Praiseworthy Poems and Poetry Prompts

Strong children’s poetry books lend themselves to helping young people write their own poems. Here are three such books with writing prompt suggestions for each one.

BookSpeak! Poems about Books by Laura Purdie Salas

One of the best things about this collection is that it gives voice to books and parts of books in ways that will compel readers to think about words, books, and stories afresh. Josée Bisaillon’s illustrations support the creative, slightly funky feel of the book. For example, on a page with a poem called “Skywriting” we see black ink birds perched on a set of five gray wires (that could also be a musical staff, and why not?). Inkblots are scattered off from the birds, and each line of the poem below is written in a different font. The poem reads:

Line after line of inky black birds

forming the flocks that shift into words.

Page after page of tales winging by,

singing a story against a

white sky.

Which is just marvelous. The birds are letters, then flocks that become words, and stories that fly. Isn’t that what a story does, lifting our minds and hearts into flight with its words and images?

A couple of Salas’s poems touch philosophically on the idea that stories and characters aren’t alive unless the book is opened and read: “If a Tree Falls” and “A Character Pleads for His Life,” respectively. A journal speaks in the poem “Top Secret,” whose illustrations feature a flight of strange butterflies pouring out of a red diary with a small key. Note that most of the poems are written in first person: we hear from the index (“I can tell you the page number/of anything you’re looking for.”), the tree whose paper makes the book (“My limbs wrote on the sky with orange leaf pens.”), and the cliffhanger (“Please, author, write/a sequel fast!”).

One poem even veers off to make a book metaphor in another setting. Here’s “Written in Snow”:

Snowy pages,

steady track,

tiny footprints

dipped in black.

Through the blizzard

stories roam.

They tiptoe bravely

out, then home.

At least, the illustration suggests that the book imagery is used by real feet in real snow. But wait—isn’t the poem another metaphor like the one about birds? It works either way.

In Book Speak! we hear from the illustrations, from conflict, from the beach book, and from the books that party late at night in the bookstore. Perhaps best of all, we get in on an argument among the Beginning, the Middle, and the End about who is the most important. Maybe the End should be declared the winner because this collection really does finish off with a poem called “The End.” Although the poem invites us back to the beginning—and why not read this book again?

Laura Salas’s poems are light and easy, bright and breezy, yet at the same time they manage to be thought provoking. Or metacognitive, anyway. What is a story and why does it matter? What parts do the physical and literary components of a book play in our experience as readers?

Then again, you might as well just enjoy the poems. Though you may think a little differently about a book next time you read.

Poetry Prompts: What part of a book haven’t we heard from? Students can write their own mask poems giving voice to other book components, e.g., setting, the author's bio, or the title page. Or just the book itself—what does each student think a book will say? They might even give voices to specific books like Charlotte’s Web, The Lightning Thief, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If those books could talk about themselves, what would they say?

Stardines Swim High Across the Sky by Jack Prelutsky

Jack Prelutsky is a bigger fan of word play than I am, and in recent books he has shown himself to be especially enamored of inventing portmanteau words or perhaps portmanteau creatures. This new collection presents 16 new “species” from the poet, all animals combined with a quality or habit—in many cases an irritating one. Here’s a list of the new creatures:

—Stardines

—Bluffaloes

—Swapitis

—Chormorants

—Fountain Lions

—Slobsters

—Plandas

—Jollyfish

—Sobcats

—Magpipes

—Tattlesnakes

—Braindeer

—The Gloose

—Panteaters

—Wedgehogs

—Bardvarks

And a few excerpts for your reference:

When other creatures are in bed,

STARDINES still twinkle overhead.

In silence, these nocturnal fish

Are set to grant the slightest wish.

CHORMORANTS are busy birds

That toil from sun to sun.

They labor over senseless chores

They’re certain must be done.

They work at this, they work at that,

And never think to ask

If they accomplish anything

With any pointless task.

TATTLESNAKE,

TATTLESNAKE,

Overly keen

To tattle repeatedly—

Truly you’re mean.

You’re nosy, annoying,

You’re venomous, vile.

You don’t mind your business,

We don’t like your style.

The most interesting poem to me is the last one, "Bardvarks," which I will include in its entirety:

BARDVARKS think they’re poets

And persist in writing rhyme.

Their words are uninspired

And a total waste of time.

But BARDVARKS do not know this,

So not only do they write

With unbearable pretension—

They incessantly recite.

BARDVARKS have no talent

For composing simple verse.

They don’t improve with practice

And in fact are getting worse.

Undeterred, they keep on writing

And reciting every day.

That’s why BARDVARKS are a problem—

You can’t make them go away.

One wonders if perhaps the poet is being ironic about his own work, but then, I’m more inclined to think that he is genuinely picturing certain people who are determined to write poetry but are too proud to make needed improvements to their work. A poor use of rhyme is a common problem. I will just tell you that the note I’ve put at the top of the new poetry collection I’m writing is “Less rhymey-rhymey thump thump.” Ahem.

At any rate, Pretlutsky’s poems are a lot of fun, though I think most kids will need a little help identifying some of the root animals and habits, particularly the wapiti and the cormorant. But I know they'll like finding out.

It’s important to note that Carin Berger’s artwork is utterly intriguing. Each creature is treated as an item in the catalog of a natural history museum. That is, each poem is printed on a card that is pinned to a board with four actual pins and given a neat label. The fonts on each card and label have the look of old card catalog listings. On or across the page is a specimen in a display box—but each specimen is created from mixed media and is in fact a nice mixture befitting the portmanteau word. For example, the stardines are cut from gold paper and look like fish crossed with shooting stars. These are physically elevated, shown soaring above a star map.

The nice thing about word play is that it is a challenge both creatively and intellectually. Children will no doubt enjoy reading this collection, but they should also take up the challenge for themselves.

Poetry Prompts: Of course students can come up with their own portmanteau creatures, poems, and artwork. They might want to apply the somewhat cautionary tone of some of the poems here. This task is more difficult than it might seem at first glance. I would suggest starting with a list of possible qualities or activities and then finding animal names to match rather than the other way round.

When Thunder Comes: Poems for Civil Rights Leaders by J. Patrick Lewis

The other two books are playful, but this book is grand in tone. This is not to say that the poems are inaccessible, and you will find a few flashes of humor. But each poem tells about a civil rights leader or leaders, so for the most part the poems have a dignity and weight that suit their topics.

Lewis uses a variety of poetic forms that I’ll admit I can’t identify at a glance—I did see a couple of sonnets, a villanelle, and a few free verse poems. Like the poetic forms, the artwork varies in that there are five different illustrators: Jim Burke, R. Gregory Christie, Tonoya Engel, John Parra, and Meilo So. This creates a rich feel to the series of page spreads. I especially like Meilo So's illustration for "The Auntie," Jim Burke's illustration for "The Slugger," Tonya Engel's illustration for "The Innocent," John Parra's illustration for "The Captive," and R. Gregory Christie's illustration for "The First."

The following is a complete list of poem titles and topics:

“The Activist”—Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s wife and civil rights activist

“The Auntie”—Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese pro-democracy activist under house arrest for many years; Nobel Peace Prize 1991

“The Slugger”—Josh Gibson, outstanding black Baseball Hall of Famer who played in the Negro Leagues before Jackie Robinson broke the race barrier

“The Innocent”—Mamie Carthan Till, mother of young murder victim Emmett Till, who was killed in Mississippi in a hate crime in 1955

“The Voice of the Voiceless”—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, great leader for India’s independence and an advocate for women and the oppressed “untouchables” class

“The Captive”—Mitsuye Endo, a Japanese American woman interned during WWII

“Freedom Summer”—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, civil rights workers ambushed and murdered by the KKK in Mississippi in 1964

“The Journalist”—Helen Zia, Chinese American activist and journalist

“The Astronaut”—Ellison Onizuka, Japanese American (and first Asian American) astronaut who died in the Challenger accident

“The Long Walker”—Dennis James Banks, cofounder of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and Anishinabe political activist

“The Crusader”—Harvey Milk, first openly gay man elected to public office in California; assassinated in 1978

“Banker to the Poor”—Muhammad Yunus, Bangladeshi banker who launched the micro-loan program in Asia to help the very poor; Nobel Peace Prize 2006

“The Statesmen”—Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for nearly 30 years for being an activist in South Africa; eventually freed and became the country’s first black president; Nobel Peace Prize 1993

“The First”—Jackie Robinson, first African American playing baseball for the major leagues

“The Child”—Sylvia Mendez, who as a child helped win the case against segregated “Mexican schools” in California in 1946, paving the way for Brown v. Board of Education

These are amazing stories, and the poems have to be powerful to tell them. J. Patrick Lewis has done justice to this list of heroes—and make no mistake, these are heroes. The book ends with an author’s note telling more about each civil rights leader.

But I should give you some excerpts. In “The Auntie,” about imprisoned Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi, Lewis contrasts her imprisonment with the General and his life of ease:

When I refused food to protest my detention,

the new General stuffed himself on mangoes

and banana pudding.

When a cyclone flicked off the roof of my prison

like the Queen of Hearts, turning my life to shame

and candle, the General had a mole removed.

Lewis’s poem about Gandhi focuses on his work in behalf of the outcast “untouchables.” The poem concludes majestically:

For we are not the ones to say

What will erode and what endure,

Where the iron, where the clay,

Who the foul and who the pure.

And here are the last few stanzas of Lewis’s poem, “The Child”:

Aunt Sally took her there once.

Eyes sharp as icepicks pierced

the windowpanes as if seeing

a Mexican for the first time.

Every door was locked with a

secret combination of frowns.

How can anyone ever get in?

Sylvia asked. Someone must know

who has the right key…

She looked up at her mother.

Maybe me?

These poems will help young readers find the key to becoming people who really can change the world. They will show them what true heroes are like.

Poetry Prompts: Students can find out about other activists and write poems about them. Or they can learn more about these heroes and write new poems about different aspects of their lives. They could also try the different poetry forms from the collection. Or they could write poems about their own reactions to the collection, or just poems about what it means to be a hero.

Note: In general, I recommend having students write in free or blank verse rather than in rhyme. Rhyme tends to distract young writers from what they would like to say and is easy to botch (see note about Prelutsky poem above). It's more productive to help young writers focus on strong metaphors, nouns, verbs, and, in the case of biographical poems, incidents than on rhyme.

Poems for an Autumn Day

Mind you, the poems aren’t fall-themed—but each of these books is worth curling up with on a gray day or even one of those blue-sky days blazing with leaves. Don’t forget the apple cider!

Outside Your Window: A First Book of Nature by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Mark Hearld (February 2012)

This book is a case of that old expression: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Though Outside Your Window is a collection of poems, it is also an introduction to nature. Many of the lines sound like a very pleasant science teacher explaining things such as birds, cows, and seasons. I was often reminded of prose poetry or simply well-stated prose. But then, some of the poems—and certainly some lines, are startlingly poetic. They are rendered all the more so by the poetry of Hearld’s illustrations, which wrap around Davies’ work like a quilt sewn by Mother Nature.

Be sure to take off the dust jacket. The look and design of the bare cover are wonderful in their own right. Hearld’s artwork manages to combine a look of 1950s children’s book illustration (e.g., Feodor Rojankovsky’s Caldecott winner, Frog Went A-Courtin’) with nonfiction nature illustration. The textured grandeur of his mixed-media style is made all the more intriguing by its often-small subjects. For example, a poem called “Night” is illustrated by a full spread that begins with yellow stalks of barley on the left, outlined by blues in a printerly way. A brown-and-blue mouse eating fallen grains of barley at the bottom of the page leads us across the gutter into a dark blue night holding the white-lettered poem. A moon, a star, and an owl overlook the right-hand page. What this description leaves out is that the whole thing sweeps and swirls as if brushed by a night wind. Hearld’s artwork makes the book into something positively spellbinding—and yet the poems are ultimately science-minded. The book is a strange and wonderful piece of art, poems and all.

I have questioned the poetic qualities of Davies’ work. We get, for example, lines such as these:

The frogs are croaking in the pond

and laying eggs like spotted jelly.

Next week the spots will be wiggly tadpoles.

Next month they’ll grow a pair of legs.

By summer they’ll be tiny frogs that leap off into the world.

And one night in another spring, when they’re big frogs, they’ll be back!

This particular poem’s best lines frame the ones I just gave you with frog calls: “Rrrruurrrp. Rrrrrruuurp. Rrrrrruuup.”

However, I should note that such descriptions take on a greater meaning because of Davies’s sharp eye for the details of nature. I had no idea that “Lambs’ tails wiggle when they’re happy…You’ll see it happen when a lamb is feeding….” Or that after dandelions bloom, “they fold up like furled umbrellas pointing at the sky./Then each rolled umbrella opens/into a puff of down.” The description of a gull’s flight is particularly fine. First the gull “runs into the wind, wings working hard for takeoff.” Then it “scoops the air with big, long strokes….” After soaring, the gull glides: “Now it bends [its wings] to make a W/and slides down the wind toward the sea.” Each of the four small stanzas is introduced with a flight sound or verb in a larger font.

Davies often uses repetition, cumulative refrains, and other devices to give her poems a more song-like quality. Her poem “Cherry Blossoms” ends each stanza with “blossoms”—the word is used once in the first stanza, twice in the second, and three times at the last. It’s a simple but true way to describe the drifts of pink that increasingly cover the ground.

I would have liked to see more metaphors, but when they appear they’re very good. “Plant [seeds] in some soil,/crumbly and moist as cake mix,” for instance. At the end of a poem called “Honey” that describes the work and sound of bees bringing nectar, we are told that their buzz and hum is “The sound of sweetness and the smell of flowers,/of sunny, sleepy summer—/the sound of honey.” That last line is just perfect.

Davies has another stupendous stanza at the end of “Tide,” but I’ll share the one at the end of “Night,” whose illustration I talked about above. Davies describes a night with its breeze, an owl, a star, a “moon [sailing] white and silver/in the dark sky.” Having led us into the night, she closes with:

Sometimes you can feel,

sometimes you can feel,

sometimes you can feel the world is turning.

So yes, at first I felt that many of the poems were a bit bland. But then I began to see this book in a different light. It really does give us eyes for looking at the world of nature that lies outside the window. And while its voice is often simple, it flashes powerful language every so often like streaks of lightning. Here’s another one, where Davies extends a cliché and makes it new. Speaking of a horse, she says:

…its dark eye is quiet,

and its nose is velvet,

softer than your own cheek.

I should mention that Davies gives us moments of humor, as in her poem “Five Reasons to Keep Chickens.” She also gives advice, mostly of the kind that will help children better care for the world. Sometimes it’s just nice; for instance, she tells us we should say thank you to worms. The book ends with instructions about how to save seeds and how to make winter cakes for birds.

Outside Your Window grew on me like a seed sprouting up into a plant. It’s a hodgepodge, yes, but in the best possible way—like compost (and there is a poem about compost). Even when Davies is just chatting about nature in that kindly teacher’s voice, there is something soothing and enlightening about her words. Other times she really sings, and Hearld sings with her. I recommend this book wholeheartedly.

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry: 200 Poems with Photographs that Squeak, Soar, and Roar! edited by J. Patrick Lewis (September 2012)

Like Davies’ book, this one is chockfull of poems—a poetical bang for one’s buck, which I like very much. There have been a lot of books of animal poems over the years (e.g., Eric Carle’s collection, Animals Animals), but some genius finally came up with the idea of pairing photos from National Geographic’s vast collection with an anthology of poems, in this case one created by our current US Children’s Poet Laureate. Huzzah!

While many of the poems are from the past, by poets such as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Ogden Nash, more recent and current poets are also well represented. The poems are grouped in nicely parallel sections. After a brief set of introductory poems called “Welcome to the World,” sections proceed as follows: “The Big Ones,” “The Little Ones,” “The Winged Ones,” “The Water Ones,” “The Strange Ones,” “The Noisy Ones,” and “The Quiet Ones.” A section of four poems called “Final Thought” concludes the book. The fact that there are sections about noisy and quiet animals endeared the book to me even while I was still in the table of contents.

But really, how do we judge a collection like this? Probably by looking at the overall qualities of the poems and the ways in which they represent their subjects. Variety of styles, voices, and ideas is important. Another consideration is the fit between illustrations and text. These big picture criteria are difficult to wrangle on a poem-by-poem basis, which leads me to take the old-fashioned approach: going with my gut. So yes, this is a terrific collection! But I will provide you with some examples to back that up. As is required so often in life, let’s begin with the elephant.

The book offers four poems about elephants on a left-hand page with a really great photo of an elephant on the right—the photo, labeled “Asian elephant” in very tiny letters at the lower left, shows an elephant in a pond with green hills behind, tossing water onto his head with his trunk. The most well-known and oft-anthologized poem on the spread is “Eletelephony” by Laura E. Richards (“Once there was an elephant/Who tried to use the telephant—/No! No! I mean an elephone/Who tried to use the telephone…”). The other three poems are brief: an anonymous quatrain that has probably been around awhile comments on the “great big trunk” that “has no lock and has no key,” but is carried everywhere by the animal, along with two more modern poems, another quatrain and a haiku. These are the latter two:

Elephant

A threatening cloud, plumped fat and gray,

Snorts a thunder, rains a spray

And billows puffs of dust away—

A weather maker every day.

—Ann Whitford Paul

Anthology

So many stories

Locked inside the amber eye

Of one elephant

—Tracie Vaughn Zimmer

Of course, not every animal gets more than one poem. The variety of poems—and animals—is just right, however. I’ll list two subjects from each section to give you an idea: cow and orangutan, ladybug and lizard, bat and hummingbird, starfish and walrus, armadillo and blue-footed booby, pig and raccoon, Luna moth and sloth. As you can tell by the elephant examples, some of the poems are silly and others are serious. Here are excerpts from two other poems, one of each type:

from “Moray Eel”

Nighttime’s my bright time.

It’s head-out-and-bite time.

Give-shellfish-a-fright time.

Swim-quick-as-a-kite time.

Stay-out-of-my-sight time.

Or fins-up-and-fight time.

When I am the blight of the sea.

—Steven Withrow

from “Dog”

The sky is the belly of a large dog,

sleeping.

All day the small gray flag of his ear

is lowered and raised.

The dream he dreams has no beginning.

Here on earth we dream

a deep-eyed dog sleeps under our stairs

and will rise to meet us.

Dogs curl in dark places,

nests of rich leaves.

— Naomi Shihab Nye

The photo that accompanies the moray eel poem is a head-on shot of an orange-faced eel with teeth glaring and yellow eyes bulging off to the sides. The dog photo is a bright green field of grass with a small dog’s head sticking up out of it, mouth open in a grin and ears jutting like a bat’s.

The best poem in the book is arguably Lewis's own, a poem so comprehensive and gorgeous that it rightfully introduces the collection. Only you might miss it if you're not careful: it's printed on the front cover beneath the dust jacket. The poem is titled "Instructions Found After the Flood," and I'll give you just the first seven lines (of 19).

Let the red fox quicken the seasons.

Let the zebra buck and clatter in the cage of his skin.

Leave the glass lagoons to the blue heron, whose eye is steady.

Let jungles whisper jaguar, whose paw is velvet.

Let the worm explore the globe, his apple.

Let the spider embroider the air.

Let tongue and belly be called reptile.

You see what I mean? This poem, like the collection, is deeply satisfying. Not every anthology is as rich as National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry, but every public and school library and, I hope, personal library needs this book.