when i saw the topic for this blog carnival i knew i'd have to participate. i have an mfa in poetry so i'm contractually required to weigh in on matters of poetics.
however, because you can find plenty of my poetry about, i'm not going to use this month's carnival to share my creative output. instead, i'm going to spend my time waxing about bad poetry, specifically in children's books.
some background: i am the parent of a two and a half year old child at time of writing. he is a big fan of books, which my wife and i have taken great pains to ensure. however, this means that we are subjected to the varieties of children's literature, most of which is good, but some of which so warps the concepts of prosody and meter as to be unforgiveable. the rest of this page will exemplify and discuss some of the worst offenders.
while i would be remiss if i did not at least mention the disturbing imagery of this book (you'll have to find it for yourself), the bulk of my complaint will be directed toward Sayres's prosody (or lack thereof). for example:
where do garbage trucks sleep
when they're done collecting trash?
do their dads sniff their load and say,
"pee-yew -- time to take a bath"?
in a book where the bulk of the meter fits well, i truly don't know how the author reads the last two lines here herself. i should email her, maybe.
do their moms reach front to backhoe
while this isn't a prosody issue, i don't know how Sayres thought we would all take this line. like, really. that's the first page.
those two, and an awkward forced elision on fire-red engines
,
aside, this book is overall all right. but we're just getting
started.
yes, even the great theodore giesel has a few clunkers in his verse. here, i'm calling out the following line from the gustatory classic:
a train! a train!
a train! a train!
could you, would you,
on a train?
really, dr?
for a book that purports to be a song (and that includes sheet music to set it to), the animal song is surprisingly poorly metered:
snap went the croc
on the little snare drum.
poom-poom, the big brown bear
thumped with his thumb.
jingle-jangle, strummed the weasel,
all steady and strong.
snap poom jingle-jangle
went the animal song.
these are the first lines of the book. notice how it disorients the reader/singer by throwing multiply-metered lines one after the other with seemingly no regard for pattern. the book continues this way apace—though i do quite like the story itself.
soon they were playing
their song in full swing,
and like the rat said,
the town joined in.
the rest of the book has really strong end-rhymes, so the in here is just jarring. also what are we doing with the meter in this song? there are short stanzas like this that require half-note words, then some that go lilting with triplet meter, it's just uneven.
soon the woods woke up and gathered to sing
the animal song as they did every spring.
they waited and waited, but the band never came,
so they went to find out what was to blame.
the desire for a caesura between out and what in the last line is so strong. sometimes i add in a just to forego the awkward pause.
my bum is one of those books that comes with a sound-effect button. it plays a long fart noise, which is funny and silly and nothing to be mad about ... except for the fact that the book is about all the different sounds the main character's bum makes. i would love to have been a fly on the wall for the marketing meetings of this one.