Any Poets Care To Respond?

Sarah from The Napping House is looking for poetry to read to children:

Katherine, I read a book to my girl the other day - The Bat-Poet. She loved the poems the bat wrote, and wanted to hear more. No cutesy, kiddy poems - she likes the smoother more grown-up cadence.

I read her some Robert Frost that she enjoyed, but I'm lost past that. We read a lot growing up, but absolutely *no* poetry.

You have mentioned poetry several times on your blog. I was wondering if you had any good recommendations for me to read to her (or for me to read to get in the spirit)? She's almost five. Thank you for any help you can give me.

Sarah, I have the same question. So I'm going to post here, hoping that if any poets pass by they might give us advice. My favorite poets are Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, and Wendell Berry. But as with prose, themes run hard and dark, scary and difficult for a child. I did not take this seriously enough with my son, figuring the themes over his head would somehow float over his head. That did not work. I should have been censoring what he read from a young age. I don't want to make the same mistakes with Ry. But baby poetry just doesn't get it. Ry is not writing baby poetry and suggesting she study it feels insulting.

One poet suggested music is the place to start teaching poetry to children. I like that idea. Song writers are certainly poets.

For myself, I think of poems as extremely condensed prose. So I think reading E. B. White or Laura Ingalls Wilder or any of the masters is a good place to start. Many of the same techniques are there, easy to tease out as poetic examples. But its the rhythm, beauty, and power of the language that's most important. I think children are very sensitive to power, and if given exposure to powerful writing, they'll get a lot intuitively. All of Ry's writing has come this way, so far. She writes poetry, even though we've never "studied" poetry. Kippling - I bet his writing has a big influence on Ry and her use of language.

The Gault School in California published a book the children wrote in response to the 1989 earthquake. I was at the epicenter of that quake and nothing captured the truth of the experience as well as those children did when they converted it all to poetry. The themes are hard and dark, but handled by master poets under the age of 12, maybe ok for other kids.

Fault Lines: Children's Earthquake Poetry edited by Patrice Vecchione