J Desk: Poems from Beyond

It's been a busy week, and because I'd promised myself blogging would never come before writing, I haven't been able to check in here. But before we're too far past National Poetry Month, I wanted to mention a couple of poetry-related things.

First I did find a poem for Poem in Your Pocket Day. Actually it was given to me by a library colleague, Karen Rose. It's a neat excerpt from a rap song she wrote:

I've got poems in my pocket

And sand in my shoes

And I wanted you to know

I could rhyme if I choose.

I wrote it on a slip of note paper and slid it into my shirt pocket. The actual day was frantic (like so many of them) and I never worked the presence of the poem into a conversation. But I was prepared. Thanks, Karen!

I also wanted to mention a few books of children's verse from the library shelves that might tickle the feathers of science fiction and fantasy fans.

Imaginary Menagerie by Julie Larios is a beautiful book of short poems about fantastic creatures. Familiar entries like the centaur and dragon are here, but there's also the firebird, the naga, and the will o'the wisp. Here's a bit from the poem on hobgoblins:

They spit and they polish and putter and shine.

And while they work, you can hear them mutter --

All mine! All mine!

The vivid illustrations by Julie Paschkis are great, like an Art Deco take on medieval Celtic manuscript illuminations. This is a fairly short book but a lot of fun to flip through.

Zombies! Evacuate the School! by Sara Holbrook, colorfully illustrated by Karen Sandstrom, is both a book of poetry and a how-to book on writing, where every piece gets sidebars about what's going on in the poem and what techniques the writer is using. As an introduction to verse-writing, or any creative writing, it seems like it would work well, and be lots more fun than many other options. The only drawback this geek sees is that most of the poems actually aren't about zombies, but instead are about the ordinary ups-and-downs of being a kid. Oh, well. It's still worth a shamble down to the library or bookstore to take a look.

Jack Prelutsky is known for children's verse, and sometimes downright bizarre children's verse (witness The Wizard and Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant) and he takes his talents to the stars in The Swamps of Sleethe: Poems from Beyond the Solar System. Sort of like Clark Ashton Smith for grade schoolers, this award-winning book takes you to places where unfortunate explorers have gone before, like cold Drifig Prime where you can expect to freeze solid, or Wonthoo whose waters shrink you to into nothingness, or the world of the title with its all-devouring "mucid horrords." My inner child (a young man of occasionally morbid disposition) thrilled to visions of Lonithor with its demon birds --

They soar above their planet

On perennial patrol --

To feast on otherworlders

Is their all-consuming goal.

-- and Ogdofod with its monopods --

The monopods of Ogdofod

Will snare you in their nets,

Then process you and package you

To feed their hungry pets.

-- and Fesstor of the deadly forests --

Every bush, every bud, every blossom

Is filled with malevolent will.

The prettiest mosses may poison,

The loveliest lichens may kill.

As you might have noticed some of the planet names are anagrams, which gives space explorers a diverting puzzle or two before they are devoured by the Bugs of Gub or dissolved into nothingness on Theentor. Jimmy Pickering's artwork has an appropriately colorful and pulpy look.

J Desk: Four for Earth Day

Image credit: NASA

Here are some cool children's books to inspire awareness of the world we live in.

Steve Jenkins is behind many thoughtful science books for children. A good one for any age is Looking Down, a worldless plunge from space toward the earth, through the atmosphere and down to an American neighborhood, where a boy is studying a ladybug. This torn- and cut-paper collage is a fantastic zoom from the vast to the tiny, very much in the spirit of Powers of Ten -- though it stays closer to home, neither going microscopic nor galactic. It always gets attention at storytime. (Reviewers suggest a range of preschool to third grade.)

Bill Peet is a famous maker of picture books, and I still remember The Wump World from when I was a kid. An idyllic green world inhabited by peaceful animals called Wumps is invaded by polluting aliens. The colonizers aren't Earthlings, but they have an uncomfortable resemblance. Their drive and dedication in totally obliterating the natural environment in their quest to build skyscrapers, smokestacks, and superhighways is both comic and horrifying. There is a happy ending, sort of. The message is a bit heavy-handed but it's delivered with creativity and sincerity. (Reviewers suggest a range of preschool to third grade.)

Author Amy Ehrlich and illustrator Wendell Minor give us an imaginative look at Rachel Carson's life. I say "imaginative" because like historical fiction Rachel: The Story of Rachel Carson tries to go beyond the record and get inside the subject's mind, attempting to show the world as she experienced it. I don't know Carson well enough to know how accurate the book is, but I know it's evocative. And it's important for a couple of reasons -- first, because the author of Silent Spring was a pioneer of environmental awareness, and second, because, in Ehrlich's words "Many girls are still turned away from science and math -- and here was a woman who was a scientist -- and a great one." (Reviewers suggest a range of grades 2-5.)

Another author-illustrator team, David J. Smith and Shelagh Armstrong created If the World Were a Village, a book that explores a single idea -- what if you visualized all humanity as a community of one hundred people? Looking over this "global village"gives you some interesting perspectives. Here are a few of them. Of the 100 people, 22 speak a dialect of Chinese, while 9 speak English. The 100 people (using the same compression) keep 189 chickens. 75 of them have secure water supplies, while 25 must struggle every day to get safe water. 39 of the 100 are below age twenty. The illustrations do a lot to dramatize this information, especially in the "Electricity" picture, in which one quarter of the nighttime village is in darkness. (Reviewers suggest grades 3-7.) There is a companion volume, If America Were a Village.

J Desk: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick

Image credit: Chris Van Allsburg

One of the more complicated feelings I get working at the J Desk is encountering a new or new-to-me children's book that doesn't just earn a reaction of "I like this," or "I want to promote this," but "I wish I'd run into this when I was a kid."


The funny thing about The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, though, is that this book appeared when I was still in high school, so I could have run into it. Maybe I even did, and avoided it as a little odd.

You see, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, despite being from Chris Van Allsburg, the great storyteller behind such picture books as Jumanji, Zathura, and The Polar Express, is not really a story. It's instead fourteen titles of stories that don't exist, with fourteen illustrations and the captions to go with them.

For example the name of the absent story for the picture above is "Another Place, Another Time," and the caption is "If there was an answer, he'd find it there."

In another picture, for "The Third-Floor Bedroom," we see an empty room with a wallpaper bird peeling itself off the wall and stretching a wing: "It all began when someone left the window open."

In the picture for "The Seven Chairs," we see a nun levitating on a chair in the mist of a cathedral. The caption reads, "The fifth one ended up in France."

In the introduction to the book, Van Allsburg spins the tale of a mysterious Harris Burdick, a vanished storyteller who left behind only these materials, and whose full tales disappeared with him. Van Allsburg invites the reader to imagine what those stories might have been. These fourteen pieces then are fourteen invitations, to get past the fear of the blank page and get started creating.

It's no surprise that The Mysteries of Harris Burdick has been used as a creative writing prompt in schools. You can see a teacher's guide at the publisher's web site, and an example of what some students did with the book here. On Van Allsburg's own site you can find lots of resources about the book.

I love the way this book spurs creativity, and for that reason I was a little nervous to discover there will soon be an official short story collection based on it. The talent assembled is top-notch, and I'm sure the stories will be great, but will they discourage, however slightly, kids from inventing their own?

In an interview on To the Best of Our Knowledge, author Michael Chabon once talked about how liberating to his young imagination were incomplete or contradictory stories, because the blank spaces and questions were invitations to make up his own extensions to a tale. His examples were the works of Sherlock Holmes, which have their inconsistencies, and the short-lived Planet of the Apes television series, which was canceled before it could complete its storyline. Chabon said the show wasn't great -- and in fact might have been awful -- but it got his young mind making up stories in the way a perfect jewel of a tale would not have.

I can see a connection there to the phenomenon of fanfiction, particularly where it tries to make up for the loss of canceled tv series or book series, or frustrating directions those series take. I wonder also if this invitation to add to an imaginative space is why artists and architecture students keep returning to Italo Calvino's evocative, but brief, descriptions of Invisible Cities.

So in that spirit, just for fun, here's an entry in the style of Harris Burdick.

DON'T FEAR THE CLOUDS

"Egad!" said the professor. "It's a dracocumulus."

J Desk: Beyond the Deepwoods

Image ©2005 Walter Siegmund

"J Desk" is short for Children's Reference Desk, and I'll use that category for thoughts on children's books.

I originally posted this short review to Goodreads:

"Like a fantasy-horror cartoon as envisioned by Tim Burton and Dr. Seuss, Beyond the Deepwoods is an entertaining coming-of-age adventure story. Twig, a boy raised among trolls in a forest at the edge of the world, finds himself lost from his adoptive people within the monster-haunted Deepwoods, and a quest for survival becomes in time a search for his origins. It's an episodic book that sometimes drags a little, and which occasionally veers awkwardly between humor and horror, but the sheer inventiveness of Paul Stewart's ideas, enhanced by the bizarre and clever drawings of Chris Riddell, keep the story engaging. I hope to read the sequels."

I can add now that I've read one of the sequels, Stormchaser, and enjoyed it. The storytelling seems to settle into a good grove in that one. I expect to continue with the Edge Chronicles, in between other things. More on Stormchaser will have to wait for another post, though.

Check out the Edge Chronicles site for more info, and to see Chris Riddell's art for the series.