hirthday! she says to people on their birthday, completely not caring if they don't get her own Runny Babbit-language joke.  I'm proud to say she's inherited the laugher-at-myself-er gene, and I'm prouder to say she gets that from me.  I have a feeling that in a few decades this Runny Babbit-language will pop up: I've decided to major in Lenglish Iterature, Mom! or I'm going to Chudy in Stina, Mom!  It will not surprise me.  It will make me smile.

This is a must-have.  Not just a must-read.  It's one of those books that you've got to have on your shelf so that you and your kids have a light-hearted book into which you can dive when things get too serious around the house.  We love it, and I hope you love it just as much.

Truckery Rhymes by Jon Scieszka

Truckery Rhymes by Jon Scieszka, illustrated by David Shannon, Loren Long, and David Gordon

Rating: 5 stars

This is a great, great book for boys!  I'm bummed I've only just found it.  Jon Scieszka is the creator of the blog Guys Read, a blog created to help boys become life-long readers.  I'm all for that!

In this book, he simply but cleverly rewrites all the classic nursery rhymes to make them dirty and funny and...truck-y!  And David Shannon, Loren Long, and David Gordon add some super cute, sometimes silly, sometimes funny illustrations to compliment the nursery rhyme.

Here are a few examples:

Patty Cake, Patty Cake 

Patty cake, patty cake, Dumper Dan.
Dump me some dirt as fast as you can.
Slide it and drop it and mark it DD,
And pile it in the lot for Melvin and me. 

Jack and Kat 

Jack and Kat raced up the hill
To burn some crazy rubber.
Jack zoomed down,
Right through Trucktown,
And Kat came scraping after.

This is a fantastic birthday book for a 2- or 3- year old boy (or truck-obsessed girl).

Jon Scieszka has written a few Trucktown books after this; they are a great preschool/kindergarten series you should definitely know about if, like me, you've got a boy or two in your charge.  We've read a bunch of them and like them...check them out here.

A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein

A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein

Rating: 4.5 stars

I am not a perfect mom.  Of that I am sure.  Lorelei's hair is usually unkempt, I still haven't gotten to the bottom of Ben's itchy bottom, and Kiefer once handed me a steak knife I left hanging out on the counter.  But I do pat myself on the back when it comes to getting my kids into books:  They love books.  I can't yet say "They love to read" because Ben and Kiefer are still working on reading.  But it will happen soon, as things do when your kids are so little.  Soon is, like, this afternoon...for most things, at least.

Reading in the car...

One specific reading-related thing I'm proud of: getting our kids in the (good, lifelong) habit of reading in the car.  We don't need no stinkin' DVD player!  (I am very fortunate that no one has carsickness in our family.)  From a very early age, Lorelei had a basket of books at her disposal in the car.  She has the same routine today as she did two years ago: Climb in the car, grab a book, start reading.  Thanks the continued supply of books and her fantastic example, Ben and even Kiefer do it now, too.  A few weeks ago I taught Lorelei and Ben the ol' Peace Corps rule: Always Bring a Book (ABAB)!  Now they often chant to each other "ABAB!" as they to the shelves before a longer car trip.

Makes me smile...and wish I was in the back seat reading with them rather than driving!

A few weeks ago my husband planned a fun family outing to Luray Caverns in Virginia, a two hour drive from our house.  After some rounds of "ABAB!" the kids climbed in and this is what Jonathan and I saw from the front seats.  Granted, Ben and Kiefer read for 30-40 minutes versus Lorelei's 90 minutes of the drive, but...every minute of peace and quiet in the backseat is one more peace- and quiet-filled minutes in your day!

Lorelei and Ben often grab Shel Silverstein poem anthologies before getting in the car.  We have all three: A Light in the Attic, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and Every Thing On It.  The poems are mostly short- or medium-length, and each has a funny and/or bizarre picture alongside that amuses Ben too.  Once they sat on the sofa, each with a volume.  They flipped the pages and, every 4.2 seconds called out, "Look at this one!" and giggled wildly at the other's illustration.  I was thrilled to have them playing so happily together (read: without me), but they were so cute and funny that I kept walking from the kitchen to the family room to look at them.

The pictures make the anthologies good choices for pre-readers and early readers, and the poems are good for stronger readers.  Lorelei still doesn't get all the jokes; she loves, loves, loves when I sit with her and read a few poems and explain the jokes to her.  (Who doesn't like being in on the joke??!)

I'll end with a poem (that is actually from Where the Sidewalk Ends) that my sister often read to me when we were kids:

For Sale 

One sister for sale!
One sister for sale!
One crying and spying young sister for sale.
I'm really not kidding.
Who'll start the bidding?
Do I hear a dollar?
A nickel?
A penny?
Oh, isn't there, isn't there, isn't there any
One kid who will buy this old sister for sale,
This crying and spying young sister for sale?

(I think I had nightmares about this illustration.)

P.S.  Yes, I know that Shel Silverstein looks a little creepy on the back cover photographs.  But we don't hate on bald people around here!