The winning title receives an honorarium of $1,000. A gold seal with art by Jessie Wilcox Smith is affixed to the book; a silver sticker for the honor book(s).

The award, established in 1993, is the first and only award of its type for poetry in the United States — given either for an original collection or anthology. A complete history of the award can be found at www.leebennetthopkins.com under PENN STATE.

Bank Street College is presenting its awards on Thursday, February 23. If you are in the New York area, you are welcome to attend. Information can be found on their web site.

(Thanks to Marilyn Singer for the news.)

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MARY ANN HOBERMAN

(American, b. 1930)

Photo by Lois Dreyer

Mary Ann Hoberman was born on August 12, 1930, in Stamford, Connecticut, to Dorothy (Miller) and Milton Freedman. She attended the Stamford public schools, where she wrote for her school newspapers and edited her high school yearbook. In 1951 she received a B.A. in history from Smith College and, thirty-five years later, an M.A. in English Literature from Yale University. She married Norman Hoberman, an architect and artist, in 1951. They have four children, all in the arts — Diane, Perry, Chuck, and Meg — and five grandchildren. The Hobermans have lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, for almost fifty years in a house that Norman designed.

Mary Ann Hoberman has taught writing and literature from the elementary through the college level. She co-founded and performed with both “The Pocket People,” a children’s theatre group, and “Women’s Voices,” a group giving dramatized poetry readings. But ever since her first book was published in 1957, her primary occupation has been writing for children. She received a National Book Award in 1983 for A House is a House for Me and the 2003 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children for her body of work. In 2008 the Poetry Foundation named her the second U.S. Children’s Poet Laureate, after Jack Prelutsky and before J. Patrick Lewis.

Mary Ann Hoberman recently published her first novel, Strawberry Hill. She is the critically acclaimed author of more than forty books for children. One hundred of her favorite poems are collected in The Llama Who Had No Pajama. Other popular titles include The Seven Silly Eaters and the You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You series.

In recollecting when she first decided to become a writer, she has said:

“I knew I was going to be a writer even before I knew how to write! I think I was about four years old when I first understood that many of the stories I loved so much had been made up by real people, with real names, rather than having always been here like the moon or the sky. I decided then that when I grew up I would write stories, too, that would be printed in books for other people to read. But meanwhile I didn’t wait to grow up or even to learn how to write. I started right away to make up stories and poems and songs in my head, which I told to myself or to my little brother…

“Many years later I did become a writer, just as I had decided back when I was four. I saw my stories and poems and songs printed in books just like the ones I loved so much when I was a little girl. But I still make things up in my head before I write them down. And most of my ideas have originated in memories of my own childhood and in my own early interests and pastimes. As a younger woman I had almost total recall of myself as a child; and even now, when I am a grandmother and the years on which I draw for my stories and poems are more than half a century behind me, I can still tell you the names of every one of my elementary school teachers, where I sat in each classroom, who my friends (and enemies) were, and how I felt about myself, my family, and my world. In many ways, despite the sorrows and pain of childhood, I loved being a child; and as a child I was somehow already aware that childhood was fleeting and that I must never forget what it felt like to be new in the world.”

(Adapted from: Sixth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators)

For more information about Mary Ann Hoberman, please visit:

• http://www.maryannhoberman.com/
• http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mary-ann-hoberman
• http://www.poetryfoundation.org/children/article/182334
• http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/About/Awards/Hoberman.pdf

Thanks also to the award judges — Michael Heyman, Michael Joseph, and Joseph Thomas — for sharing their intriguing essay with us.

Thank you all for taking part in Poetry Advocates for Children & Young Adults. Since September 2011, we have begun to build a base for a thriving children’s poetry community worldwide. I view PACYA as a long-term, multigenerational project, and I’m honored to be here at the very start.

The Poetry at Play blog and our Facebook page will continue to be outlets for news and features, including our popular “Featured Poet” series. We will soon announce a children’s poetry conference in Montreal, Canada, sponsored in part by PACYA. We are also exploring the creation of an advocacy award and the use of YouTube for kids and teens to see and hear poets read their works aloud.

What do I need from you?

• Essays (critical, historical, or craft-oriented)
  
• Reviews and interviews (text or audiovisual)
• Lesson plans and activities
• Event reports and calendar items

Please email me at stevenwithrow(at)gmail(dot)com if you’re interested in submitting materials. I can’t keep PACYA growing without your generous contributions. Thanks for your support and for spreading the word!

Roxie Hanna posted an excellent interview with poet and author David L. Harrison on her blog. David is a gifted poet and a tireless advocate for children’s poetry. His word-of-the-month activity is a central part of our virtual community.

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X.J. KENNEDY

(American, b. 1929)

Equally at home in poetry for children and adults, a superb teacher and critic as well as a legendary poet and anthologist, X.J. Kennedy (known to his friends as Joe) was born in Dover, New Jersey, on August 21, 1929, shortly before the crash of the stock market. For summaries of Kennedy’s voluminous biography, please visit:

• X.J. and Dorothy M. Kennedy’s website
• NCTE profile from 2000
• Poetry Foundation profile
• Wikipedia profile

In 2000, Kennedy received the National Council of Teachers of English Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children for his body of work. In 2009, the Poetry Society of America gave him the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime service to poetry.

The Kennedys have five grown children and six grandchildren. They now live in Lexington, Massachusetts, in a house half century-old and half new.

INTERVIEW BY STEVEN WITHROW

In your afterword to John Ciardi’s The Reason for the Pelican, you wrote that Ciardi was responsible to a large extent for the change in climate that allowed poets writing for adults to publish children’s verse without shame. Do you feel that poets writing for adults are more open today to children’s poetry than they were in past decades, or has the trend moved in the other direction?

 Back when John Ciardi’s verse for children was flowering, you could count numerous other poets who had ventured to write for kids. Ciardi’s example certainly encouraged me. While I’m not exhaustively familiar with the current scene, I don’t see that happening now. One reason for this lack may be that book publishers, overly aware of the bottom line, bring out so few new collections of verse for children nowadays. Maybe there’s more kidpo being written and published on blogs and websites, but I daresay that pre-readers and very young pre-hacker-stage kids can’t get to it.

Do you think the borders between poetry for children and poetry for adults are more permeable than many teachers and writers think? Should children and teens be given more opportunities to explore poetry written for adults?

You bet, the borders are permeable, all right. When Dorothy (M. Kennedy) and I were scouting out stuff to put in anthologies, we were always elated to find adult poems that kids could dig—for instance, Wallace Stevens’s wonderful rigmarole “John Smith and His Son John Smith” and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Pete at the Zoo.” We put those in an anthology for pre-readers. I could never share Kenneth Koch’s conviction that you could read Milton ’s “Lycidas” to little kids and if they didn’t grasp all of it, so what, they’d get some of it. But it’s true that the receptiveness of little kids is easy to underestimate. As for teenagers, anthologies aimed at them have always been hard to tell from anthologies aimed at adults.

We are clearly facing a difficult market (some say a dire crisis) for publishing and selling children’s poetry collections and anthologies. Lee Bennett Hopkins said only three new anthologies were published last year in the US. Do you see this as an especially troubling development, or a challenge that poets have always faced?

It’s troubling, all right, more so than ever. Digital technology, I think, makes it easier for poets to circulate their work, but harder to reach readers who will keep it on hand and sometimes go back to it. When read on screen, poems aren’t physical objects, like poems on pages of a book, and I suspect we tend to pay ’em less attention and dismiss ’em with a click forever.

Do you think more rigorous standards should be adopted for teaching poetry in schools? Do you think a more structured and mentored educational course of study, such as is common in classical music or ballet, would benefit poetry? Or should learning to read and write poetry follow a different course?

God, no, the teaching of poetry doesn’t need to be more rigorous. Let’s have fun with it, not make it a duty. No kid needs a course in onomatopoeia or poetic metrics in order to survive. To paraphrase W.H. Auden, thousands have lived without poetry, not one without water. (Auden didn’t say “poetry,” he said “love.”)

I appreciate your response about having fun with poetry. Do we risk making poetry seem too simple, though, and therefore of lesser value than other art forms—something that can be done by anyone instantly without need for instruction, practice, or revision? Or am I missing your point?

 I meant that poetry should be fun to read, that teachers shouldn’t make it a grim duty. What about writing the stuff? I think that should be fun too, even though it may also be work. To be sure, for young writers, instruction, practice, and revision are called for. Without some instruction, kids writing in rhyme risk writing lines like “When you’re alone / It keeps you Capone”—to quote an example from a small girl’s poem cited by Myra Cohn Livingston. The kid had heard the name of Al Capone and threw it in, not knowing what it meant. In such a poem, rhyme is like a big dog taking the poet for a walk. As for revision, ah, if only all poets, young and old, were like Yeats, who told a correspondent that he had a large batch of first drafts and looked forward to months of hard work revising them—“What bliss!”

Many teachers are wary of meter and rhyme, as they have been taught that formal poetry is out of fashion, while others merely use forms as tools to teach grammar and vocabulary. Are meter and rhyme still vital and essential, and what does formal poetry offer to young readers and writers that free verse does not?

No doubt formal poetry is out of fashion, but if kids are to read practically any poems written before 1960 (and many good ones written after), it won’t hurt them to know that rhyme and meter exist. What do those elements have to offer young readers and writers today? Well, for one thing, pleasure, and for another thing, memorability. Consider this well-known poem, of anonymous child authorship—

Jingle bells!
Batman smells!
Robin laid an egg!
The Batmobile
Lost a wheel
And the joker broke a leg!

Crude as that example is, it’s memorable and it gives instant delight. Now imagine those lines rewritten as free verse, and the satisfactions of its rhyme scheme and driving rhythm will be lost. For me, reading most poetry in free verse is somewhat like watching black-and-white TV. There’s a valuable element missing from the viewing experience.

How do you feel about encouraging children (as well as teens and adults) to memorize and recite poems aloud? Are we missing out on much of poetry’s power by simply reading silently or hearing another person’s voice?

Right on. I’m a great believer in learning poems by heart, so that if you’re waiting for a bus and don’t have any reading matter, you can always regale yourself by tapping your memory. In my experience, many teens and college students hate to be asked to memorize. They complain that it’s grand-schoolish. But in teaching poetry, I’d always ask them to find a certain number of lines to learn, from poems of their own choice. Just to get the poems down out of their brainpans and into their bloodstreams. In the end, most of them were glad. And if a poem is any good, it usually gets better from being heard.

How did the poems in your newest book, City Kids: Street & skyscraper rhymes, come together as a book? Did you start with a theme and write poems to match it, or did the theme emerge after you’d written many individual poems? Did you arrange the poems in a specific sequence?

The theme emerged from a handful of poems I’d done. But when I had gathered together more than a dozen of them, they started to look like a book, and I invoked the Muse to give me more items along the same lines. Invoked, not threatened or forced—which is why City Kids took years to complete. The sequence of poems in a collection hasn’t ever interested me. All I care is whether the book has any good stuff in it, wherever it happens to fall. In assembling a book of my own, I’ve generally tried to put a really strong poem first, to encourage readers to keep reading, and to put a good one last, so they’ll feel they got their money’s worth. The rest of the contents get flung in any old place. The story is told of the critic Austin Warren, who when teaching a class at Michigan once delivered a lecture praising the structured arrangement of W.H. Auden’s Collected Poems. He was crestfallen when a student in the back of the room raised a timid hand and asked, “But Professor, aren’t the poems arranged by their titles, in alphabetical order?”

If you would, please pick a poem from City Kids and talk a little about how the poem works from a craft standpoint? How is the poem constructed or formed? What are some of its salient features in sound or image?

OK, here’s “Tires”:

When Poppa comes to Momma’s place
To visit me, he hires
A boy to keep watch on his car
So no one takes the tires
Because last time he came he lost
All four, but Poppa say,
“Why, girl, it’s worth a heap of tires
To see you, any day.”

This brief story-poem began when I read a newspaper story about a New York neighborhood so tough that taxi drivers refused to take fares into it. It evolved into a story about a couple of separated parents, one who lives in such a neighborhood, and the other who’d visit a kid there and have to leave his car parked for an hour or two. I found myself wanting to tell their story from the kid’s point of view. It came out in these two rhymed quatrains, which (for once) didn’t need much rewriting. Probably unconsciously, I seem to pick words that alliterate—takes/tires, last/lost. This wasn’t contrived; the words just came out that way. There’s not any imagery to speak of—just the “heap of tires” in Poppa’s figure of speech. If the poem works at all, maybe it’s because the feelings of Poppa and daughter are hinted at, rather than discussed.

Are you generally optimistic about the future of poetry for young people from both a quality and a popularity standpoint? Will we see a resurgence of poems for kids in the years and decades to come, do you think?

Yes and yes, I think so, but maybe I’m optimistic by nature. Hell, I’m 83, but I usually renew a magazine subscription for two or three years.

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ELOISE GREENFIELD

(American, b. 1929)

Eloise Greenfield was born in Parmele, North Carolina, on May 17, 1929. The second oldest of five children, she moved, as an infant, with her family to Washington, D.C. She studied piano as a child and teenager. She loved music, movies, and books. As a young wife and mother in her early twenties, while working as a clerk-typist at the U.S. Patent Office, Greenfield began a search for satisfying work. She found it in writing.

After several years of study and rejections from publishers, Greenfield had her first poem published in the Hartford Times in 1962. Her first book was published in 1972. She is now the author of more than 40 books for children—poetry, biography, picture books, and older fiction. She says her mission is twofold: (1) to contribute to the development of a large body of African American literature for children and (2) to continue to fill her life with the joy of creating with words.

Greenfield has received many honors, including the Coretta Scott King Award for Africa Dream and the Carter G. Woodson Award for Rosa Parks. For Honey, I Love and Other Love Poems, she received the 1990 Recognition of Merit Award, presented by the George G. Stone Center for Children’s Books. She has received the Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor Award for Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir, written with her mother, Lessie Jones Little; the Hope S. Dean Award from the Foundation for Children’s Literature; the 1997 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children for her body of work; the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s North Star Award for lifetime achievement; and a lifetime achievement award from the Moonstone Celebration of Black Writing.

In 1999, Greenfield was inducted into the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Furthermore, In the Land of Words was named a 2005 Notable Children’s Book in the Language Arts (Children’s Literature Assembly/NCTE). When the Horses Ride By and The Friendly Four were chosen for the Cooperative Children’s Book Center’s 2007 Choices. Most recently, The Great Migration: Journey to the North—illustrated by Greenfield’s frequent collaborator, Jan Spivey Gilchrist—was named a Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book for 2012.

Greenfield lives in Washington, D.C. She is the mother of a son and a daughter and the grandmother of four.

******

INTERVIEW BY STEVEN WITHROW

First, I’d like to go back to your poetic beginnings. I read your mother’s poems in Children of Long Ago last year, which led me to Childtimes. Both are beautiful books. Could you tell my readers a little about your mother and her writing, and the effect she had on your writing early on?

I’m happy that you like those two books. My mother’s work is precious to me. She didn’t begin writing until she was in her late sixties, years after I grew up and became a writer. Mama told me that when my siblings and I were small, she wrote one story that was rejected, and she didn’t try again. But she loved books, and she read to us. That was one of my early influences. Also, in my elementary school classes, we often read poems aloud, together, pretty much in the sing-song fashion of the time. I can still hear the melody of our voices, as we recited Stevenson’s poem, “The Swing.” Even so, I didn’t begin writing, except for school assignments, until I was in my early twenties, bored with my typing job and trying to think of another way to earn a living.

How much has your childhood, particularly your years in Langston Terrace, stayed with you in the poems you’ve through the years? As a corollary, do you write for the child you were then, or for today’s children?

I don’t write for the child that I was. That child is with me still, but I write with today’s children in mind. Most of my work is not autobiographical, though there are pieces of my life that I do include, from time to time. For example, the “flying pool,” “going down the country,” and the laughing children, in the poem, “Honey, I Love,” are all from my childhood, including wonderful memories of Langston Terrace, the low-rent housing project where I lived from age 9 to 21. I devote a chapter to Langston Terrace in Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir.

One thing I love about your work is how open you are about sharing strong and sometimes conflicting emotions with children. In what ways does poetry help children, even the youngest who cannot yet read, explore their own emotional experiences and those of others?

Thank you. Human beings are fascinating to me, our complexity, and especially our contradictions. I believe that, if children are able to see emotional conflicts in characters, it will help them to see themselves and accept their own emotions and to understand and empathize with other people, as well. These are important factors, but I never think about them when I’m writing. I think about trying to bring the characters to life, so that readers can see them, get to know them and become immersed in their lives.

Your poems show that you have a keen ear for musical language and a gift for unity in sound that Donald Hall calls “sound-form.” How much attention do you pay to consonants and vowels, rhythms and line breaks, rhymes and repetitions, while you’re composing? Is much of it instinctive for you?

I’m sure that some of it is instinctive, because we are all born with a connection to music, with our beating hearts and vocal cords. In my family, music was a constant, when I was growing up—on the radio, at concerts and stage shows, in school and church choirs. We had a piano. My two sisters and I took piano lessons, and both of my parents played—not well, but often!

However, the composing I do, in writing poetry, requires conscious thought and revision. I hear the music as I am writing, and I am not satisfied until I achieve the sounds I am seeking. I revise and revise until I think I have it right. I use all of the elements you mentioned, and I would add “melody” to the list, because our voices go up and down as we talk, even in ordinary conversation. I would also add “punctuation.” For example, a period in the wrong place can bring the music to a full stop, instead of the brief pause I may want and that a comma would elicit.

We are clearly facing a difficult market (some say a dire crisis) for publishing and selling children’s poetry collections and anthologies. Lee Bennett Hopkins said that only three new anthologies were published last year in the US. Do you see this as an especially troubling development, or is it a continual challenge for poets?

I see this as very troubling, but no more so than unemployment, generally, across the country. This is a rough period for millions of people, poets included, who can’t find enough work. I do think, though, that this is different from the earlier difficulties poets experienced in trying to build a wide audience. On my many visits with schoolchildren, teachers, librarians, and parents, I see a widespread and enormous love for poetry and excitement about reading and writing poems. An encouraging factor is the commercial and critical success of children’s poetry books before the economic crisis occurred.

Many teachers are wary of encouraging meter and rhyme, as they have been taught that formal poetry is out of fashion, while others merely use forms as tools to teach grammar and vocabulary. Are meter and rhyme still vital and essential, and what does formal poetry offer young readers and writers that free verse does not?

I feel that all forms of poetry are valuable and should be taught to children. Is the poem well-crafted? Is it nurturing? Does it touch the heart, mind, and/or spirit? I think these are the important criteria for determining what children should be taught. Fashions come and go, of course, but I think it’s up to parents and educators to see that what is of value survives for children.

Is your poetry a performance art? Is it best for children to read your poems aloud and “act out” the many voices? Are we missing some of your poetry’s power by simply reading silently or listening to another person’s voice?

I don’t see this as an either/or situation. One is theater; the other is reading. Both can elicit a range of experiences. They can be engrossing, enlightening, moving, deeply satisfying, fun, etc.—all the things we want when we experience the arts. Also, silent reading is not complete silence, in the way we usually think of it, as a total absence of sound. As we read, not our ears, but our minds “hear” the words, and if children have been read to, in their early years, they will be able to choose varying moods, tones, etc., for “hearing” the poet’s words. Children and adults can be drawn into a book, as well as into a performance.

When we read to children, we can see the signs that tell us they have gone into the world of the book. The signs are in their eyes, their breathing. At appropriate times, they will look sad or break into spontaneous laughter, and we know that we have reached them.

If you would, please pick a poem of your own and talk a little about how the poem works from a craft standpoint? How is the poem constructed or formed? What are some of its salient features in sound or image?

Near the end of The Great Migration: Journey to the North, there’s a part called “Question,” in which the travelers on a train are silently questioning their decisions to leave their homes and embark on new lives. The poem begins with their question, as the train gets close to its destination. The travelers’ thoughts then take on the rhythm of the train, moving from apprehension to courage, optimism and determination. As the train gradually slows, so do the travelers’ thoughts. At least, that was my intention, and I hope it comes through. The train and the thoughts come to a stop simultaneously, with the finality of the words, “Going to make it. No matter what.”

Could you talk a little about your process of arranging the structure and order of The Great Migration?

I wanted to tell the story of this movement chronologically, from the time the people in the South begin thinking about leaving, until they arrive in the North. At the same time, I wanted to go inside the movement and show some of the individuals who made this momentous trip. Why were they leaving? What were they thinking and feeling? Who and what did they have to leave behind? I wanted to show the courage it took for these people, in particular, and for people all over the world, to pick up and move when it became necessary, to do whatever they needed to do to survive and to make better lives for themselves and their children.

Are you generally optimistic about the future of poetry for young people from both a quality and a popularity standpoint? Will we see a resurgence of poems for kids in the years and decades to come, do you think?

I’m optimistic that the situation will improve. I hope it’s sooner than later. From a popularity standpoint, a substantial and enthusiastic audience is there, waiting. They just have to be able to buy food, clothing, and shelter before they can buy books. Budgets for school and public libraries have to increase, at least to the point where they were before the crisis. From a quality standpoint, there will be innovations, some of which will be short-lived; others will stand the test of time.

In the meantime, poets will keep writing, holding to their standards of craft, as well as nourishment for children. Organizations such as PACYA serve to keep the issues of need and availability before the public and are crucial to the recovery and maintenance of a society where poetry is woven into the lives of children and contributes to their happiness and development as human beings.

******

REVIEW OF THE GREAT MIGRATION BY JOYCE RAY

Eloise Greenfield, The Great Migration: Journey to the North, illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist. 32 pp. Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, 2011.

Eloise Greenfield, winner of the 11^th NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, and award-winning artist and writer Jan Spivey Gilchrist have collaborated on a book of poems inspired by a little-talked-about period of American history. Train travel is almost foreign to today’s children. Yet a train ticket led to a better life in the North for hundreds of thousands of African-American children in the early part of the 20^th century. The Great Migration: Journey to the North chronicles such a trip in nine poems. Collage artwork using archival material lends historical authenticity to the collection. An introduction tells Greenfield’s own story of her family’s migration.

Greenfield’s free verse lets us witness a family’s goodbyes—goodbyes to the land, to inequality, and to the Ku Klux Klan.

Goodbye, crazy signs, telling me
where I can go, what I can do.
I hear that train whistling
my name. Don’t worry, train,
I’m ready.

The poems book us a seat on the overnight trip with all its uncertainties.

I hope they’re right.
I think they’re right.
I know they’re right.

Finally, we arrive in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, or another northern city where

…the people keep coming,
keep coming, keep on coming,
filling up the cities with
their hopes and their courage.
And their dreams.

The rhythm in each of Greenfield’s poems lets us hear the click clack of train wheels on the track. We feel the hope in the hearts of the travelers. Gilchrist’s haunting illustrations combine layers of artwork and archival photos. The results were achieved through labor-intensive methods without computer graphics. They draw us into the poems as if we are watching a documentary. One moving illustration plants grainy photos of African Americans in a field, like ghostly witnesses to the train’s passing.

The Great Migration, Journey to the North is a stirring account in verse of a period that opened up opportunities for America’s Black citizens and changed American history. The jacket flap says the audience is Ages 3-8. The subject matter is more suited for an older audience, such as Grades 2-5.

NCTE has this profile of Greenfield, and The Herman Agency posts this profile of Gilchrist.

Joyce Ray earned an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has published nonfiction for children and poetry for adults. In 2008 the Vermont Studio Center awarded her an artist’s grant in poetry. Memberships include NH Writers’ Project, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and Poetry Advocates for Children & Young Adults. Joyce conducts poetry workshops in New Hampshire and muses about poetry and writing at http://joyceray.blogspot.com.