Poetry Friday: Enormous Smallness

Writer Matthew Burgess and illustrator Kris Di Giacomo have captured the playful spirit of E. E. Cummings in this charming biography for young readers. Burgess reveals how Cummings’s love of nature and his sense of imagination as a child developed into an exploration of language. The delightful illustrations blend fittingly with lively displays of text—words and letters dot the trees, spot tulip petals, hover in clouds, and spout from an elephant’s trunk.

From a young age, Estlin Cummings expressed his fascination with nature through his poems, which his mother recorded in a book.

Estlin’s first workspace was his tree house where he created art and wrote poems.

Quotations weave in and out of the story of Estlin’s life. We learn more about the poet through the words he spoke, the words of those around him, through full poems, and poem fragments.

Burgess and Di Giacomo introduce Cummings’s experimental style in a way that is intriguing and accessible.

Children will be fascinated to see Cummings as an inventor of words who broke rules and faced criticism.

Readers will discover that despite the criticism Cummings received, he pursued his dream and went on to become respected and loved for his work as a poet.

Surrounding examples of the poems is the poetic telling of Cummings’s life—Burgess’s words are as playful as the poet they describe. Throughout the book, Burgess and Di Giacomo reveal the interconnectedness of the enormous and the small.

E. E. Cummings is an attractive personality for children to explore. Young readers are sure to connect with the poet’s playful approach to expression wonderfully expressed in this book.

Enormous Smallness: A Story of E. E. Cummings

by Matthew Burgess

illustrations by Kris Di Giacomo

Enchanted Lion Books

2015

Thanks for stopping by! For more Poetry Friday fun this week, please visit Write. Sketch. Repeat.

Wordless Wednesday—shift

Poetry Friday: The Complete Poetry by Maya Angelou

Have you picked up The Complete Poetry by Maya Angelou? It was released in the spring of 2015 and I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy right away. I wrote a review of this book for my local newspaper. You can find an online version of the review here. Lovers of poetry and fans of Maya Angelou—please check out this book! It is wonderful, of course. But it is also an amazing feeling to hold the weight of this phenomenal woman’s lifework of poetry. As I read through the poems—some I’d seen before, many I hadn’t—I experienced a whole range of emotions, I reflected, and I learned.

While reading the book and preparing my review, I had begun reading outside again in parks for the first time this year. It was very early spring, snow patches still melting under pine trees, maple buds just beginning to appear. I had decided to reread I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which I took along with The Complete Poetry to a park in Elora one sort-of-warm but mostly-cool March day. 

With my husband beside me on a park bench (reading The Orenda by Joseph Boyden), I began my session with the poetry collection and moved on to the autobiography, placing The Complete Poetry behind me against the bench to shield my back from the cool breeze. (Survivors of Canadian winters know that even poetry books protect against the cold if positioned creatively.) In all honesty, it wasn’t too cold. We even took off our jackets for a short time (five seconds) to remember the feeling of outdoor air on skin. So really, it wasn’t necessary that I put The Complete Poetry behind me on the bench. I shouldn’t have. You can probably tell by now where this is going.

I am ashamed. I left the book in the park. On the bench. I don’t even live in Elora. We had taken a little day trip to the charming tourist town. We were now back at home. It was the next morning. I was seated at the breakfast table with my first tea, sun rising above the backyard maples, a red cardinal singing on a bare branch. I reached over to my pile of books to pick up The Complete Poetry. It wasn’t there.

We considered driving up and looking for it, but we had only an hour before we needed to get ready to go visit friends in the opposite direction of Elora.

I got myself another copy of The Complete Poetry and entertain myself imagining all the possible outcomes of the one I left on the bench in the park. Teenagers found it later that night attracted to a glossy shine on the word Poetry in the moonlight. One of them took it home and is now hooked on poetry.

Or perhaps after a night of paying bills with borrowed money, a man, led by a dog, discovered the book the next morning. He is now a Maya fan and has started writing poems again.

Or could it be that two sisters walked together at sunset after finally settling a dispute that separated them for years? In the park, they happened upon a beautiful poetry book and to this day they pass it back and forth after their rekindled weekly coffee meet-ups.

Wherever the book is, no doubt it has brought some inspiration to the life of its new owner.

Today's Poetry Friday Round-Up is at Life on the Deckle Edge. Thank you, Robyn!

Wordless Wednesday: White Birch Watching

Poetry Friday: My Letter to the World and Other Poems

Something clicked for me as a teen studying poetry in my Grade 11 English class—poems seemed to say what we wouldn’t dare say out loud in regular speech. Or maybe we could say these things out loud—poetry dared us to do so.

To my younger self, the bold admission “I’m Nobody” in Emily Dickinson’s famous poem confidently expressed what many might feel but never say. The words flipped over the shame of it, experimenting with the idea that we might even be proud of such a statement.

Then, Dickinson bravely asks, “Who are you?” To my younger self, it was a question that reached out for connection. Those three daring words seemed to ask for more—are you like me, or are you not?

The words that begin the second stanza are relevant ideas for today’s young readers—“How dreary—to be—Somebody!/ How public—” The preference for and beauty of a private life couldn’t be more fascinating and timely an idea today as our lives are more public than ever before. The Selfie Generation might be surprised by the confidence voiced in the confession “I’m Nobody.” It might even seem impossible, or perhaps only an exciting thought experiment, to imagine refraining from telling “one's name” to the “admiring bog” or what we might compare to social media.

This famous poem is the third to appear in My Letter to the World and Other Poems from the Visions in Poetry series published by Kids Can Press. It’s one of two poems presented complete on pages of their own, while the others are spaced out carefully over several pages. On a first transparent leaf, an introductory poem functions as an invitation for readers to approach the book as a letter:  “This is my letter to the World…”

Seven poems strung loosely together follow, but some spreads present two or three stanzas, some six.

Other pages display three short lines, or just two. It seems natural for Dickinson’s short lines to be spotlighted this way, bringing new light and insight to the poems you’ve read before. Meanwhile, a young reader discovering Emily Dickinson’s poems for the first time will be mesmerized by the careful placement of lines and stanzas on these pages.

Award-winning illustrator Isabelle Arsenault captures Dickinson’s loneliness, seclusion, and separateness but also her thoughtfulness, introspection, and contemplation of the world around her. Within many of the illustrations, Dickinson is depicted with her eyes and face downturned. In a few of the illustrations, her eyes look out, searchingly, as if just over the reader’s shoulder, not making contact with the reader’s own eyes, suggesting meditation with a touch of resistance. I think that young readers will be attracted to the depth of expression in words and illustration that offer a glimpse into 

Dickinson’s private world.

My Letter to the World and Other Poems

written by Emily Dickinson

illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault

from the series Visions in Poetry

Kids Can Press, 2008

Ages 10 and up

I’ve been revisiting the beautiful books in this series and plan to feature a few others for upcoming Poetry Friday blog posts. They were published in hardcover and paperback between 2004 and 2014, but if you haven’t checked them out yet, My Letter to the World and Other Poems is a wonderful place to start. It’s my favourite in the series.

The Poetry Friday Round-Up is at RandomNoodling today. Please head on over there for more inspiration!