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osprey_archerContinuing 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.
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.
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Date: 2025-05-05 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-05 08:34 pm (UTC)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.