Caldecott Monday: The Little Island
Aug. 8th, 2016 08:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThere was a little Island in the ocean.
Around it the winds blew
And the birds flew
And the tides rose and fell on the shore.
So begins Margaret Wise Brown's The Little Island. It's like a free verse poem: you can almost track the ebb and the fall of the waves in the length of the lines.
It strikes me that picture books are one of the last bastions of popular poetry that is widely read by ordinary people, rather than mostly by dedicated poetry-lovers. Poetry used to be widely loved and read and quoted and even written (although by people who were quick to declaim that they weren't true poets, true poets being rarified creatures who live on air), and then after World War I it all seemed to peter out until you end up with the situation today where so many people see poetry as impenetrably high brow with nothing to say to them.
I read a book, Gregory Orr's Poetry as Survival, about the ability of poetry to help people build bridges through suffering, a theme that both Eugenia Ginzburg and Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn elaborate in their gulag memoirs: they found reciting remembered poetry and writing poems of their own central to their survival, both in the purely physical sense but also as preserving their intellectual integrity (in the meaning of wholeness, although probably honesty also applies).
It is perhaps worrisome that the great mass of the American population is now armed with nothing but Dr. Seuss.
The other thing that strikes me about this book is the fickleness of fame. The Little Island won the Caldecott in 1947, but I had never heard of it; Margaret Wise Brown's reputation now rests on Good Night Moon. The award hit the right author but the wrong book.
Around it the winds blew
And the birds flew
And the tides rose and fell on the shore.
So begins Margaret Wise Brown's The Little Island. It's like a free verse poem: you can almost track the ebb and the fall of the waves in the length of the lines.
It strikes me that picture books are one of the last bastions of popular poetry that is widely read by ordinary people, rather than mostly by dedicated poetry-lovers. Poetry used to be widely loved and read and quoted and even written (although by people who were quick to declaim that they weren't true poets, true poets being rarified creatures who live on air), and then after World War I it all seemed to peter out until you end up with the situation today where so many people see poetry as impenetrably high brow with nothing to say to them.
I read a book, Gregory Orr's Poetry as Survival, about the ability of poetry to help people build bridges through suffering, a theme that both Eugenia Ginzburg and Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn elaborate in their gulag memoirs: they found reciting remembered poetry and writing poems of their own central to their survival, both in the purely physical sense but also as preserving their intellectual integrity (in the meaning of wholeness, although probably honesty also applies).
It is perhaps worrisome that the great mass of the American population is now armed with nothing but Dr. Seuss.
The other thing that strikes me about this book is the fickleness of fame. The Little Island won the Caldecott in 1947, but I had never heard of it; Margaret Wise Brown's reputation now rests on Good Night Moon. The award hit the right author but the wrong book.
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Date: 2016-08-09 02:51 am (UTC)Also, I feel one could do a lot worse than Dr. Seuss.
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Date: 2016-08-09 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-09 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-12 12:02 am (UTC)ETA: LOL, posted without reading other comments....