Time for a Poem

When a whole bunch of people tell you You Need to Read This, I've learned to listen.

That's why I put my librarian skills to work to find Kathi Appelt's poem,
ODE TO MY SOUTHERN DRAWL.

It's in a book, POETRY AFTER LUNCH, that I borrowed from the library.
I've now renewed it the maximum time. It needs to go back.

I'll share just a little bit of the Southern Drawl poem here. I love it.

Here in the south
we treat words like wine
letting them rest in our mouths
until they are ripe and
have soaked into the sides of our cheeks.
And sometimes they get so warm,
we have to cool them
off with iced tea
or Coca Cola

You can find other poems by Kathi on the Poetry Starter page on her website. Like this one about tomato sandwiches and FIGS. (You never saw that coming, did you. But you know I'm going to love a poem that even mentions figs.)
Here's the link to Tomato Sandwich, and some great ideas about teaching and using poetry in the classroom:
http://www.kathiappelt.com/poetry/ps1.html


PS: I have a really terrible, but readable, scan of the entire ODE TO MY SOUTHERN DRAWL poem which I'll send anybody who leaves me a comment and lets me know where to send it.

Kathi Appelt's Blurred Lines

Kathi Appelt's recently published Hunger Mountain essay will make you ponder a lot of things: Accelerated Reading (and I mean that with capital letters, the read and test machine), Librarians and Parents as Guardians of the Book Gates, censorship, parenting, lifelong readers, expectations, death, failure, love and loss.

It's a long essay, one I'm not capable of consuming in one swoop. But I plan to read it again, and that's why I'm sharing the link here.

The debate over requiring kids to read and report is long and complicated. Librarians I trust say it's helped immensely with comprehension. Others despise reading requirements, from standardized testing to book reports to reading discussions. I know kids who love to talk about what they read, while others- like the character Miranda in this year's Newbery Award winner- jealously guard favorite books, refusing to share.

But I believe Kathi Appelt's point that books become part of us, that we read at different life stages and take away things on many levels is so true. Of course, it doesn't hurt that she and I remember and love many of the same books, especially those read by our grandmothers.

She writes of her teenage son, and Ferdinand the Bull. How I adore Ferdinand! So does son Cooper -

"Cooper was fifteen, but Ferdinand was still with him. Remember this when you’re writing: We carry these stories with us all of our lives. There is no delineation. We don’t become fifteen and set aside the stories that we grew up with."

The Underneath, her novel about survival and love and the sheer terror of losing those you need, caused a few adult readers to doubt children would get it. I confess to having reviewed it with a caveat that the cover might draw younger readers who were less likely to appreciate it than older kids. I still think the primary audience is for ten and up, but I've always known that lines are blurred when it comes to book appeal.

We teachers and librarians, parents and writers need an occasional reminder, that Ferdinand and The Underneath, The Runaway Bunny, Hunger Games and way too many books to cite here, may impress us when we are young, but they don't leave us when the book goes back to the library or gets packed away in the attic. The Quiet Old Lady Whispering Hush stays with you long after that little mouse has scampered off the page for the last time.

Southerners Writing Books

I could get lost in children's authors' blogs. Especially those writers from the South who remind me of home. Last night I discovered the blog of Deborah Wiles. I'm a big fan of her books and heard her speak about her path to publication at a conference a year or so ago. I drooled over the blog's yummy food references- what's summer without cornbread and vegetables from the garden? Or at least reading about it...
And via Deborah Wiles, I got to "meet" another Southerner, Colleen Salley. I rushed right down to the library to find her picture books and the voice of my grandmother telling me stories jumped off the page of Epossumondas. "You don't have the sense you were born with," Possum's mama says about the truck possum drags home. (And I don't mean the 4-wheel drive kind!) I stopped by the bookstore and ordered the picture book and can't wait to read it to a child I know.


Speaking of reading aloud and books by Southerners- I think The Underneath might be a book kids will appreciate hearing out loud. Read my review in today's Christian Science Monitor. How's that for sneaking in a reference to myself? But really, it's all about Kathi Appelt's newest book, well worth reading.

Reading and Writing

Today I hid in my basement, pretending to get organized. It was cool and restful and I unpacked a box or two. You know the type- boxes you never should have moved, the ones that have been sitting in a corner for two years. We needed the space so I promised to clear out the boxes. But I kept going back to a book I was reading. At first I needed to know if Sabine and Puck would be OK. It was an adventure story, a mystery. Then the rest of Kathi Appelt's new book, The Underneath, grabbed me and wouldn't let go. As I said, it was cool and restful in my basement, a perfect place to read. I finished it tonight and can't get it out of my head.

I'm really more of a dog person, if we have to take sides. But I know exactly what Appelt means when she writes Purring is not so different from praying. To a tree, a cat's purr is one of the purest of all prayers, for in it lies a whole mixture of gratitude and longing, the twin ingredients of every prayer.