Making a case for vibrant, well-stocked poetry collections

Just 10 years ago the Academy of American Poets initiated the observance of National Poetry Month to celebrate poetry and its place in American culture. Since then, the movement has continued to gain momentum with the emergence of Young People's Poetry Week in 1999 sponsored by the Children's Book Council, a focus on poetry slams as the centerpiece for Teen Read Week in 2003 sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA), and the inauguration of the Poetry Blast in 2004, a concert of children's poets held at the annual conferences of ALA and the International Reading Association. Where are we now?

Unfortunately, I don't believe our school library collections have kept up with this trend. In working with librarians and teachers across the country during their graduate coursework, I have discovered that the poetry section is one of the most overlooked and neglected areas of the library. Many professionals admit to a general apathy regarding poetry alongside fear and ignorance about selecting and using quality titles.

A crew of volunteers helped me gather data from a dozen elementary school libraries across my home state of Texas as an anecdotal sampling of the status quo. Schools ranged in size from small campuses with 282 students to those numbering 977 students. The size of each library varied greatly too from 6,684 total volumes to 21,243 volumes. The number of books in the children's poetry section (811), however, was consistently a very small portion of the total collection, about one percent on average.

Which books were in these collections? Libraries consistently had multiple copies of Shel Silverstein's three major anthologies as well as a generous assortment of works by the popular Jack Prelutsky (17 titles, on average). Works by the recipients of the notable awards, however, such as Barbara Esbensen, Karla Kuskin, David McCord, Lilian Moore, or Valerie Worth were notably absent. Books by poets representing varied cultural perspectives were also hard to come by. Children looking for writers such as Pat Mora, Gary Soto, Joyce Carol Thomas, and Janet Wong will have to look elsewhere. Their work was not available to the 8000+ child readers in these dozen schools.

How do we select the best poetry for our library collections? Just as we eagerly anticipate the announcement of the Newbery and Caldecott award recipients and add those titles to our collections, we can use the poetry awards to guide our selections. One major award is given by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) entitled the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, established in 1977. It is a lifetime achievement award. Thus there is name recognition here—you can bet any book of poetry by these individuals will generally be worthwhile. The recipients thus far include Nikki Grimes, Mary Ann Hoberman, X. J. Kennedy, Eloise Greenfield, Barbara Esbensen, Valerie Worth, Arnold Adoff, Lilian Moore, John Ciardi, Eve Merriam, Myra Cohn Livingston, Karla Kuskin, Aileen Fisher, and David McCord.

As we seek out new books, it is also useful to know about awards for specific titles of poetry books. The Lee Bennett Hopkins award established in 1993 is presented annually to an American poet or anthologist for the most outstanding new book published in the previous calendar year. The 2006 winner is Joyce Sidman's Song of the Water Boatman and Other Pond Poems (Houghton, 2005) with honor citations given to Naomi Shihab Nye's A Maze Me (HarperCollins, 2005) and Marilyn Nelson's A Wreath for Emmet Till (Houghton, 2005). Other awards include the Claudia Lewis Award given by Bank Street College in New York City and the Award for Excellence in North American Poetry established in 2005 by the distinguished journal, Lion and the Unicorn. You can also count on the Boston Globe/Horn Book “Fanfare” list to specify poetry titles in their “best list” of children's literature each year.

As we strengthen the poetry holdings in our collections, one extra step that may help patrons find more award-winning poetry is to mark the circulation records of these titles with poetry awards received. This can also assist teachers and librarians in compiling bibliographies and recommended reading lists.

But choosing only the Newbery and Caldecott medal books is not enough to keep our collections current—nor is adding only poetry award winners. In the United States today, there is more poetry for young people being published by a larger variety of poets than at any other time in the recent past. Not only are we experiencing a publishing renaissance, but the openness to new voices has also encouraged multicultural writers to flourish. And more and more international poetry is finding its way into the U.S. Seeking out poetry that reflects many diverse viewpoints such as the works of Francisco Alarcon, Michio Mado, and Monica Gunning enables us to show children firsthand both the sameness and the differences that make the human landscape so dynamic and fascinating.

On a practical level, “beefing” up the poetry collection can serve the school curriculum well. Poetry has many teaching and pedagogical uses–for building science concepts, reinforcing historical themes, adding motivation to math lessons, as a “sponge” activity in transition times, etc. Poetry taps the essence of a subject and is accessible to a wide range of reading abilities with collections available on unifying themes and topics such as animals, holidays, or nature gathered by poets and anthologists such as Douglas Florian, J. Patrick Lewis, Myra Cohn Livingston, and Lee Bennett Hopkins. For aspiring writers, there are also many books that showcase form and technique by poets such as Paul Janeczko, Helen Frost, and Avis Harley.

Some may argue that much of children's poetry is not shelved separately in the 811 Dewey section and these percentages do not reflect all that is available. That's true. Rhyming picture books, novels in verse, and other poetic works are shelved in a variety of places. Others will argue that teachers don't widely use or recommend poetry and children don't choose it on their own. That is also often and unfortunately true. However, this is a bit of a “chicken and egg” problem. If poetry is scarce, hard to find, and rarely shared, children won't be aware of it. Thus, librarians relying on circulation statistics may decide that it is not popular. But if we build a current and relevant collection and actively promote it, children can discover the pleasures of the genre at an early age. Indeed, our youngest children tend to respond easily to it based on the enduring appeal of Mother Goose. Poetry, nursery rhymes, and playground verse are all a natural part of childhood. Why should our appreciation for this genre stop with Mother Goose? We need to provide school-aged children with a bridge from “Jack and Jill” to the classics.

Another variable in building poetry collections is the role of reading incentive programs. So often librarians depend on the external recommendations (and available quizzes) of programs such as Renaissance Learning's “Accelerated Reader.” Other experts have argued about the relative advantages and disadvantages of such programs in motivating children to read. For the purposes of poetry, however, this resource is particularly problematic. It's hard to test poetry knowledge as any teacher or student will agree. So depending on quizzes for assessing comprehension is challenging, and arguably inappropriate. But all that aside, very little poetry is even available via such programs. A quick study of the Renaissance Learning database reveals that NONE of Silverstein's three main poetry anthologies is listed. There are only seven titles by the prolific Prelutsky. Douglas Florian, Eloise Greenfield, and Kristine O'Connell George have 8-to-11 works in the database. Absent are such notables as Myra Cohn Livingston, John Ciardi, Aileen Fisher, Eve Merriam, Paul Fleischman, David McCord, and Valerie Worth. Clearly, such programs have limited poetry resources when it comes to collection development.

Adults may be shy or reluctant to explore this genre, but children respond to it with great enthusiasm—whether in three-minute poetry breaks or poetry month celebrations. If we're serious about helping children discover poetry and then return to it again and again, we need to make this gem of the library obvious, easily reachable, and even inescapable.