11:11 Angels Message Board

While there is quite a bit of poetry in this somewhat lengthy article it is more about poetry for both children and adults. I thought it was brilliant. Here are the introductory thoughts...

Our concerns as adults and as children are not so different. We want to be surprised, transformed, challenged, delighted, understood. For me, since an early age, poetry has been a place for all these things. Poetry is a rangy, uncontainable genre—it is a place for silliness and sadness, delight and despair, invention and ideas (and also, apparently, alliteration). Giving children poems that address the whole range of the world, not just the watered-down, “child appropriate” issues, makes them feel less alone. Corny as it sounds, if children find poems that express things they have themselves thought and poems that push them beyond what they have themselves imagined, they’ll have a friend for life. This is the story of how I found that friend.

In the first poetry workshop I ever took (my junior year in college), my professor, Henri Cole, handed out a page of quotations about poetry from luminaries such as Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens. One of them read:

“Poetry is an egg with a horse inside.”
—Third grader

Poetry is an Egg with a Horse Inside — by Matthea Harvey

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articl ... rse-inside

That is a wonderful article, Welles.
It took me back to my childhood where one of my favourite books (next to "Winnie the Pooh" )was The first volume of our ChildCraft series, called "Poems and Rhymes". It was wonderful and still is as the series of books still Patiently awaits another child in a beloved bookcase along with the Comptons Encyclopedias at my parent's home... (thus I still get it out and read the poems.) The poems about nature and the seasons were always my favourite. But, of course, there was always the "Naughty soap Song" by Dorothy Aldis that tickled my fancy. I still chuckle over that one...

Naughty Soap Song
by Dorothy Aldis

Just when I'm ready to
Start on my ears
That is the time that my
Soap disappears.
It jumps from my fingers and
Slithers and slides
Down to the end of the
Tub, where it hides.

And acts in a most diso-
Bedient way.
And that's why my soap's growing
Thinner each day.


Thank you Welles!

Sandy

That Naughty Soap Song is wonderful!