Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail

Chapter 1: Catching Woodies

In our family this is what we call a "woody" poem. The name goes back to the first big children's book fair I went to. One thing that's been fun about having books published is that my publishing company began sending me to these fairs. They've changed some, over the years, but at the time I first went, various cities had them, often all in the same week or two, around Children's Book Week in November. Large numbers of children's books were brought in; all the newly published ones that the companies sent, and many of the best books of former years. These were put on display in libraries, at fairgrounds, or in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry, and then kids by the busload came and looked over the books and made lists of the ones they would like to own or have their school libraries order. They sometimes saw a play, or had a program by authors and artists of childrens books, which is why I was there.

Some authors and artists considered it a grueling sort of thing and did it only because their publishers wanted them to. It did take a lot of energy to give talks all day and then fly to another city and give talks all the next day, but I enjoyed it and wished my company would send me every year! It was fun to talk with the kids, as well as the teachers, librarians, reviewers, and other people interested in children's books. Parents, too— lots of parents came. It was also revealing to hear and meet the other authors and artists. Some of these were people whose books I'd admired; some whose books I didn't like; and some whose books I'd never even heard of.

One of these latter authors was Mary Neville, whom I met at the Cleveland Book Fair. She was a bright, vivacious person. I liked the way she talked on the programs, and I liked her ideas, but I'd never read a Neville book. So I sneaked off to the display, "Books by Our Guest Authors and Artists," and there one was, a small volume of poems called Woody and Me. I've used one at the start of the "Blind" chapter. Here are two others:

They weren't all this brief. Get the book for yourself and read the long, sad story about the Dick Tracy Detective Squad car, and it's happier sequel.

But are these poems? What is a poem, anyway? These don't sound the way that some people expect poems to sound. They don't rhyme. They don't have a set rhythm pattern. They don't use particularlay "poetic" words or "poetic" subjects. But whoever said poems have to rhyme, have set rhythm, and can use only certain kinds of words and subjects? Chad Walsh was my writing prof at Beloit College, and has remained a friend ever since. He sometimes tells his students to visit the local garbage dump and then write a poem on it. This gets them over the idea, fast, that you can only write poems about love, birds, and flowers.

A virtue of a woody is that it's not self-consciously poetic. It deals with life's small but memorable moments, and there are many more of these than of the earthshaking ones. A woody tells aobut the turns and twists of life, the sudden illuminations, the trudges up and slides down, like the snakes and ladders game. We all have these at all ages and the material is lying thick around us. But we forget— unless we snatch a pencil and write them down.

Whatever we call these Woody and Me bits, they're laid out like poems and they have a sort of rhythm, a speech rhythm. You've heard talk that is a dull and flat as cardboard, and you've heard other talk that's so bright and vivid you enjoy listening to the sound and rhythm of it, as well as the interesting words and ideas in it. Some people talk that way most of the time, and everybody does once in a while, especially little children who haven't been around the world long enough to have soaked up the same old tired way of seeing things and saying things.

Megan came up to me once and said, "Do you know what love is to me? It's when I'm swimming in cold water and I suddenly hit a warm spot."

I said, "Megan, that's a poem," and wrote it down:

It wasn't until I read Woody and Me that I realized that Megan's was a woody poem, and that we'd been collecting woodies for years. For instance, Demi had limped home from school one day and stood at the door of the camping trailer in our backyard that served as a study for me when we lived in Kent, Ohio. With a little smile in her voice she related the following incident, and then departed for the kitchen and a four-o'clock snack. I grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote down her words as closely as I could remember, stretched out like a poem:

At supper, she was pleased to see it.

Here's one we call "Cyclops;" I don't remember who said it, maybe Jill:

Or who said this one:

These are some of Elspeth's:

This one is about Elspeth's best friend, Keats, with whom she alternately plays and fights:

"Outrage," by Jill at seven, is self-explanatory— she was in tears of pain and anger:

Megan's "Revenge" happened on the New York Thruway, at one of those huge awful restaurants. It was crowded and the family had to split up. I was sitting at a counter with Elspeth when Megan, then ten or eleven, came up with a vindictive look on her face, her eyes narrow slits, and blurted out:

I scribbled her words on a napkin with the waitress's order pen.

The other day I found this in the typewriter, abandoned by Demi. I call it "Dull Saturday" and I've drawn a square around it to show you the whole thing goes together and isn't two poems.

And a few weeks ago a friend stayed overnight with our girls. Talie came down to breakfast with these works on her lips:

Two more things that happened recently:

To her father after bicycling:

That's why I call this "catching" woodies. You're catching a poem rather than sitting down and composing it. You have to be there with your mitt when the ball comes down, or with your net when the minnow swims by, or with your hamburger when the ketchup drips off the ceiling. You have to have open ears to recognize the interesting turn of speech, the fresh idea, the amusing little incident that forms the core of a woody, and then quickly get it down. You can learn this skill— to tune and sharpen your ears— as you learn many other things, simply by doing it. And to recognize when you yourself say or think a woody, too. Megan could have said, "Do you know what love is to me?" and then written it down herself. Kenneth, a fourth-grade boy, did:

My friend Greggie, six or seven, wrote his down too. Like Megan's and Kenneth's it's a "feelings" woody— he was banished to his room for some misdeed and after a while this poem appeared taped to the outside of his closed door:

When we get into thinking and feeling, we can produce another sort of woody besides the sneak-up-and-grab variety. For feeling and thinking don't always deal with the immediate moment. They include a lot of recalling. You can remember the way an incident happened, and write it down. Someting made you hold it in memory: there was a little twist to the happening, or something or amusing or strange that gave it a niche in your mind. Then something triggered you to recall it, in the present. Here's one I wrote about a long time later, about an occurrece in fifth grade. Why have I always remembered it?

And one of Jill's friends told me this incident, which a large-flaked snowfall made me remember— though I couldn't recall Debbie's exact words:

If you start to write a woody poem from remembering, don't try to make it rhyme. it's usually much better if it doesn't, for the natural, precise word isn't likely to be the rhyming one.

And don't be discouraged if the ketchup of your thought doesn't bloop out immediately. Once it does, there'll probably be enough for several hamburgers. So take your time, think and remember. Have patience. As with the potatoes, set your dinger for a few more minutes.

Linscott Charter School 220 Elm Street Watsonville, California 95076 (831) 728-6301