Slammin! @ your library®

an introduction by Stephanie Squicciarini

I believe through poetry I can express my deepest feelings, fears, and dreams. To me each poem is like a short story, telling tales that are in and beneath words. Like other young poets, I am not a master or a pupil; I am both. I teach and learn. My only inspiration is my imagination. Poems can be your anger, happiness, stress, hope, or your dreams. If I couldn’t write I would be like a wild bird locked away in a cage. As a once famous sailor, Popeye, said, “I am what I am, and that’s all that I am.”—Elizabeth Celata, Grade 6, Martha Brown Middle School, Fairport, New York

Each year Mrs. Bridget Tierno’s sixth grade class at Martha Brown Middle School studies and creates poetry. For the past three years, I have held a Teen Poetry Contest each April (National Poetry Month). Last year, Mrs. Tierno’s class practiced reading and performing their poetry for our very first Teen Poetry Reading as part of National Library Week. And this year I presented an in-service on novels in poetry format for middle and high school teachers. For someone whose only clear memory of poetry from school was often feeling confused and mildly tortured while trying to analyze and compare poems I did not really understand, this increasing focus on poetry in my adult life has come as quite a surprise. I always seemed to envy those that had acquired an appreciation and love of poetry, seemingly able to recite their favorites with little effort. While I still cannot recite poems from memory, I have begun to acquire that appreciation thanks not only to the events mentioned above, but also to the authors that have shared with us novels told in poetry format.

Traditional, for lack of a better word, books of poetry are compilations of a poet’s works, like Gary Soto’s New and Selected Poems, or several poets’ works like Roots and Flowers: Poets and Poems on Family, Michael L. Printz Honor Book Winner Heart to Heart: New Poems Inspired by Twentieth-Century Art, and Broken Hearts…Healing: Young Poets Speak Out on Divorce, either with a central theme (as with the latter three) or without. These poems can stand on their own and are not necessarily part of a bigger story. Novels in poetry format are different from what we traditionally think of as “poetry books” in that they tell a complete story, either through the use of free verse like those by Michael L. Printz Honor Book author Virginia Euwer Wolff (Make Lemonade and True Believer) or through a series of interconnected poems, like the stories brought to us by Mel Glenn (Jump Ball: A Basketball Season in Poems, The Taking of Room 114: A Hostage Drama in Poems, and Split Image). While it is popularly believed that Mel Glenn began this trend, many tribute Karen Hesse’s 1998 Newbery Award–winning Out of the Dust with bringing increased attention to the format. Since then, several authors have published novels using poetry as their medium, and across several genres. Mel Glenn has brought us mysteries with Who Killed Mr. Chippendale and Foreign Exchange; historical fiction is represented through Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust and Witness as well as Robert Cormier’s Frenchtown Summer; humor is represented with Love That Dog by Sharon Creech (though there is a heart-wrenching poem about that beloved dog); and sports fiction with Mel Glenn’s Jump Ball. Realistic fiction, however, appears to be the dominant genre. Many different realities are experienced by these books’ characters, though. In Who Will Tell My Brother by Marlene Carvell, readers follow Evan as he discovers who and what he is through his fight to have his school’s Indian Mascot changed. In After the Death of Anna Gonzalez by Terri Fields we hear from forty-seven different voices, sharing the aftershock of a student’s suicide. We get a look inside a school on the edge through the eyes of fifteen students, one who is making a list of students he is going to kill, in Brimstone Journals by Ron Koertge. Sonya Sones offers us a personal look at her teenage life during a time when she was struggling to deal with her older sister’s nervous breakdown in Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy. And Jinx by Margaret Wild takes us on a journey with Jinx (a.k.a. Jen) as she finds her way back to her true self with the love she finds in a completely unexpected place.

These are just a sampling of the stories told through poetry. But the format is not for fiction alone. Nonfiction is also represented. Learning to Swim by Ann Turner is a memoir of an innocent summer taken away by abuse, and Eireann Corrigan shares her fight for survival in You Remind Me of You. And poet Marilyn Nelson provides a look inside the complex life of George Washington Carver in the award-winning book Carver: A Life in Poems. The fiction and nonfiction titles with diverse complexity and themes come together to create a new way for even the most reluctant readers to enjoy a variety of approaches to poetry, and, according to the teachers that took part in the in-service, just might inspire readers to become poets themselves.

This section of the Teen Reading Web site is a gold mine of information about poetry. It contains a list of Web sites and articles about poetry and links to Web pages in the Resources section; information for librarians celebrating Teen Read Week for the first time; different ways to celebrate, including programming ideas from years past as well as ideas specific to this year’s theme, Slammin’ @ your library. Enjoy!