Celebrating Shel
I am a huge fan of poetry for kids, and one of my very favourites is Shel Silverstein. Who doesn't love Shel? Well, as it turns out, he was one of the authors in a New York Times article we were talking about a little while back, the one about authors whose works were not exactly embraced by everyone at the time?
Shel was, it must be admitted, a strange choice for a children's author. His writing was as adult as it was child-like, and he dabbled in songwriting, cartoons for adult magazines, and stories as well as poetry. Once he found a publisher and editor who embraced him, however, he became a favourite with both adults and children, which makes his work wildly share-able. In fact, the wonderfully kooky poems and drawings of Shel Silverstein have become classics in every sense, and are being delightedly passed down by paren'ts who loved them as kids.
And now, though he passed on some dozen years ago, his family is releasing a book of poems that had not found there way into his previously published collections. Does this mean the 145 poems in the new Every Thing On It are the rejects? Not at all, explains his editor in a recent article on NPR. Instead, they are bits he removed because they did not fit his vision for a given collection quite as ideally as other poems.
"He would move a piece of art over an 18th of an inch … and look at how it looked on a page," she said in the interview. " … It's a slight adjustment, but to him, it mattered. I think one of the reasons his books are still so immensely popular after almost 50 years is that every tiny detail was considered."
These poems are, in fact, a small fraction of some 1, 500 poems that Shel left, and were chosen and put together with loving care to come as close as possible to Silverstein's own way of ordering poems and designing his books. While I"m skeptical, in general, about posthumous publications, I can't wait to see this one.
The article itself is really worth visiting, too, as it shows a couple of the new poems, complete with illustrations, and features children reading one of them aloud. And, as the family noted, poems really are meant to be read aloud.
If your kids are not already a fan, I highly recommend you get your hands on Where the Sidewalk Ends or A Light in the Attic (my two favourites) today and get them started. They are wonderful for reading together or for kids to enjoy on their own, the sort of book they can dive into at any point and get pulled in to reading more, and finding more treasures that they simply must read aloud to you, complete with giggles.
This is a great thing, for not only is he fun for kids, being silly, philosophical, and more than a smidge subversive, but poetry is great stuff for children. They are naturals for it already, fresh from nursery rhymes and still chanting schoolyards skipping rhymes, taunts, and those little ditties not meant for adult ears. It's only a matter of marrying that sense of bounce and rhythm to a poet who knows his audience, and suddenly, you've got small fans of poetry on your hands, onces who might write poetry of their own, or simply enjoy the reading and sharing of words that sing with metre and rhyme.
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