Picture Book Monday: “I Am Cherry Alive,” The Little Girl Sang

[osprey_archer]

Continuing my Barbara Cooney theme, I read the picture book in which she illustrates ”I Am Cherry Alive,” the Little Girl Sang, a poem by Delmore Schwartz, a mid-century American poet of whom I had never heard. Sorry, Mr. Schwartz.

The little girl is not only cherry alive, she is apple, she is plum, she is pit of peach, (she is deeply opposed to articles), she is red and gold and green and blue. What does this mean? I teetered between finding the poem exhilarating and finding it maddening, in a way makes me think irresistibly of Billy Collins’ poem Introduction to Poetry, in which he encourages his students to experience a poem,

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Okay, Billy! I get it! I need to follow Barbara Cooney’s good example and just vibe with Delmore Schwartz’s little girl who is cherry alive and apple and plum and witch in a zoo, “I will always be me, I will always be new!”

(But also what does it mean to be cherry alive. What does it MEAN.)

Cooney’s illustrations are of course beautiful. I particularly like the ones illustrating the colors, the girl in her red coat and hat watching the red sunrise above the snow, and sitting beneath a golden tree, and crouched on a rock in a green bathing suit by a green pool in a deep green forest.

Comments

[asakiyume]

What does it MEAN?? The fine line between torturing a confession out of a poem and feeling frustratedly like the boy watching the naked emperor walk by.

[osprey_archer]

RIGHT. Sometimes you're pretty sure there's something there and you're just not getting it, and sometimes you're like "Okay but are you just. stringing words together. What does it MEAN that you are plum and apple and cherry and blossom and tree. Why do you need to be EVERYTHING."

[asakiyume]

I'm just giggling over this notion of self that's self, Me Me Me Me Me, and by the way, Me Me Me encompasses plum and cherry and all the rest. "I'm meeeeee! But I'm also everything else! But in a meeeeeeee way!"

... Not to mention [WARNING WILL ROBINSON, PEDANTIC VIEWPOINT AHEAD], isn't "cherry" really the thing that's cherry? And plum plum and so on? I don't know.

[asakiyume]

Also, maybe this was just a midcentury poetry-for-children thing, because I remember being given a little book of poems (okay, this was the 70s, not the 50s, but who knows when the poem dated from??), and there was one poem that started

I will always be myself and no other /Just me, like a tree [eyeroll at that rhyme]

What was it about the 20th cent. that made people feel they needed to focus on this??? Like WHO ELSE would you be.

I will always be Cardinal Richelieu and no other, just him uhhhhhh....

But seriously.

[osprey_archer]

I don't know when the poem was originally written, but the book with Cooney's illustrations was originally published in 1979, so clearly part of the same cultural zeitgeist. I will be ME and no other! To thine own self be true!

It's maybe a long (long, long) hangover from the pro-conformity messages of the 1950s? A more general cultural feeling that the discovery or crafting of the Self is the highest human good? Maslow's hierarchy of needs with self-actualization on top.

[asakiyume]

At some point I remember realizing that I didn't have to believe things. People usually have this realization I gather about faith related stuff, but I realized... I don't have to believe Freudianism! I don't have to believe in Maslow's hierarchy! Those are ideas. I can listen to them and say, Huh! Cool, interesting! And then decide not to believe them if I don't want.

It's a strategy I employ freeeeequently.

(It goes along with how so called fact-based science is so culturally laden. Yep. Can just smile and say no.)

[osprey_archer]

I remember reading about the gulags (it always goes back to gulags with me) and being so struck by how, in this situation where people simply could not meet their physiological and safety needs at the base of the pyramid, they just catapulted right past to the "love and belonging" level, and built these super-strong friendships in order to navigate the situation.

[asakiyume]

(it always goes back to gulags with me) 😂 --But also: I get it. Nothing says "in extremis" like a gulag, and if you see how people are in extremis, you're seeing something. And yes! Turns out you CAN jump to the top of the pyramid.

[troisoiseaux]

The little girl is not only cherry alive, she is apple, she is plum, she is pit of peach, (she is deeply opposed to articles)

This made me laugh.

little girl who is cherry alive and apple and plum and witch in a zoo, “I will always be me, I will always be new!”

This does feel like a slightly elevated version of those flashcards that are used to teach small children to read words like "ball" and "dog"...?

[osprey_archer]

Perhaps Delmore Schwartz was inspired by such flashcards. Perhaps he is trying to encourage us all to embrace the whole world through the figure of the little girl who can embrace it, unlike grown-ups who have forgotten how. But must I always be new in order to embrace it? Can't I just be the same old me at some point? What if I WANT my daemon to settle down, Mr. Schwartz?

[ethelmay]

My bet would be that he heard a child singing the first line, found it very evocative, and elaborated. I am a little reminded of my son at three or so going through a period when he occasionally remarked out of the blue, "Trees are like houses." I don't think he was quoting anything.

[sovay]

My bet would be that he heard a child singing the first line, found it very evocative, and elaborated.

I read this poem for the first time in Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell's Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems for Young People (1985) and there it has the dedication "For Miss Kathleen Hanlon," who I always assumed was a real child. Backing out to look at Schwartz's bibliography for the first time, it seems to have been one of the new poems in his Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems (1959), although I don't know its date of composition.