 |
I didn't start out to be a poetry anthologist. I started out as a kid in New Jersey who had two major goals in life: 1) to survive one more year
of delivering newspapers without being mauled by Ike, the one-eyed, slobbering cur that lurked in the forsythia bushes at the top of the hill; and 2) to become more than a weak-hitting, third-string catcher on
our sorry Little League team. I failed at both.
Had I announced at the dinner table, "Mom, Dad, I've decided to be a poetry anthologist," my parents—particularly my mother—would
have been thrilled. In truth, they would have been thrilled that I'd decided to be anything other than the top-40 disk jockey, Edsel salesman, or bullpen catcher that I constantly yammered about becoming in
grammar school. But at that point in my life, poetry meant no more to me than 1066, George Washington's wooden teeth, or the chief exports of the Belgian Congo.
It must have been some time in college when I started reading more poetry on my own. I can't put my finger on the exact date or even the year
that I discovered poetry. I wish I could name the person who turned me around, but I can't. The change was gradual, and I suspect it was the poetry itself that showed me what poetry could be. The more poetry I
read, the more good poems I discovered and the more I realized that the most commonplace made wonderful subjects for poetry.
Even though graduate school temporarily retarded the growth of my poetic inclinations, they had grown too strong to die. I became a poetry
junkie. I feel safe confessing that. I read poetry the way some people watch soap operas, work in their gardens, or follow the Red Sox: irrationally, compulsively, endlessly. I read poems nearly every day
whenever I find myself with a few unfilled minutes. In fact, I've found some wonderful poems while waiting to have my car repaired, eating breakfast, and sitting out an early April blizzard. I've come to agree
with James Dickey, who said, "What you have to realize . . . is that poetry is just naturally the greatest [...] thing that ever was in the whole universe. If you love it, there's no substitute for
it"
And whenever I read good poems, I'm struck by the possibilities of poetry, and I want to share those possibilities with my readers.
Possibilities in form, language, images, structure, rhythm, voice, sound, feeling. I want young people to see that poems are expressions of human experience, that poems are as different as people. The
possibilities of subjects poets choose to write about seem endless. I've offered young readers poems about teeth, suicide, lasagna, movies, swimming, insomnia, gluttons, dentists, war victims, crows, cars, cats,
and gnats, to name a few.
Young people must feel that all poems have a purpose, as Jonathan Holden noted so well: "[Poetry should] give shape, in a concise and
memorable way, to what our lives feel like. . . . Poems help us to notice the world more and better, and they enable us to share with others." And today, with civilization seemingly destroying it self
piece by piece, we all need to share. That's what poets do. That's what I try to do with my anthologies. I want young readers to feel that each of the collections and every poem in them is a sharing. My hope is
that when young readers are touched by a good poem, they may recall the words of Stanley Kunitz, who said that if we listen hard enough to poets, "who knows—we too may break into dance, perhaps for grief,
perhaps for joy." •
|
About the Author:
Paul B. Janeczko has edited over 25 poetry anthologies for young readers.
His most recent anthologies are Very Best (Almost) Friends and Stone Bench in an Empty Park, a collection of urban haiku.
Recent Books
His most recent book of poems is That Sweet Diamond: Baseball Poems.
In addition he has written Favorite Poetry Lessons, an instructional book for teachers, and How to Write Poetry, a guide for young writers
To contact this author or illustrator, please use the information for his or her publisher provided on our list of CBC member publishers.
Meet the Author/Illustrator Archives
|