First Laureate for Children's Poetry Appointed

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Staff -- School Library Journal, 10/4/2006

With 35 books to his credit, including The New Kid on the Block (1984), It's Raining Pigs and Noodles (2000), A Pizza the Size of the Sun (1996), and The Dragons Are Singing Tonight (1993, all HarperCollins), Jack Prelutsky has long been considered the preeminent—and funniest—poet for the underage set. This week, the Poetry Foundation made it official when it appointed Prelutsky the first-ever children's poet laureate. The two-year term carries a $25,000 award. SLJ spoke with Prelutsky about his plans for promoting children's poetry, if he's always been funny, and how to make kids want to write.

So what's your reaction to being elected the first poet laureate for children's literature?

I'm tickled by this whole thing!

What are your responsibilities or plans?

I do have to give a few speeches, but I'm thinking bigger. I'd like to do something on the Poetry Foundation Web site—a monthly feature about other children's poets. I'd choose two or three poems a month. I'd also like to have a contest for child poets on my Web site. I'm considering talking to my local NPR station [in Seattle]. I thought of this years ago, but I didn't think I had the cachet to do it then. I've met a few of them before, and I wonder if they'd be interested in a weekly commentary on children's books. I'm also having a friend make me a special case for the medallion!

By the way, I just visited the SLJ Web site and saw that my latest book, Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant and Other Poems (HarperCollins), is the book of the week. That's wonderful.

And that's good timing, considering it was just announced that your book's illustrator, Carin Berger, won the Founder's Medal from the Society of Illustrators.

What? She did? I didn't know that! That's wonderful. Except—I always buy originals from my artists. Now she's going to charge me more.

What does a poet laureate for children's literature mean for the genre?

I think it gives it more validation as a form. It always has taken a backseat to adult poetry, but children's poetry books outsell adult poetry books. I know I'm being blogged all over the place. I googled myself, and the hits are going up 10 or 20 thousand an hour. A month ago, there would be about a half million hits. Now I'm well over a million—just like that!

Do you think there's any potential for a Harry Potter phenomenon with children's poetry, where you might get adults reading children's poetry?

I hope so. I'm working on a book right now that started out as a children's book. It's about birds. It's bigger than anything I've done before. The New Kid on the Block, for instance, has about 100 poems. This book on birds, I've written over 200 poems for it. And then I realized that poems were only going to be one part of it, and that it's for adults too.

What makes it for adults, too?

The content, the puzzles—which were starting to get too difficult. Also, in terms of getting adults involved, I'm working on a book of lullabies for adults to sing to their babies. I'm looking for a wider audience.

On a Q&A on your Web site, you say that two of your favorite writers are Ogden Nash and I. B. Singer. I can see the Nash influence in your work, but Singer? And who else are you reading right now?

I was influenced by I. B. Singer because I'm a Polish-Russian Jew, so it tells me where I'm from. My favorite is Alexander McCall Smith right now. I read Donna Leon's detective novels about Venice because my wife and I fell in love with Venice. I read a lot of natural history. I'm a very eclectic reader.

How has your work evolved over the years?

I began writing on a manual typewriter. Sometimes a mistake would make me think of a new poem. I wrote some of my poems that way.

Really. That's interesting. Which poems?

I can't recall any specifically. If I flipped through a few books for five or ten minutes I'd probably find some. Lots of names of creatures came from mistakes. Say that instead of the word cow I typed zog or something, because c is near z, and then I would have written something about the zog. But that's a hypothetical example. Now when I make mistakes I save them to a scrap pile, and I look at them and they give me new ideas. I'm not kidding.

A lot of your poems are known for being funny. Were they funny right from the beginning, or was this a skill you developed?

They were funny from the beginning. I try to find humor in just about every situation. Sometimes it's hard. But that's why I don't write about war and famine—because I don't find anything funny in those things. Years ago I considered being a stand-up comic, and probably the main reason I didn't do it is because I hate smoking, and you had to work in those smoke-filled clubs.

Even the fan letters on your Web site are funny. One question that struck me was from a boy who wrote, "Are you basically bored?" I'm not sure what he meant, but it made me wonder. Many people find writing hard. Are you entertaining yourself with it?

Writing is hard. But I have a talent: I can make anything rhyme. The trick was to take the thing that I do and work at it, and not just become adept but professional. Just because you can make things rhyme, it doesn't mean you have anything to say.

In another fan letter, a girl wrote that she liked your books despite the fact they contain difficult words like "diaphonous [sic], complexion, unpredictable, dissolved, and Prelutsky."

That was a second grader! Think about that! A second grader is writing me a letter using words like that.

That leads to my question. Does your word choice take into consideration vocabulary level of the age you're writing for?

Oh, certainly. I guarantee you that if there was a sentence, "The pterodactyl flew over the hill," pterodactyl is the first word kids are going to look up, because that's an interesting word. Words are beautiful, they're wonderful. I polish every word. I really do look for the perfect word. That's the great thing about the English language. It is fun for me.

How do you communicate the fun of writing to kids?

I have techniques I've developed. For years I wasn't making much of a living from writing, and I did workshops with kids in schools and libraries. Going through exercises, I developed an "unsystematic system" for writing.

Clearly, libraries facilitate reading. Are there ways they could facilitate writing more?

I'm really not an expert on this. If you show them [children] writing is part of something they can do and understand, at least they'll develop a love of it. Have them write about things that are important to them: their friends, their families, their pets, their neighborhoods, the man at the store who gives them a cookie. Not about trees and bees and hills and daffodils.

That rhymes.

It does. And daffodils do have their place.