Too Young For Poetry? No way!

It's ANZAC Day here in Australia today, a sad public holiday. It's cold, wet and windy. A day for poetry if ever there was one. I've been planning to introduce more poetry to the kids for some time now but wasn't really sure how to do it without boring them or freaking them out. After reading a little First World War poetry to myself this morning I decided that although apt they really weren't ready for that kind of emotional carnage! Luckily I happened to stumble on A Poke In the I, a great children's book about 'concrete poetry', at the library yesterday. Do you remember learning about concrete poetry (calligrams) at school? It's that lovely visual poetry that uses a blend of placement, typography and words to convey meaning. You can see Isabella's balloon example in the photo above and some other great examples here. 

Henry found it too hard to contain his poetic muse and dictated the following to me all in one go (he's 5).

Marching With The Band 

Think about marching in your poetic deafness

of lemon drops and sugar.

In your flavoured mouth

poetic things dance to your deafness

Then you begin to feel sleepy and you fall asleep

and taste the deafness

and nobody knows your deafness is dead.

I swear that's just what came out! I just wrote it down and formatted it. Ah, to have the lack of fear that would just let me spew things out like that...