Poetry for Children in the 21st Century and Beyond
A Conversation Between Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong:
Sylvia Vardell is Professor Emerita at Texas Woman’s University and President of IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People. Janet Wong is the 2021 winner of the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) Excellence in Poetry for Children Award, a lifetime achievement award that is one of the highest honors a children’s poet can receive. Together, they are the author-editors of more than two dozen poetry anthologies published by Pomelo Books, and were co-hosts of a Poetry Camp drawing poets from all over the country with PoetryCHaT of Western Washington University. We present a conversation between them on the current state of poetry for children.
SV: The collection of antiquarian poetry books on display at Western Washington University showcases the very best examples of poetry in the 20th century and earlier. From the point of view of a poet, what do you feel the main differences are in poetry of the 21st century?
JW: The audience for poetry has shifted. In the past, more families shared poetry at home. Today the primary consumer of poems is the classroom teacher. When teachers share poetry, they mainly do it during April (National Poetry Month), when its “purpose” isn’t questioned. Poetry shared during other months seems to need a clear connection to the curriculum. Poems about nature are folded into a science or social studies lesson; poems about feelings are part of a social-emotional learning lesson.
The motto of Pomelo Books—“Pomelo Books is Poetry PLUS!”—recognizes that teachers need poems to offer something “extra.” We’ve answered the call with The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science and its poems about science, technology, engineering, and math. The pandemic made it clear that children needed more “brain breaks” away from screens, and so we assembled HOP TO IT: Poems to Get You Moving. Poems about resilience and optimism in What Is Hope? recognize that children face more stress than ever before and need to get into a mindset that helps them function before they can learn.
On another level, many “21st century poems” differentiate themselves by including vocabulary and concepts that we didn’t know about until recently. Robyn Hood Black’s poem “Printing, Pressed Beyond Words . . . “ from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science explains what bioprinting is (“Need a blood vessel? An organ, an ear? / Bioprinting is real—bioprinting is here!”). Kristy Dempsey’s poem “What’s Behind My Head?” from Hop to It: Poems to Keep You Moving has the speaker changing virtual backgrounds on her screen during online school.
JW: One characteristic of current books, too, is that they often infuse “extra” elements in a separate pedagogical section or even a separate teacher edition that is meant to be used in tandem with a student edition. Can you tell us about that?
SV: We designed the The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science and The Poetry Friday Anthology for Celebrations so that the pedagogy wouldn’t get in the way of the enjoyment of a poem. In the teacher editions of these books there is a “Take 5!” section where we present: (1) ways for a teacher to share the poem; (2) ways for a teacher to bring students into the poem for a second reading; (3) a short discussion question or activity; (4) explanation of a skill, or a link to a picture book to further learning; and (5) a text-to-text connection within the book. We put all of that separate from the poems themselves, either in a separate book or at least a separate section, so that children would not associate poems only with skills.
One of my favorite elements is a “did you know” component of fun and fascinating facts that we infuse into introductory openings in Great Morning: Poems for School Leaders to Read Aloud and in Hop to It: Poems to Get You Moving. These facts are presented in ways that pique a reader’s interest and, indeed, Hop to It won the “Best Book of Facts” category for ages 8 and up in the 2021 Kids’ Book Choice Awards sponsored by Every Child a Reader and the Children’s Book Council.
SV: Are there any non-obvious things that poets do while writing a poem?
JW: Something that many people may not know is that poets often do research before writing a poem. For instance, even for my silly pour quoi-tale poem “Mountain Gorilla” from Once Upon a Tiger, a poem that has been reprinted in the National Geographic Book of Animal Poems by J. Patrick Lewis and elsewhere, I did some research on the habitat and diet of mountain gorillas. I wanted to have the mother mountain gorilla spitting papaya seeds into the air at the end of the poem, but I needed to know if papayas grow where mountain gorillas live (mainly Rwanda and Uganda). Answer: they do, but mountain gorillas probably eat most of the seeds!
SV: What does the future hold—for children’s poetry, and for us at Pomelo Books?
JW: As you predicted a decade or more ago, verse novels are where it’s at. And I’m finally warming up to your suggestion from years ago that we should compile a collaborative verse novel featuring poems by a few dozen poets.
SV: What? Are you finally saying that I’m right about this?
JW: YES!