Pure Poetry: A Talk with Jack Prelutsky

Carrying on the traditions of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Hilaire Belloc, Jack Prelutsky--with his rollicking collection of over 40 books--is largely responsible for rejuvenating children's poetry in the last few decades. Amazon.com's Karin Snelson talked with Prelutsky about his contributions to this flourishing field--poems that Horn Book calls "jaunty, usually funny, often silly, sometimes gross, and always childlike."
By Karin Snelson, Amazon.com

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Amazon.com: Some say that the nonsense verse of 19th-century England--Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll--marked the beginnings of modern children's poetry.

Jack Prelutsky: I completely agree, and I would add Robert Louis Stevenson and Hilaire Belloc at the end of the 19th century. Most children's literature from that period and a little earlier is didactic. Preachy. They didn't think of children as real people. I don't know how they thought of them, but it was mostly of the "children should be seen and not heard" mentality. My favorite poem is still "Jabberwocky." Come to think of it, that was the earliest children's poem that I memorized! I still know it by heart.

Amazon.com: How would you define modern children's poetry?

Prelutsky: Well, there's not a lot of really good stuff from the first three or even four decades of the century. There are a few exceptions. David McCord was writing then, but there wasn't an established tradition of children's literature in America. That was something that started at Macmillan in 1919. Previously, all children's books, even books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, had been published by the adult trade department. When I was working on a comprehensive anthology of 20th-century children's poetry, one of my tasks was to try to represent every single decade of the century. It was easy from 1950 on, but from the zeros, the tens, it was tough to find things. You had A.A. Milne in the '20s, writing Winnie-the-Pooh and poems about Pooh, so that was very good, and I found a few obscure poems that I liked, but many of them were stilted. Writers rarely spoke to children on their own terms. They generally talked down to them. The very best children's poetry--with rare exceptions--has been written since the '60s.

Amazon.com: A lot of people credit you and Shel Silverstein for this renaissance.

Prelutsky: I know they do. Several younger poets have told me that they had not thought of writing for children until they saw my work--and I'm flattered by it. But there are other poets who have been publishing as long as I have, or even longer, who are writing wonderful poems for children.

Amazon.com: Did you know Shel Silverstein?

Prelutsky: Well, it's very odd. I knew him before either of us had ever written any children's poems, when we were both in Greenwich Village in the late '50s and early '60s. He was already a legendary character. He had written for Stars and Stripes and was doing work for Playboy , so he had developed an adult audience. We were both involved with the folk music scene in Greenwich Village and we had a few friends in common--but then somehow we just lost touch.

Amazon.com: I read that you were a singer as a child.

Prelutsky: I was. I always wanted to be an opera singer, but then I heard Pavarotti... He was better!

Amazon.com:

The Chicago Tribune review of The Dragons Are Singing Tonight says, "With his irreverent gothic poems, Prelutsky has done almost as much as anyone to develop the living, breathing, under-twelve poetry audience." Your work is consistently identified as being irreverent in a good way, as in "irreverent, refreshing," and I wondered what you thought about that.

Prelutsky: Well, I used to be accused of telling children to do bad things. I thought about that, and I realized that I was just writing from personal experience and personal observation. I wasn't telling children what to do--I was just telling them what they were doing.

Amazon.com: Critics often say that you reach kids at exactly their level.

Prelutsky: I just never grew up. Or part of me didn't--the part that remembers his childhood. By the way, that all started with Rolling Harvey down the Hill, which I wrote about 20 years ago. It's about the kids I grew up with in the Bronx just after World War II. I simply talked about the things we did--pulling practical jokes on each other, wrestling, and playing games. Doing that book and talking about it with kids in schools started reminding me more and more of my childhood. I realized that I was reaching kids with this stuff. But I'm really not trying to be irreverent. I'm trying to be lucid about the childhood most adults don't or can't remember.

Amazon.com: I've never heard anyone criticizing you for being irreverent, or using "irreverent" in a bad way. It seems like you're just being realistic--and you know what makes kids laugh.

Prelutsky: That's exactly it. What I'm trying to do is write the stuff I wish I had heard when I was a kid.

Amazon.com: How did you get your feet wet as a professional poet?

Prelutsky:

It was about 1963. I was working in a book and music store in Greenwich Village and in my spare time I was trying to be an artist. I would invent creatures--dozens of creatures, drawing purely out of my imagination. One was a bird, a flightless bird that was on top of a 100-foot-tall tree, but it had a 101-foot-long tongue, like an anteater. One night I looked at all these sketches and thought they needed poems to go with them. Anyway, I brought them to a famous editor at Harper's, Ursula Nordstrom, but she gave me my manuscript back. I took them to another editor later, Susan Hirschman, and she said she'd publish my work. Just like that. Right then and there. I said, "Do you mean you like my drawings?" She said, "Oh, no, you're terrible at it! You can't draw!" She showed me early books by Maurice Sendak, Arnold Lobel, Tomi Ungerer. And I saw their stuff and I said, "Oh, well, yeah!" Just like when I heard Pavarotti, I said, "Oh, well, yeah!" Anyway, that's how I got started.

Amazon.com: Why do you think poetry is important for children?

Prelutsky:

Oh boy! It's a distillation of experience. I think kids need that instantaneous expression. I like to think of it as the music of language, but most of all it's communication. It's a way to talk to other people. And I think children, most of all, want and need to be conversant with as many forms of communication as they can. Kids today are bombarded by garbage. There's trash music, there are video games where the whole object is to kill something, and there's ultraviolent TV. But we all have these little quiet, funny parts of ourselves that want something else. I think children should have that... the other way of giving information, of learning about the larger world, of seeing. The poetry they should hear should not only be the poetry of rap music and repetitive rock lyrics. One of the things I've tried to do with my poems is to make them so natural that a child might say, "Oh, this happened to me," or "I feel the same way." That's also why I record, and set many of my poems to music and perform them. But why do children need poetry? I think children need poetry the way children need bread and water and air. And art and architecture and everything else. It's just another piece of the puzzle. It happens to be the thing I do. Maybe they don't need it! But I like to think they do. I think it helps to make them better people to know that there are other things out there.

Amazon.com: So, do you have any all-time favorite children's books?

Prelutsky: Well, The Wind in the Willows, of course. That's everybody's. It's a marvelous book. I've tried to write something like it, but haven't yet succeeded.

Amazon.com: How did It's Raining Pigs and Noodles develop?

Prelutsky: I wrote at least half of it on my walks in the streets of Seattle. And, as always, the poems are inspired by friends and relatives, and their children. Especially by the children. "Never Poke Your Uncle with a Fork" was inspired by my two-year-old nephew who actually did that. I told him, "Never poke your uncle with a fork," and he walked around repeating the phrase. "I'm Raising a Virtual Chicken" was inspired by a trip to Japan and the tamagotchi craze. This is why I always have a notebook with me.

Amazon.com: Are all of the poems in It's Raining Pigs new?

Prelutsky: They are all brand-new with two exceptions: "The Chocolate-Covered Salami" is one, though I changed it slightly. And "We Are Plooters" has been one of my most anthologized poems, so I decided to include it.

Amazon.com: Any advice for a budding poet?

Prelutsky: Keep your day job! No, seriously... Carry a notebook. Practice. Write every day. Write as much as you can. Keep your eyes and ears and mind and heart open. Be aware of things around you. And as soon as you get an idea, write it down. Don't worry about the rhyme--the important thing is to get your ideas down on paper. List everything you can think of that relates to your idea. Start out by writing about the things closest to you. Write about yourself, your home, your family, your pets. Then branch out, and write about your neighborhood, your relatives, and your school. Don't begin by writing about another solar system, because you've never been there. Write what you know, the other stuff will come later. Notebooks are indispensable. I was rummaging through my filing cabinet recently, and realized that I'm running out of room to store any more notebooks in there. If I stacked up all my notebooks, they'd be as tall as I am. Maybe taller!