Prelutsky Jack 1940–
Jack Prelutsky
1940–
American editor, translator, and author of children's poetry and picture books.
The following entry presents an overview of Prelutsky's career through 2005. For further information on his life and works, see CLR, Volume 13.
INTRODUCTIONPRINCIPAL WORKS
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
GENERAL COMMENTARY
TITLE COMMENTARY
FURTHER READING
INTRODUCTION
One of the most popular contemporary poets of humorous verse for children, Prelutsky is noted for his irreverent style, technical versatility, and keen awareness of juvenile likes and dislikes. Well known for his droll animal sketches, spine-tingling ghoulish jingles, and eccentric characters whose exaggerated peculiarities often include gross eating habits, Prelutsky tends to stress the baser instincts of human nature in his poetry collections. His rhyming, rhythmic stanzas combine traditional form and literary devices with clever wordplay, colloquial expressions, and surprise endings. Formerly a professional singer, Prelutsky reveals his musical training in the sensitivity to language sounds, patterned repetition of words, and strong metric beat that characterize his works. In addition to macabre and slapstick ballad-type tales, Prelutsky writes occasional lines of lyric beauty, modern epigrams, and short collections about major holidays. He has also translated German and Swedish children's poetry into English.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Prelutsky was born on September 8, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York, to Charles and Dorothea Prelutsky. He and his younger brother were raised in an apartment building in the Bronx borough of New York City, in a neighborhood he describes as "a working-class neighborhood made up of Jewish, Irish, and Italian families" where "everyone knew everyone else, just like a small town." Early in life, Prelutsky showed musical aptitude. Active in the music department at his elementary school, he took voice and piano lessons throughout his childhood. As a teenager, he enrolled in New York City's High School of Music and Art before attending Hunter College. Throughout his early twenties, Prelutsky worked a widely disparate variety of jobs, including cab driver, folk singer, furniture mover, and opera singer. During this period, he considered finding work as an illustrator and began sketching fictional animals, accompanied by short stanzas of descriptive verse. A friend encouraged him to show the work to an editor, Susan Hirshman at Macmillan, who bluntly told him that his artwork was lacking, but he showed a natural talent for light poetry. Prelutsky wrote in Worlds of Childhood in 1990, "As for when I started being a poet, the truth is I never stopped. A poet is not something you become; a poet is something you are, just as you are a human being. I didn't always know I was a poet." In 1967 he released his first volume of original poetry for children, A Gopher in the Garden and Other Animal Poems. He has since authored over sixty books, won numerous literary awards, and edited several popular poetry collections. While his canon remains firmly focused on children's literature, Prelutsky has published one volume of poetry for adults titled There'll Be a Slight Delay: And Other Poems for Grown-Ups (1991).
MAJOR WORKS
Prelutsky's poetry reflects his meticulous attention to structure and sound. Drawing on aspects of rhyming, alliteration, and tonal sensibilities, one of Prelutsky's most conspicuous traits is the cohesive and lyrical strength evident in his word choice. Alliteration is one of the more striking characteristics of his verse, as demonstrated in the first two stanzas of his poem "Don't Ever Squeeze a Weasel by the Tail" from Zoo Doings: Animal Poems (1983): "You should never squeeze a weasel / for you might displease the weasel, / and don't ever seize a weasel by the tail. / Let his tail blow in the breeze; / if you pull it, he will sneeze, / for the weasel's constitution tends to be a little frail." Demonstrating a deceptive simplicity, this poem also displays another regular feature of a Prelutsky poem: a sprightly sense of humor. To that end, he often includes a surprise in the last line of his poems—what he terms a "little gift." He also generously applies a healthy inclusion of puns. For ex-ample, in the poem "Forty Performing Bananas" from perhaps his most famous collection to date, The New Kid on the Block (1984), Prelutsky offers a small litany of gentle puns, including the note that the bananas' "features are rather appealing" and that "people drive here in bunches to see us / our splits earn us worldly renown." In an essay for Writer, Prelutsky opined: "Writing humorous verse is hard work. For the humor to succeed, every part of the poem must be just right: It requires delicacy. If the poem uses too heavy a hand, the poem goes beyond being funny and turns into something disquieting or even grotesque. Conversely, if the poet doesn't push the idea far enough, then incongruities that are supposed to make the poem funny bypass the reader."
In addition to Prelutsky's fascination with slapstick humor and beasts of all kinds, both real and imaginary, his verses often reveal an obsession with food and eating. When these characteristics come together in such collections as The Terrible Tiger (1969), The Snopp on the Sidewalk and Other Poems (1977), The Baby Uggs are Hatching (1982), and Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast: Dinosaur Poems (1988), the result is a comical look at fanciful, gluttonous creatures which offers children a unique perspective on their own world. Some of Prelutsky's creations include the Baby Uggs, frightful creatures that begin to eat everything—including their mothers—the moment they hatch; a duck-like beast who gobbles up a teacher; and Prelutsky's terrible tiger, who receives his due when he slurps down a tailor, scissors and all. The poet has also written books that recognize the childhood delight in hearing ghost stories that make one afraid of turning the lights off at night. Prelutsky's award-winning collections Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep (1976) and The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight: More Poems to Trouble Your Sleep (1980) illustrate the author's relish for macabre tales of ghouls and vampires. However, Prelutsky's use of language mitigates the wickedness of his subject matter, just as his other creatures are made less threatening by their very ridiculousness. For example, in "The Ghoul," a poem included in Nightmares, the author writes: "Fingers, elbows, hands and knees / And arms and legs and feet— / He eats them with delight and ease, / For every part's a treat." With collections such as The Sheriff of Rottenshot (1982), Ride a Purple Pelican (1986), and Beneath a Blue Umbrella (1990), Prelutsky mostly steers clear of monsters while maintaining his love for nonsense rhymes and surprises (one character in The Sheriff of Rottenshot literally sneezes his head off). Rolling Harvey Down the Hill (1980), for example, concerns five friends and the various misadventures they have. Many of their experiences could happen to almost any group of children, except for the surprise prank at the end of the book when Harvey's friends take revenge against him for earlier pulling down their pants.
Prelutsky has further expanded the appeal of poetry targeted at young audiences through experimentation. Many of Prelutsky's later works eschew traditional rhyming couplets and present their readers with entertaining interpretations of more adult poetic forms. For example, in If Not for the Cat (2004), the poet expresses the inner-thoughts of the animal kingdom by using the form of classic Japanese seventeen-syllable haiku poetry. The title comes from the thoughts of an average mouse who ponders, "If not for the cat, / And the scarcity of cheese, / I could be content." In Scraminals (2002), Prelutsky and illustrator Peter Sís create a narrative out of zoology and wordplay, crafting a story about young tourists visiting Scranimal Island to see rare hybrid animals like "Spinachickens" and "Broccolions." In 1998 Prelutsky undertook an atypical and high-profile project when he agreed to complete an unfinished manuscript by the late Dr. Seuss titled Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! Working with illustrator Lane Smith, Prelutsky took Seuss's initial sketches and fashioned them into a storyline about the nontraditional Diffendoofer School, whose students must take a standardized test to prove Diffendoofer's worth or else the school will be closed. In addition to such inventive original projects, Prelutsky has also acted as editor and compiler for several children's poetry collections, including The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (1983), Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young (1986), For Laughing Out Loud: Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone (1991), The 20th-Century Children's Poetry Treasury (1999), and Read a Rhyme, Write a Rhyme (2005). Prelutsky founded another series of poetry collections, beginning with the volume Poems of A. Nonny Mouse (1989), that collects classic children's verse by anonymous authors, alleging that all of the poems were, in fact, written by the same person, the often-overlooked "A. Nonny Mouse."
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Prelutsky has emerged as one of the most popular and critically acclaimed children's poets of the modern era, prompting Terry Glover to label him "the poet laureate of the pre-pubescent set." Critics and teachers alike have particularly applauded Prelutsky's efforts to encourage juvenile and grade-school audiences to read poetry, a literary form that often goes ignored by pre-teens. Commentators have noted that Prelutsky effectively engages his audience by creating images—both mundane and fantastic—that speak directly to the interests of his readers. Discussing Something Big Has Been Here (1990), Carolyn Phelan has asserted that, "Prelutsky adopts a child's perspective to a remarkable degree—technically through his frequent use of the first person, but more fundamentally through his unerring sense of kids' concerns and their humor." Some have accused Prelutsky of pandering and employing inappropriate humor at times, with Myra Cohn Livingston commenting that Prelutsky's "verse is set apart by a fascination with the aberrations of human physiology and behavior, a taste for the macabre, and a curious delight in the gross and baser side of human nature" which "for those with differing sensibility, other light verse may hold more appeal." Despite such opinions, most reviewers have praised Prelutsky's ability to evoke strong images through wordplay and rhythm rather than overindulging in scatological references. In her review of Scranimals, Deborah Stevenson has called the volume a "stunning achievement" that "impeccably orchestrates sounds and cadences to suits a variety of moods."
AWARDS
Prelutsky has won numerous awards and accolades for his body of work. Some examples include: Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep was selected for the Children's Book Showcase of the Children's Book Council and was included in the American Institute of Graphic Arts Book Show in 1977. The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight: More Poems to Trouble Your Sleep was selected as one of the New York Times Outstanding Books of the Year and one of the Times' Best Illustrated Books of the Year in 1980. The Random House Book of Poetry for Children was a Child Study Association Children's Book of the Year and a Library of Congress Book of the Year. Something Big Has Been Here was an Association for Library Services to Children Notable Book and a Booklist Editor's Choice Book. Beneath a Blue Umbrella was named as a New York Times Best Illustrated Book, and For Laughing Out Loud: Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone was recognized as one of the School Library Journal's Best Books of the Year. Awful Ogre's Awful Day (2000) was a New York Times Best Illustrated Book, a BookSense 76 Pick, and won the National Parenting Publication Award (NAPPA) and the Parenting Magazine Reading Magic Award. Additionally, Scranimals was a 2003 School Library Journal Best Book and won the Kentucky Bluegrass Award.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
The Bad Bear [translator; written by Rudolf Neumann; illustrations by Eva Johanna Rubin] (picture book) 1967
A Gopher in the Garden and Other Animal Poems [illustrations by Robert Leydenfrost] (children's poetry) 1967
Lazy Blackbird and Other Verses [illustrations by Janosch] (children's poetry) 1969
The Terrible Tiger [illustrations by Arnold Lobel] (children's poetry) 1969
Three Saxon Nobles and Other Verses [illustrations by Eva Johanna Rubin] (children's poetry) 1969
Toucans Two and Other Poems [illustrations by José Aruego] (children's poetry) 1970; published in the United Kingdom as Zoo Doings and Other Poems, 1971
Circus! [illustrations by Arnold Lobel] (children's poetry) 1974
The Pack Rat's Day and Other Poems [illustrations by Margaret Bloy Graham] (children's poetry) 1974
Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep [illustrations by Arnold Lobel] (children's poetry) 1976
It's Halloween [illustrations by Marylin Hafner] (children's poetry) 1977
The Snopp on the Sidewalk and Other Poems [illustrations by Byron Barton] (picture book) 1977
The Mean Old Mean Hyena [illustrations by Arnold Lobel] (children's poetry) 1978
The Queen of Eene [illustrations by Victoria Chess] (children's poetry) 1978
The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight: More Poems to Trouble Your Sleep [illustrations by Arnold Lobel] (children's poetry) 1980
Rainy, Rainy Saturday [illustrations by Marylin Hafner] (children's poetry) 1980
Rolling Harvey Down the Hill [illustrations by Victoria Chess] (children's poetry) 1980
It's Christmas [illustrations by Marylin Hafner] (children's poetry) 1981
The Baby Uggs are Hatching [illustrations by James Stevenson] (children's poetry) 1982
It's Thanksgiving [illustrations by Marylin Hafner] (children's poetry) 1982
Kermit's Garden of Verses [illustrations by Bruce McNally] (children's poetry) 1982
The Sheriff of Rottenshot: Poems [illustrations by Victoria Chess] (children's poetry) 1982
It's Valentine's Day [illustrations by Yossi Abolafia] (children's poetry) 1983
The Random House Book of Poetry for Children [editor; illustrations by Arnold Lobel] (children's poetry) 1983
Zoo Doings: Animal Poems [illustrations by Paul O. Zelinsky] (children's poetry) 1983
It's Snowing! It's Snowing! [illustrations by Jeanne Titherington] (children's poetry) 1984
The New Kid on the Block [illustrations by James Stevenson] (children's poetry) 1984
What I Did Last Summer [illustrations by Yossi Abolafia] (children's poetry) 1984
My Parents Think I'm Sleeping [illustrations by Yossi Abolafia] (children's poetry) 1985
Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young [editor; illustrations by Marc Brown] (children's poetry) 1986
Ride a Purple Pelican [illustrations by Garth Williams] (children's poetry) 1986
Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast: Dinosaur Poems [illustrations by Arnold Lobel] (children's poetry) 1988
Poems of A. Nonny Mouse [editor; illustrations by Henrik Drescher] (children's poetry) 1989
Beneath a Blue Umbrella [illustrations by Garth Williams] (children's poetry) 1990
Something Big Has Been Here [illustrations by James Stevenson] (children's poetry) 1990
For Laughing Out Loud: Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone [editor; illustrations by Marjorie Priceman] (children's poetry) 1991
There'll Be a Slight Delay: And Other Poems for Grown-Ups [illustrations by Jack Ziegler] (poetry) 1991
Jack Prelutsky's Sweet and Silly Muppet Poems [illustrations by Joe Ewers] (children's poetry) 1992
A. Nonny Mouse Writes Again!: Poems [editor; illustrations by Marjorie Priceman] (children's poetry) 1993
The Dragons are Singing Tonight [illustrations by Peter Sís] (children's poetry) 1993
For Laughing Out Louder: More Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone [editor; illustrations by Marjorie Priceman] (children's poetry) 1995
Monday's Troll [illustrations by Peter Sís] (children's poetry) 1996
A Pizza the Size of the Sun: Poems [illustrations by James Stevenson] (children's poetry) 1996
The Beauty of the Beast: Poems from the Animal Kingdom [editor; illustrations by Meilo So] (children's poetry) 1997
Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! [adaptor from an unfinished script by Dr. Seuss; illustrations by Lane Smith] (picture book) 1998
Imagine That!: Poems of Never-Was [editor; illustrations by Kevin Hawkes] (children's poetry) 1998
Dog Days: Rhymes around the Year [illustrations by Dyanna Wolcott] (children's poetry) 1999
The Gargoyle on the Roof [illustrations by Peter Sís] (children's poetry) 1999
The 20th-Century Children's Poetry Treasury [editor; illustrations by Meilo So] (children's poetry) 1999
Awful Ogre's Awful Day [illustrations by Paul O. Zelinsky] (children's poetry) 2000
It's Raining Pigs and Noodles: Poems [illustrations by James Stevenson] (children's poetry) 2000
The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders: Rhymes [illustrations by Petra Mathers] (children's poetry) 2002
Halloween Countdown [illustrations by Dan Yaccarino] (children's poetry) 2002
Scranimals [illustrations by Peter Sís] (children's poetry) 2002
If Not for the Cat: Haiku [illustrations by Ted Rand] (children's poetry) 2004
Wild Witches' Ball [illustrations by Kelly Asbury] (children's poetry) 2004
Read a Rhyme, Write a Rhyme [editor; illustrations by Meilo So] (children's poetry) 2005
Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant and Other Poems [illustrations by Carin Berger] (children's poetry) 2006
What a Day It Was at School! [illustrations by Doug Cushman] (children's poetry) 2006
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Jack Prelutsky (essay date November 1990)
SOURCE: Prelutsky, Jack. "How to Write a Funny Poem." Writer 103, no. 11 (November 1990): 7-10.
[In the following essay, Prelutsky discusses his writing process, specifically focusing on how to write humorous poetry aimed at juvenile audiences. Prelutsky notes that, "If the poet uses too heavy a hand, the poem goes beyond being funny and turns into something disquieting or even grotesque."]
Writing humorous verse is hard work. For the humor to succeed, every part of the poem must be just right: It requires delicacy. If the poet uses too heavy a hand, the poem goes beyond being funny and turns into something disquieting or even grotesque. Conversely, if the poet doesn't push the idea far enough, the incongruities that are supposed to make the poem funny bypass the reader.
Humorous poetry is often highly underrated. The reader responds easily to humor with laughter, often unaware of the mental and technical gymnastics that the poet has performed to elicit this response. Physiological studies have shown that the body has a much easier time laughing than getting angry. Since humor is such a facile emotion, the reader assumes that the funny poem is also a simple poem—about as complicated as slipping on a banana peel.
How do I make a poem funny? Exactly what are these gymnastics? I'll start with one that is a favorite, and then continue with several others that should be standard in any humorist's repertoire.
I love the technique of asking serious questions about a silly idea. You can make almost anything funny by starting with an absolutely nonsensical premise and asking common sense questions about it. I once was in a supermarket selecting some boneless chicken breasts for dinner, and it suddenly occurred to me to ask the question, "What about the rest of the chicken—was that boneless, too?" And if so, where did it live, what did it do, and what did the other chickens think of it? When I'd finished answering my "serious" questions, I had the groundwork for a poem, "Ballad of a Boneless Chicken," which appears in The New Kid on the Block.
While I was writing the poem, one last question occurred to me: Exactly what sort of egg does a boneless chicken lay? The answer provided me with a surprising, yet somehow logical conclusion.
"Ballad of a Boneless Chicken"
I'm a basic boneless chicken,
yes, I have no bones inside,
I'm without a trace of rib cage,
yet I hold myself with pride,
other hens appear offended
by my total lack of bones,
they discuss me impolitely
in derogatory tones.
I am absolutely boneless,
I am boneless through and through,
I have neither neck nor thighbones,
and my back is boneless too,
and I haven't got a wishbone,
not a bone within my breast,
so I rarely care to travel
from the comfort of my nest.
I have feathers fine and fluffy,
I have lovely little wings,
but I lack the superstructure
to support these splendid things.
Since a chicken finds it tricky
to parade on boneless legs,
I stick closely to the hen house,
laying little scrambled eggs.
Another of my tricks is to find that one small special something in the ordinary, or to add something unexpected to the apparently mundane. For example, in The New Kid on the Block, I have a poem called, "Euphonica Jarre." Euphonica would be unexceptional, were it not for one preposterous talent—she's the world's worst singer. In this poem, I applied an other device, one familiar to all humorists—exaggeration! To make Euphonica outlandishly funny, I decided that her vocalizing should cause unlikely events, such as ships running aground, trees defoliating themselves, and the onset of avalanches.
"Euphonica Jarre"
Euphonica Jarre has a voice that's bizarre,
but Euphonica warbles all day,
as windowpanes shatter and chefs spoil the batter
and mannequins moan with dismay.
Mighty ships run aground at her horrible sound,
pretty pictures fall out of their frames,
trees drop off their branches,
rocks start avalanches,
and flower beds burst into flames.
When she opens her mouth, even eagles head south,
little fish truly wish they could drown,
the buzzards all hover, as tigers take cover,
and rats pack their bags and leave town.
Milk turns into butter and butterflies mutter
and bees look for something to sting,
pigs peel off their skins, a tornado begins
when Euphonica Jarre starts to sing.
In The New Kid on the Block, there's another poem called, "Forty Performing Bananas," which illustrates the tactic of making something extraordinary out of the ordinary. On the surface, there's nothing unusual about bananas. They're found in every food market, and we take them for granted when we slice them over our breakfast cereal. However, they become uniquely foolish when imbued with the skill to sing and dance. Some inanimate objects are just naturally amusing when they're anthropomorphized. Performing bananas are among them; airborne hot dogs, which appear in my newest book, Something Big Has Been Here, are another.
By the way, I use a lot of wordplay in the banana poem: their features are "appealing" and their fans "drive here in bunches." It's probably already occurred to you, but I'd like to mention that I routinely combine several techniques in a poem and can wind up with some complex results.
Another way to find humor in the ordinary is to take this item or idea and keep amplifying it until it reaches a totally absurd conclusion. When I was writing Something Big Has Been Here, I was struck with the notion of an uncuttable meat loaf. It's an old joke, and there are dozens of examples on TV and film. I searched for an approach that would allow the reader to experience that old joke in a new way. In this case, the meat loaf in question resists all attempts to slice, hammer, drill or chisel it. The implements become more and more exotic; the speaker resorts to bows and arrows, a blowtorch, a power saw, and finally a hippopotamus to trample it. Nevertheless, the meat loaf remains intact. Though I could have ended the whole business here, I decided to employ an additional tactic, that of combining two different ideas that normally don't belong together, further stretching credulity. I conclude the poem by accepting the meat loaf for what it is (indestructible) and reveal that additional meat loaves are now being manufactured as building materials. Of course, no builder would use meat loaves to erect a house, but by making such an absurd leap, I made the poem even funnier.
I'd like to touch on a rather obvious resource for any poet who writes humor: letting the humor grow out of the words themselves. There are numerous kinds of wordplay: puns, anagrams, spoonerisms, and malapropisms. I love puns, and in Something Big Has Been Here, I expanded on the sayings that children write to each other in their autograph books when I composed the poem, "I Wave Good-bye When Butter Flies." In this list of puns, you can watch a pillow fight, sew on a cabbage patch, dance at a basket ball, etc.
"I Wave Good-bye When Butter Flies"
I wave good-bye when butter flies
and cheer a boxing match,
I've often watched my pillow fight,
I've sewn a cabbage patch,
I like to dance at basket balls
or lead a rubber band,
I've marveled at a spelling bee,
I've helped a peanut stand.
It's possible a pencil points,
but does a lemon drop?
Does coffee break or chocolate kiss,
and will a soda pop?
I share my milk with drinking straws,
my meals with chewing gum,
and should I see my pocket change,
I'll hear my kettle drum.
It makes me sad when lettuce leaves,
I laugh when dinner rolls,
I wonder if the kitchen sinks
and if a salad bowls,
I've listened to a diamond ring,
I've waved a football fan,
and if a chimney sweeps the floor,
I'm sure the garbage can.
Another common technique to achieve humor is the surprise ending. My use of this device is the result of being so astounded and delighted by the O. Henry stories I read as a child. One of my most successful uses of a surprise ending is in the title poem of my book, The New Kid on the Block. I recite a complaint about a neighborhood bully, the new kid who punches, tweaks my arm, pulls my hair, likes to fight, is twice my size, and just at the point when everyone has conjured up an image of some big, loutish boy, I end the poem with the following lines: "… that new kid's really bad, I don't care for her at all."
I admit that the punch line's humor depends heavily on the shameless use of one of contemporary society's most common stereotypes, but it has never failed to draw laughter whenever I've recited the poem to an audience. This is a good place to remind everyone that much of our humor is culture bound. Very often, what may be hilarious to an American audience may draw blank looks from residents of the Himalayas. Actually, I don't have to go as far as Tibet to make an apt comparison; there are many moments on the British Benny Hill television show that draw blank looks from me.
One last device I'll mention is irony. It can be as simple as in my poem, "My Dog, He Is an Ugly Dog" (from The New Kid on the Block ), where I list all the things wrong with my dog: he's oddly built, sometimes has an offensive aroma, has fleas, is noisy, stupid, and greedy. Nevertheless, despite this litany of his drawbacks, I declare that he's the only dog for me.
In my poem, "I Met a Rat of Culture" (from Something Big Has Been Here ), the irony becomes a bit more sophisticated when I describe a learned and highly skilled rodent: He's handsomely attired, recites poetry (a bit of irony within irony), speaks many languages, is knowledgeable about all the arts and sciences, and so on, but at the end of the poem, he reveals his true nature: "… but he squealed and promptly vanished at the entrance of my cat, for despite his erudition, he was nothing but a rat."
There are several other methods I incorporate, but I'll leave them to some desperate graduate student to uncover. A few involve simple observation and focusing on incongruities. That's what happened when I was squirrel-watching, and noticed that their tails look like question marks. I wrote a poem in which I concluded that it's pointless for them to wear question marks, inasmuch as "there's little squirrels care to know." ("Squirrels," from Something Big Has Been Here ) And there's always the riddle trick, where you start with the punch line and work backward, as I did in "A Wolf Is at the Laundromat" from The New Kid on the Block. You learn in the last line that the unusually polite wolf doing its laundry is not to be feared, since it is nothing more than a "wash-and-wear-wolf."
So much for the mechanics of making a poem humorous. What do you do when you're stuck for a really funny idea? Watch an I Love Lucy rerun—it hasn't failed me yet.
Jack Prelutsky (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: Prelutsky, Jack. "In Search of the Addle-pated Paddlepuss." In Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children, edited by William Zinsser, pp. 99-120. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990.
[In the following essay, Prelutsky discusses his writing career, his inspirations for becoming a children's poet, and the literary devices he employs to engage his readers.]
The questions I'm asked most often are: Do I have children? When did I start being a poet? Where do I get my ideas, and how do I write my poems?
I don't have any children. If I did, I don't think I could have ever written my poems, because I love children and I love being around them, and over the past twenty years I've visited thousands of children around the country—none of whose diapers I had to change in the middle of the night. I could store up energy in the middle of the night and get up the next morning and write the poems.
As for when I started being a poet, the truth is I never stopped. A poet is not something you become; a poet is something you are, just as you are a human being. I didn't always know I was a poet. When I was a child I wasn't a particularly good writer. My teachers tended to discourage creativity on my part; they didn't sense any. I flunked English One in college twice and English Two once. Or maybe it was the other way around.
I didn't discover that I could write until I was about twenty-four. I wanted to be an artist, and I used to draw imaginary animals for my own amusement. One evening I sat down and looked at about two dozen of these drawings that had taken me months to draw, and after about two hours I had written two dozen little poems to go with them. I put them aside and didn't think of them for a while. Then a friend saw them and made me take them to his editor. She said, "You are talented." I thought she was going to love my drawings. But she told me I was a terrible artist, and she showed me the work of other illustrators—Arnold Lobel and Maurice Sendak and Tomi Ungerer—and I understood why I was a terrible artist. But she said I had a talent for verse that I didn't suspect I had. As many of the best things are discovered in life, I discovered my gift through serendipity. I was looking for one thing and found something else, but only because I was looking for that first thing.
When I write my poetry for children I have the words in mind, but I also have the child in mind, including the child within myself. I remember that in school I had a librarian who loved books but hated children. We had to go to the library once a week. The first week, when I was in seventh grade, I accidentally discovered a book called Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton. I had always loved animals—I grew up in the Bronx and spent a lot of time visiting the Bronx Zoo. Well, I hated and feared that librarian so much that I was afraid to go in every week and stand there looking for a book. So I hid Wild Animals I Have Known behind some other books. Then, every week, I could just walk into the library, grab the book and sit down with it; I read the same book thirty-six times that year. I had similar feelings about my English teacher; she disliked poetry and was determined to perpetuate her own prejudices in her captives.
Where do my ideas come from? Ideas come from everywhere. They come from everything that has ever happened. They come from everything I have inside. They come from everything I have ever seen or felt or dreamed or read or seen on television or at the movies or remembered or experienced. Things I was told.
One of the main differences between a poet and a non-poet is that a poet knows he is not going to remember what happened. Therefore he is smart enough to carry a notebook and write it down. If I didn't write down what was happening I wouldn't remember it. The brain is a wonderful tool in many ways. But in one way it's like a sieve. If you've ever tried to hold sand in a sieve at the beach, you know you can only hold it for a little while; unless you put a bucket underneath, the sand is gone pretty soon. It's the same thing with an idea—unless you act on an idea, it doesn't stick around very long. I once heard that Albert Einstein was asked why he didn't keep a notebook for his ideas and he said, "Well, I only had one idea."
A poem exists because something happened to a person whom other people choose to call a poet. It exists because something occurred or was felt or dreamed or remembered and the poet chose to com municate it to other people.
Poetry is many things. It's the music of language. It's the stuff that doesn't have to extend to the margin. It's the stuff that can have meter and rhythm. It's the stuff that at its finest says things that prose cannot say. Very often it's something that's comforting to the poet. It's a distillation of experience. But most of all it's communication, right up there with sculpture and photography and painting and music.
One of my earliest poems was a distillation. I looked at a bee one day, and I simply wrote:
Every bee
that
ever was
was
partly
sting
and partly
… buzz.
I wrote that twenty-five years ago. Since then I've tried writing other poems about bees and I haven't been able to write a better one. Because, back then, I really didn't know what I was doing.
Another secret of writing, along with taking notes, is keeping your eyes and your ears open, keeping your mind and your heart open, and being aware of what's going on around you. No two poems happen the same way. Writing a poem is like skinning a cat—there's more than one way to do it. To skin a cat it's helpful to have a sharp knife and a steady hand. To write a poem it's useful to have a sharp pencil and a clear head. (Or, again, maybe it's the other way around.) Sometimes I just close my eyes and let the muse take over. Most writers will tell you that often they don't tell the poem or the story what to do; the story or the poem tells them what to do. It takes over. And very often, by the time I've finished a poem it doesn't resemble anything I had set out to create. Never be afraid to let your imagination take wing.
Sometimes I have a rhyme in mind. It can be something as simple as pig/wig. Sometimes it's just a word. A word will come into my mind, like "mucilaginous." (We'll get to that later.) Sometimes it's a couplet. A couplet will just come to me and I'll work in both directions from those two lines. Or it could be a sentence. Or part of a sentence—a beginning with no end, or an end with no beginning; just some vague notion of what I want to say.
When I was a kid I heard poems about hills and daffodils and things like that. The teacher would recite a boring poem:
Blah, blah, blah, blah, the flower,
Blah, blah, blah, blah, the tree,
Blah, blah, blah, blah, the shower,
Blah, blah, blah, blah, the bee.
And of course I didn't care much for that. There's a place for that later in life. If I had wanted to hear poems back then—and I wasn't convinced that I did—I probably wanted to hear poems about kids like myself. Or poems about Monsters, OuterSpace, Dragons, Dinosaurs, WeirdPeople, Sports—things that kids can relate to. That's what is wonderful about writers who are writing for children today. They do write about those things.
When I first started compiling anthologies and looking at the writing of other poets I had a lot of trouble with the stuff that was written in the early part of the twentieth century and the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was a Victorian tradition, and it had two unfortunate tendencies. One was a sort of greeting-card verse that was sickeningly sweet and condescending and had no literary merit. The other was poetry that was moralistic and pompous; everything had to have a message, and that was condescending, too. But it doesn't have to be that way. Children aren't stupid. The main differences between children and adults are that children have had fewer experiences—because they haven't been around long enough to have as many as we have had—and they are short. Children love to learn. They learn quickly. So I never condescend when I write for children.
There are different tricks. I have a studio at home that's filled with paraphernalia. Stuff. Like wind-up toys and my miscellaneous frog collection. I put things in my studio because I never know what's going to strike my eye. One day I'll go in there and I'll look at something that I've looked at hundreds of times, and on that day a particular object will say, "Write me today."
I have, for example, a little wind-up mouse that's holding a piece of cheese. You wind it up and it goes zut zut zut zut and then it flips over backwards and it goes zut zut and it flips over again. About six months after I got the mouse I said, "There's a poem in that mouse," and I wrote a poem called "Boing! Boing! Squeak!"
Boing! Boing! Squeak!
Boing! Boing! Squeak!
A bouncing mouse is in my house,
it's been here for a week.
And I continued from there. I also have a plastic flower "growing" on my window sill, and in my next book there's a poem about growing plastic flowers.
About twenty-five years ago I was in upstate New York and I stopped at a farmhouse. That was something new to me. I hadn't been on farms much; I was born in Brooklyn, grew up in the Bronx and was weaned in Manhattan. I went into a barn and happened to get there when an egg was hatching. It was wonderful. I just sat there for a long time watching the egg crack and watching the little beak come out and the little feathers come out. I was fascinated by it, and I made a few notes. Later I went home and wrote this poem, simply from direct observation. Incidentally, I discovered very early the value of the surprise ending; I may have learned it from O. Henry. Children love to be surprised, so I love to give them little gifts. Often the gift is in the last line of the poem.
"The Egg"
If you listen very carefully, you'll hear the chicken hatching.
At first there scarcely was a sound, but now a steady scratching;
and now the egg begins to crack, the scratching starts to quicken,
as anxiously we all await the exit of the chicken.
And now a head emerges from the darkness of the egg,
and now a bit of fluff appears, and now a tiny leg,
and now the chicken's out at last, he's shaking him self loose.
But, wait a minute, that's no chicken … goodness, it's a goose.
Sometimes I would fall in love, not with the life of the animal, or with the look of the animal, but with the sound of the name of the animal, and I just enjoyed myself. There's something about the word "sneeze," for instance, that has always rung a bell in my head. I've written three or four poems that talk about sneezing: about someone sneezing on a trapeze; about the "sneezy snoozer," someone who sneezes and snoozes at the same time; about a man who sneezes seven times, and each sneeze is louder than the previous one, and on the seventh sneeze his head flies off. Those "eeze" words have always tickled me. Many of my poems were written at the Bronx Zoo, and one day I got to thinking about the weasel—just having fun with the word and seeing what I could do with it. This is what came out:
"Don't Ever Seize a Weasel by the Tail"
You should never squeeze a weasel
for you might displease the weasel,
and don't ever seize a weasel by the tail.
Let his tail blow in the breeze;
if you pull it, he will sneeze,
for the weasel's constitution tends to be a little frail.
Yes the weasel wheezes easily;
the weasel freezes easily;
the weasel's tan complexion rather suddenly turns pale.
So don't displease or tease a weasel,
squeeze or freeze or wheeze a weasel
and don't ever seize a weasel by the tail.
Sometimes you take it a step further and you combine the two processes—direct observation and word play. Once I was watching a cow chewing her cud in a field. I liked the idea of a chewing cow, and I also liked the idea of chewing, and I thought, "Well, cows chew. And cows moo." So I just took the thought of what a cow does—it stands there and doesn't do much of anything, it just chews its cud—and those "oo" words started popping into my head. The poem that I wrote was harder than most because I had to combine two different ways of thinking—observation and word play—into one poem, and I came up with this:
"The Cow"
The cow mainly moos as she chooses to moo
and she chooses to moo as she chooses.
She furthermore chews as she chooses to chew
and she chooses to chew as she muses.
If she chooses to moo she may moo to amuse
or may moo just to moo as she chooses.
If she chooses to chew she may moo as she chews
or may chew just to chew as she muses.
One of my first jobs when I got out of high school was working at a commercial factor company in midtown Manhattan. I wasn't cut out for it. My coworkers had several nicknames for me, and one of them was "the Snail." I was called the Snail because I tended to do things at my own pace. It was a very different pace from the one that the people who were running the company wanted to pay me for. After they relieved me of my duties, permanently, I thought about that. As it happens, over the years I've written many autobiographical poems that I've disguised as animal poems. When I was younger, for example, I was a very insular person; it was hard to get to know me. So I wrote of myself as a turtle hiding inside a shell. This time I wrote of myself as a snail:
The snail doesn't know where he's going
and he doesn't especially care,
one place is as good as another
and here is no better than there.
The snail's unconcerned with direction
but happily goes on his way
in search of specifically nothing
at two or three inches a day.
As I began to learn more about writing and about children I increasingly started to write from my own childhood experiences, drawing on things that really happened. Something wonderful occurs when you do that. The more you do it, the easier it gets; the more you write down what happened to you when you were a child, the more you will remember.
I had a childhood friend named Willie, and one day, when the rest of us were hanging around—Harvey, Lumpy, Tony and I—he came out into the street and said, "Look at that!" We said, "What?" He said, "There's a worm on the sidewalk." We had all seen worms before, and we didn't think much about it one way or the other. But then he said, "You know, that looks good!" And he ate it. Willie and I had an agreement that if one of us did something new, the other one had to do it—right then and there. When Willie did things, by the way, he did them right. He didn't just eat some little pinkiesize worm, because anybody can eat those. He ate one of those big, long, fat, red, juicy worms.
This happened when I was about eight years old. I had completely forgotten it until I was in my thirties and began writing about some of the things that happened to me when I was a kid in the Bronx. And one of the things I suddenly remembered was that I had eaten a worm. So I wrote the following poem. It's direct experience, that's all it is. I wrote it the way it happened.
"Willie Ate a Worm"
Willie ate a worm today,
a squiggly, wiggly worm.
He picked it up
from the dust and dirt
and wiped it off
on his brand-new shirt.
Then slurp, slupp
he ate it up,
yes Willie ate a worm today,
a squiggly, wiggly worm.
Willie ate a worm today,
he didn't bother to chew,
and we all stared
and we all squirmed
when Willie swallowed
down that worm.
Then slupp, slurp
Willie burped,
yes Willie ate a worm today,
I think I'll eat one too.
I remember one period of several years when I was having a lot of trouble writing. Nothing was coming out—real writer's block. I didn't know what to do. So I started asking teachers and librarians, "What should I write about? What do kids want to hear about?" And they all told me the same thing: monsters. (Today they will tell you dinosaurs.) I suddenly remembered that when I was a kid my mother used to threaten me, her own son, with the bogeyman. Her method was simple:
"Mommy, I don't want to eat my spinach."
"You eat your spinach or the bogeyman is going to get you!"
"O.K., I'll eat my spinach."
"Mommy, I don't want to go to bed."
"You go to bed or the bogeyman is going to get you."
All right, I'll go to bed."
He never got me, by the way. I figured out that the reason he didn't get me was not because my mother was lying to me, but because we lived in a bad neighborhood. He would rather stay in his own domicile and wait for me to come to him.
Well, I wrote a poem about the bogeyman and later I started reading books of folklore, particularly about the traditional scary creatures of popular culture—werewolves, zombies, witches … But the bogeyman has always interested me the most because he was the one my mother used on me. I wrote this poem in the middle of the night. (I wrote all the poems in Nightmares between midnight and six in the morning; I couldn't seem to write them at any other time.) What I did was to draw a word picture of what I thought the bogeyman should be and what I thought my mother had in mind when she was saying these terrible things to her gullible little boy.
"The Bogeyman"
In the desolate depths of a perilous place
the bogeyman lurks, with a snarl on his face.
Never dare, never dare to approach his dark lair
for he's waiting … just waiting … to get you.
He skulks in the shadows, relentless and wild
in his search for a tender, delectable child.
With his steely sharp claws and his slavering jaws
oh he's waiting … just waiting … to get you.
Many have entered his dreary domain
but not even one has been heard from again.
They no doubt made a feast for the butchering beast
and he's waiting … just waiting … to get you.
In that sulphurous, sunless and sinister place
he'll crumple your bones in his bogey embrace.
Never never go near if you hold your life dear,
for oh! … what he'll do … when he gets you!
In other words, I took my mother's monster threat and turned it into a poem. Over the years I've learned that every experience should be treated as an opportunity for creativity, whether it's a good experience or a bad one or an indifferent one. For instance, I like to do a little woodworking around the house, and one day six or seven years ago I was building some shelves. We had recently moved into a house, and I was building a large cabinet. I built it in one piece. It turned out to be too big to fit through a door or to move from my shop, so I built it on-site, in the living room, on the wall-to-wall carpet. I was gluing it up, and I had spread newspapers everywhere. But Murphy's Law, which says that if something can go wrong it will, is a wonderful law; it's a law that's rarely broken. Well, the phone rings and I run to get it. I'm barefoot. I stub my toe on the edge of a board and continue running to the phone. I'm talking on the phone and I'm looking back in horror, because I realize that what I've also done is to tip over a quart of woodworker's glue, which has found its way through the one gap in the newspapers in the entire room and is seeping into the carpet.
The carpet was irreclaimable—we had to rip the whole thing up. I didn't like it anyway. But at the time we couldn't afford to replace it. I looked at that glue oozing over the carpet and I started to anthropomorphize the glue. That's a wonderful technique, by the way; you can anthropomorphize anything—make it come alive. And that's what I did. I created glue creatures that I called gloppers. At first I had them as "gloppy gloopers," but that didn't work out for purposes of rhyme. Finally I turned them into "gloopy gloppers," and I created these mucilaginous—I told you we'd get back to that word—gelatinous gloopy gloppers, as follows:
"Song of the Gloopy Gloppers"
We are Gloppers, gloopy Gloppers,
mucilaginous, gelatinous,
we never fail to find a frail
yet filling form to fatten us,
we ooze about the country side,
through hamlet and metropolis,
for Gloppers ooze where Gloppers choose,
enveloping the populace.
We are Gloppers, gloopy Gloppers,
unrelenting, irresistible,
what we will do to you is too
distressing to be listable,
we'll ooze into your living room,
your kitchen, and your vestibule,
and in your bed we'll taste your head,
to test if you're digestible.
We are Gloppers, gloopy Gloppers,
globs of undulating Glopper ooze,
you cannot quell our viscid swell,
there is no way to stop our ooze,
for Gloppers are invincible,
unquenchable, unstoppable,
and when we swarm upon your form,
we know we'll find you GLOPPABLE!
Sometimes a writer is faced with an interesting problem: you have to write about something you know nothing about. Writers do this all the time—open almost any magazine and you'll see. In my most recent book, a small book of dinosaur poems called Tyran-nosaurus Was a Beast, I had the problem of wanting a magnificent huge dinosaur to end the book with. I was stuck. But sometimes blessings happen. The very week that I needed a dinosaur, a new one was discovered. Not only that; it was discovered a few miles from my house, right outside the city of Albuquerque, and it was the largest land creature ever on earth. The story was on the front page of the newspaper. It was one of the psauropods, called seismosaurus, which means "earth shaker," and I knew nothing about it. All I knew about seismosaurus was that I wanted to end the book with it and that it was big. I opened Roget's Thesaurus, my favorite reference book, to the word "big," and this is what I wrote:
"Seismosaurus"
Seismosaurus was enormous,
Seismosaurus was tremendous,
Seismosaurus was prodigious,
Seismosaurus was stupendous.
Seismosaurus was titanic,
Seismosaurus was colossal,
Seismosaurus now is nothing
but a monumental fossil.
All those big words, by the way, are in the exact order that they appear in the thesaurus. You can check it.
Usually we're unaware that we are storing up images. Then one day, suddenly, a lot of things just come together. When I was a kid there was a television program called You Asked for It. One of the things I saw on that show was a cat that played ping-pong. There was a man at one end of the table hitting the ball, and at the other end was a cat. The cat never missed. A few years ago I went to the University of Oregon, in Eugene, to give a talk, and they put me up with a local couple. The man's two interests seemed to be astronomy and ping-pong. He had a ping-pong table in the basement. We played, and he beat me 21-0. Then he said, "Now I'll play just half of your side of the table and I'll hit all my shots to either your forehand or your backhand—you choose which." And he beat me 21-3. Then he did the same using half the table and playing with his wallet and spotting me 16 points, and he still beat me easily.
Well, You Asked for It and the ping-pong-playing cat and this fellow in the basement in Eugene all came together, and I wrote the following poem, which is from a book called Something Big Has Been Here, a sequel to The New Kid on the Block.
"The Addle-pated Paddlepuss"
The Addle-pated Paddlepuss
is agile as a cat,
its neck is long and limber,
and its face is broad and flat,
it moves with skill and vigor,
with velocity and grace,
as it spends its every second
playing ping-pong with its face.
The Addle-pated Paddlepuss
prevails in every game,
its opponent doesn't matter,
the result is all the same,
with its supersonic smashes
and its convoluted spins,
it demolishes all comers
and invariably wins.
The Addle-pated Paddlepuss,
with effervescent verve,
follows innovative volleys
with a scintillating serve,
if you're fond of playing ping-pong
and would like to lose in style,
the Addle-pated Paddlepuss
will serve you for awhile.
Jack Prelutsky (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: Prelutsky, Jack. "Jack Prelutsky." In Writers Dreaming, edited by Naomi Epel, pp. 188-99. New York, N.Y.: Carol Southern Books, 1993.
[In the following essay, Prelutsky reflects on how his dreams often influence the imagery in his poetry and verse for children. The author notes, "One of the secrets of art, whether it's painting or music or anything else, is knowing that it's just as important what you leave out, as what you put in."]
Today I shall powder my elephant's ears
and paint his posterior red,
I'll trim all his toe nails with suitable shears
and place a toupee on his head.
Tonight I shall tie a balloon to his tail
and wrap him in feathers and furs,
then fasten his necktie and velveteen veil
and put on his boots and his spurs.
There'll be a warm smile on my elephant's face
as we're welcomed to Pachyderm Hall,
to dance until daybreak with elegant grace
at the elephants' masquerade ball.
That poem came from a dream. It's odd because the elephant came first from a mouse. A little friend, who was then six years old, said, "I had an idea about dancing with a mouse." I said, "That's very interesting" and I went to sleep that night and dreamt about dancing with elephants. There were thousands of elephants and it was a masquerade ball. Now an elephants' masquerade ball is very exciting. After all, you need a big hall. And toilet facilities are important.
I don't know about the psychological significance of it but I've probably written about eight or ten poems about elephants over the years. I like to take simple ideas sometimes, things that we've heard all our lives and rework them into new forms. I remember when I was a kid I heard jokes—How do you know when there's an elephant in the refrigerator? The answer I remember is, You can't close the door. How do you know when you have an elephant in the house? You can smell the peanuts on his breath. Et cetera. I said, Wouldn't it be fun to put a bunch of these ideas together into a poem? And, since I do enjoy writing about elephants, I would up with "An Elephant Is Hard to Hide."
I get a lot of inspiration from my dreams. Actually just about all of the poems in my two nightmare books, The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight and Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep came from dreams. The only exception might be the first poem that I wrote, which was the poem called "The Bogeyman." That one came from direct experience. My mother used to threaten me with the bogeyman when I was a kid. She'd say, "Wash your hands or the bogeyman's going to get you." Or "Eat your spinach or the bogeyman's going to get you." And that sort of led to the book.
After I wrote the bogeyman poem, I realized I was on to something. I wrote all the poems in the two Nightmares books between about midnight and six in the morning. I would wake up in a cold sweat and I'd be dreaming about a witch or a werewolf or a goblin or something like that. It was a particularly unpleasant time.
I had dreamt about the witch but was missing some parts of the poem. I was having dinner with my girlfriend in Boston and in the middle of dinner I got up from the table and picked up a paper napkin and just scribbled the poem. I said "Thank you so much because you've just inspired a wonderful poem." I showed it to her and she slapped me and said, "Get out." I never saw her again. I tried to explain to her that the witch I was writing about was really the opposite of what she was. But she didn't buy that. Needless to say, I learned a little about romance that evening.
Some of my dreams are very pleasant actually. I've had one for the past couple of months I'm trying to hold on to. It's my magic chair. I dream about it about twice a week. It's sort of my magic carpet but it's a big yellow chair, overstuffed and it has a gear shift with five on the floor. No reverse, so you can only go forward. It serves not only as an automobile, it's also an airplane. I fly around the world and see all sorts of things from the comfort of my magic yellow chair. I might do a book about it someday.
When I was living in Albuquerque, I was looking out the window of my studio one day and I fell asleep. I usually keep the radio on while I'm working—usually to classical music, because I need quiet back-ground—so I listen to something like Mozart or Brahms. I was thinking of the plants and the flowers that were growing there and I dreamt that they had all changed to musical instruments. The trees, instead of being trees were oboes and cellos and bassoons. Maybe it was a combination of looking at the garden and listening to the music, but when I woke up after a little nap, I immediately wrote a poem called "I Am Growing a Glorious Garden."
After watching an episode of The A-Team on television I had a nightmare about Mr. T. He was covered with vegetables. Of course the poem that resulted has nothing to do with Mr. T now. I just kind of fantasized what kind of creature would want to spend its life submerged in vegetables.
Sometimes when I finish writing a poem, I look at it and say, What can I do with this, can I write the opposite? I've done this a couple times. For example, in Something Big Has Been Here, I have a poem about my mother's cooking, called "My Mother Made a Meatloaf," about a meatloaf that we never ate because it was uncuttable. We tried everything, blow torches, hippopotamus, nothing worked. And as soon as I finished that I wrote a poem called "The Turkey Shot Out of the Oven," just the opposite, about a food that explodes just before you get to eat it.
Sometimes to get in the mood for work I do a bunch of New York Times crossword puzzles. I play a lot of word games and just sort of futz around for a while. Sometimes I'll be doing a puzzle and there will be a little fragment or word that will hit me in a new way. It might be something that I've seen a thousand times before. It'll just hit me and I'll play with that for a while. This happens in life, too.
I was in my local market and I was buying chicken for supper. I was going to do the cooking that night so, being naturally lazy, I decided to get boneless breast of chicken. I'd bought it many times, but that day something occurred to me that had never occurred to me before. I asked myself, what about the rest of the chicken. Was that boneless too?
Well as soon as I thought of that I started asking questions about chickens. I mean can a boneless chicken walk? Can it fly? What do the other chickens think about it? Where does it make it's home? Does it have friends? Can it walk erect? I played with those ideas when I got home. I went to bed and I actually dreamed about this. As a matter of fact from this dream two poems have happened. One is "Last Night I Dreamed of Chickens" and the other is "Ballad of a Boneless Chicken."
When I was writing that poem, I went to bed asking myself the question, How can I end this poem about a boneless chicken? I fell asleep and in the middle of the night I woke up and I said, Yeah! because I knew how I was going to end the poem. I had a dream about a chicken laying an egg. Well, what kind of an egg does a boneless chicken lay? The answer is revealed in the last verse.
I'm a basic boneless chicken,
Yes, I have no bones inside,
I'm without a trace of ribcage,
Yet I hold myself with pride.
Other hens appear offended
by my total lack of bones,
they discuss me impolitely
in derogatory tones….
Since a chicken finds it tricky
To parade on boneless legs,
I stick closely to the hen house,
Laying little scrambled eggs.
I deal a lot with nonsense. Nonsense is a kind of organized chaos. It's setting up a system which does not exist. But you treat it seriously and you stay within the boundaries, like an artist should stay within the frame of the paintings. If the artist starts spilling over onto the wall and onto the floor it tends to mean less. But if you set limits …
In the case of the boneless chicken, what I did was ask all the questions you're supposed to ask. All those who, what, where, when, how, why questions, as if you're asking about something serious.
If you start with a ridiculous premise—which is, by the way, what most dreams are—and if you ask just those ordinary straightforward questions about a ridiculous idea, you don't have to stretch anymore. Because all the answers are going to be ridiculous or weird. That's a technique I use with much of my writing.
I think limits are important. Robert Frost, when asked why he didn't write nonrhyming verse said, he'd just as soon play tennis without a net. I happen to like a lot of nonrhyming verse, but I think it helps to have a framework. For example, I'm writing some sonnets for adults. Well, I'm restricted to fourteen lines. So even if I thought I needed sixteen to say something, I'm not allowed to have it. I have to be more creative because I have to fit that extra two lines of ideas in somewhere. And it's a challenge. I find limits very challenging.
Several years ago I was working on a book about dinosaurs. I wrote about dinosaurs eating and dinosaurs walking around and dinosaurs either eating plants or other dinosaurs, and I'd run out of things to say. But my publisher said we needed one more poem to finish the book. And just that week a new dinosaur was discovered four or five miles from my house in New Mexico. I knew then that I had it. It was then the largest dinosaur ever discovered. It was the first land creature that was longer, if not heavier, than the blue whale. It was called Seismosaurus, which means "Earthshaker." Well I didn't know much about it. All I knew was that it was very big. So I went with that. I live and die by the thesaurus so I opened it up and was delighted because there, in the exact order, were the words that I needed. I didn't even have to turn two words around. There were all the words for "big," which described what I wanted, and it was wonderful because the second word rhymed with the fourth word. And the sixth word rhymed with what I wanted to say at the end of the poem. It was magic. And it's called "Seismosaurus Was Enormous."
Seismosaurus was enormous,
Seismosaurus was tremendous,
Seismosaurus was prodigious,
Seismosaurus was stupendous.
Seismosaurus was titanic,
Seimosaurus was colossal,
Seimosaurus now is nothing
But a monumental fossil.
And that's it.
One of the secrets of art, whether it's painting or music or anything else, is knowing that it's just as important what you leave out, as what you put in. I could've gone on with that Seismosaurus poem—and Seismosaurus was strong and Seismosaurus ate broccoli or whatever. It wouldn't've added anything to the poem. It's what you don't put in. I find that sometimes I'll have lines and I'll say, wait, this isn't saying anything new, this isn't adding anything. If I've written a four-verse poem there's a good chance it started out as five verses. I didn't need the extra one and combined some of the ideas.
But nothing is thrown out. Nothing. Everything is saved. Usually when I finish a book I have more ideas left over than when I started. A lot of the passages in Something Big Has Been Here came from leftover ideas. They were things that just didn't work. They were not ready. Or they were just off-shoots, maybe just a word that I didn't use, and that led to a brand-new poem.
In The New Kid on the Block there's a poem called "Forty Performing Bananas" about some bananas who get up on stage and sing and dance. There are some banana puns in there like "our features are rather a-peeling" and "people drive here in bunches to see us," "our splits earn us worldly renown," and I wanted to outdo myself. When I was kid I had discovered that, if you squeezed a hot dog just right, it would shoot across the room. I stored that idea. And then one day I was in a novelty store and I bought a little Styrofoam glider in the shape of a hot dog. I put those ideas together and said, This could be a poem. So I wrote down all the hot dog puns I could think of. "Mustered in formation" was easy and "ketch up with each other," but there were still some key ideas that were eluding me. I wrote down all those words but I could not think of a way of using sauerkraut in the poem. And then I had a dream about the flying hot dogs and I knew exactly what I had to do. When I sing the poem I pretend to be the lead hot dog whose name happens to be Major Weiner. Some of the puns are hidden, by the way. They're not all obvious.
We're fearless flying hot dogs,
The famous unflappable five,
We're mustered in formation
To climb, to dip, to dive,
We spread our wings with relish,
Then reach for altitude,
We're aerobatic weiners,
The fastest flying food …
The throngs applaud our antics,
They cheer us long and loud,
There's never a chili reception,
There's never a sour crowd,
And if we may speak frankly, We are a thrilling sight,
We're fearless flying hot dogs,
The delicate essence of flight.
I was so happy when I woke up and wrote delicate essence! That's Kosher delicate essence by the way. These are all-beef hot dogs.
I'd been puzzled by this poem for months and months. I'd started it, I would try it in the shower, I'd put it away, I'd sit at my desk, I'd do it on trains and planes and automobiles and it wouldn't work. I always have a notebook and paper by my bed and I woke up one Sunday morning with a big grin on my face. The poem was complete in my head—I'd dreamt the whole thing, and I just said yeaaaah.
My biggest suggestion to writers is: keep a notebook or a piece of paper and a pencil by the bed. I mean I wake up almost every night and write something down. It's the rare night that I don't. Sometimes you dream that you've found a cure for cancer or something and you think it's brilliant and, of course, you wake up and it's crap, garbage. There's nothing there. But about a third of the time there's a very good idea there. It may be something as silly as sour crowd and delicate essence but you never know.
In the sixties I was one of those counterculture types. I still have a lot of the same values I had back then even though I have reached the half-century mark—people are more important to me than money and property and that sort of thing. I wanted to be an artist but not everything works out the way you want it to. I was about twenty-three years old and I was searching for myself. I had tried all sorts of arts, along with all sorts of day labor, I was also doing things like acting, and singing, and photographing and making pots and terrariums. I used to draw imaginary animals. I remember one creature I invented had four legs, but the two on one side were shorter than the two on the other. It lived under a mountain and could only walk in one direction, so it was perfectly suited to its environment. There was another tiny bird that lived atop a hundred-foot-tall tree. The problem was that the bird couldn't fly. Fortunately it was also perfectly suited to its environment because it had a hundred-and-one-foot-long beak and it fed off the ground. It just waited and things crawled in. It worked very nicely.
I drew a bunch of these creatures, and after about six months, I had about two dozen. They were very painstaking. They took me about a week apiece and they were all two dimensional. I still can't draw perspective.
One evening I sat down, looked at them, and said, Oh well, they need poems to go with them. I do not know where that idea came from to this day. I had never written poetry. I'd never even written. I'd flunked English One twice in college and English Two once. Or the other way around. I'd showed no promise as a writer. I certainly had never written any poetry. But I sat down that evening and in two hours I'd written two dozen little poems to go along with the drawings that took me six months to do.
A friend who had published a few children's books saw what I had done and made me take the whole business in to his editor and she said, You're very talented—we want to publish you.
I said, Really, you like my drawings? She said, You're kidding. You're absolutely the worst artist we've ever seen. You have no talent in that direction. But you have a natural gift here for verse. And it went on from there. She encouraged me. I started writing about real animals and one thing lead to another. Now I've got about forty books.
I guess I have a facility with words. It's certainly a lot easier than it used to be. But still, even the ones that sound easy take a lot of work. Once in a while they do just come out. I sit down and I write and it's done. But even those have a word or two that changes. Some of those poems take ten, thirty, fifty rewrites before they're right. I can work for weeks and weeks on a single poem. The whole trick is to make it seem easy, as though, hey, I could have done that, anybody could have done that. I've even had one of my illustrators say that to me, "God, I work so hard on these drawings and you just sort of put these poems out there. Gee, I could do that." And I said, "Well, good." And he hasn't. But that's okay because I can't do the drawings.
Many poems don't really end up the way they start. I believe in serendipity. Just as I thought I was going to be an artist and I turned out to be a writer. I discovered my talent only because I was looking for something else. Well, it's the same thing with kids. You tell them to do something and they do something else. Sometimes the thing they do is better than the thing you ask them to do and you better pay attention to that. I have a poem, it's kind of autobiographical. It's a bittersweet poem about paying attention to children.
The day they sent Sam to the grocery store
To purchase a carton of eggs,
He brought back a pear with a pearl in its core,
And a leopard with lavender legs.
He returned with an elephant small as a mouse,
A baseball that bounces a mile,
A little tame dragon that heats up the house,
And a lantern that lights when they smile.
Sam brought them a snow ball that never feels cold,
A gossamer carpet that flies,
A salmon of silver, a grackle of gold,
And ermine with emerald eyes.
They never send Sam to the store any more,
No matter how often he begs,
For he brought back a dodo that danced on the floor,
But he didn't bring home any eggs.
GENERAL COMMENTARY
Myra Cohn Livingston (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: Livingston, Myra Cohn. "Jack Prelutsky." In Twentieth-Century Children's Writers, Third Edition, edited by Tracy Chevalier, pp. 793-94. Chicago, Ill.: St. James Press, 1989.
[In the following essay, Livingston suggests that Prelutsky's canon of children's poetry relies heavily on images of fear and gluttony, arguing that, "Prelutsky's verse is set apart by a fascination with the aberrations of human physiology and behavior, a taste for the macabre, and a curious delight in the gross and baser side of human nature."]
The work of Jack Prelutsky lies outside the province of classical light verse, which stresses wit, decorum, and elegance. The broader limits of contemporary light verse include word-play and earthly humor, but even here his work eludes the category. What links him to the genre is his use of traditional form, a keen ear for lively rhythm, and a penchant for rollicking alliteration.
Prelutsky's verse is set apart by a fascination with the aberrations of human physiology and behavior, a taste for the macabre, and a curious delight in the gross and baser side of human nature. This is felt in his almost obsessive concern with gluttony and obesity, a greed that goes beyond familiar foods and dwells on a never-ending variety of non-edibles. Gretchen's pot contains "A lizard's gizzard, lightly mashed, / an ogre's backbone, slightly mashed." The wozzit eats clothes, Herbert Glerbett eats 50 pounds of lemon sherbet and turns into "a thing that is a ghastly green, / a thing the world has never seen, / a puddle thing, a gooey pile / of something strange that does not smile." Pies made of nuts and bolts, of shoe polish and candied eyeballs are typical staples. Pumberly Pott's niece devours his automobile piece by piece. Many of Prelutsky's characters eat each other, the flonster, floober, flummie, and flakker, the frummick and frelly. Others squash each other by sheer force of overweight.
While all of this might be construed, by some, as nonsense, there is an element in the verse that goes beyond nonsense, for the reader is often threatened directly. The grobbles, It, lurpp, and preternatural creatures, Prelutsky warns, may also eat you. In Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep and The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight a catalog of supernatural beings wallow in blood and death. The bogeyman will "crumple your bones in his bogey embrace," and the ghoul, having eaten other boys and girls, waits outside school "perhaps for you."
Here are echoes of the German school, of Struwwelpeter with cautionary tales to frighten, things that exist physically to attack beyond the limits of the page. Rolling Harvey Down the Hill is another instance of the darker side of human nature. Harvey is nasty, selfish, a cheat and braggart, a "tub of lard," a sadist who ties up his friends and, although he is rolled down the hill for punishment, the reader has learned that boys who dress neatly and "dumb" girls are outside of Harvey's accepted circle.
As an anthologist, editor of The Random House Book of Poetry for Children and Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young, Prelutsky opts for the instant guffaw of earthy humor, bypassing the more serious kinds of poetry. His obvious belief in verse as quick, easily assimilated entertainment carries over to his most recent writing, Ride a Purple Pelican, What I Did Last Summer, It's Valentine's Day, and It's Snowing! It's Snowing! The New Kid on the Block furthers his view of women as addled, greedy, poorly mannered, thieving, sneaky, and mean. He writes of a snoring father, a mother who makes "Willy wail," his own ugly, stupid dog, and continues to dwell on satisfaction through food and/or neulogistic creatures such as Snillies, Yubbazubbles, Underwater Wibbles, Gloopy Gloppers, and a host of others. In his latest book, Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast, Prelutsky is at his best, capitalizing on the eating habits and nasty nature of beasts and adding his own witty asides.
Prelutsky has some lighter moments with word-play. In The Sheriff of Rottenshot there is a bicycling centipede who "merits medals, / working all those centipedals" and an ocelot who likes to "toss a lot" and "fuss a lot." As a craftsman Prelutsky knows the power of the anapestic line, alliteration, and the fun of making up foolish names and unusual creatures.
For readers who feel that physical force, gluttony, and a dose of fear are funny, Prelutsky will serve well. But for those of differing sensibility, other light verse may hold more appeal.
TITLE COMMENTARY
TYRANNOSAURUS WAS A BEAST: DINOSAUR POEMS (1988)
Mary M. Burns (review date September-October 1988)
SOURCE: Burns, Mary M. Review of Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast: Dinosaur Poems, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Arnold Lobel. Horn Book Magazine 64, no. 5 (September-October 1988): 641-42.
Although they no longer roam the land, dinosaurs still live in books and find new audiences year after year. In an intriguing combination of fact with rollicking rhyme schemes and full-page portraits, the dinosaurs are rejuvenated once again to amuse and amaze their devoted fans [in Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast: Dinosaur Poems ]. Fourteen poems, one for each variety, are included. Some, like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, are familiar; others, like Deinonychus and Quetzalcoatlus, are less frequently eulogized. Given the lilting quality of the verses, it is quite likely that the strangest among their names will soon roll trippingly off the tongues of listeners, for these poems are readable, quotable, and unforgettable. Take, for example, this commentary on Corythosaurus: "Corythosaurus, short on sense, / had no semblance of defense, / though it did the best it could, / Corythosaurus is gone for good." Illustrations by the late Arnold Lobel match the vigor and humor of the poems. The larger specimens break through borders as if about to launch themselves into action. Their muscular structure is suggested in modeling created by skillful use of color and line. They are not cuddly critters, yet their pose and posture complement the humor implicit in the text. Several features, unusual in a book of poetry, are also notable: a miniature of each subject is included on the title page, together with basic information about its habitat, size, and the period during which it was extant; a time line entitled "When the Dinosaurs Lived" is appended; and each illustration is accompanied by a pronunciation guide and translation of the scientific name. These added elements are skillfully incorporated into the page designs so that they enhance rather than distract. Nor should the end papers be forgotten: lush, vibrant interpretations of prehistoric forests, they serve as prologue and epilogue for the delights to come. A wonderful book to savor—again and again.
POEMS OF A. NONNY MOUSE (1989)
Elizabeth S. Watson (review date January-February 1990)
SOURCE: Watson, Elizabeth S. Review of Poems of A. Nonny Mouse, edited by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Henrik Drescher. Horn Book Magazine 66, no. 1 (January-February 1990): 82.
From the introduction—in which the reader learns of the mistaken attribution of many poems over the years to "anonymous" instead of to the real author, Ms. A. Nonny Mouse—to the concluding poem, "Don't worry if your job is small / And your rewards are few. / Remember that the mighty oak / Was once a nut like you," the giggles and chuckles are plentiful [in Poems of A. Nonny Mouse ]. Many of the selections are familiar; others, more obscure; four are new works by Prelutsky himself—a challenge to identify unless the reader is familiar with the verso of the title page. It is difficult to decide whether the poems or the illustrations are the more hilarious, but easy to see that they are perfect for each other. Who could resist Drescher's apologetic grasshopper and weepy elephant in "Way down South, where bananas grow, / A grasshopper stepped on an elephant's toe. / The elephant said with tears in his eyes, / 'Pick on somebody your own size'"? What a wonderful way to introduce poetry to a recalcitrant class. Good fun from beginning to end.
Luann Toth (review date April 1990)
SOURCE: Toth, Luann. Review of Poems of A. Nonny Mouse, edited by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Henrik Drescher. School Library Journal 36, no. 4 (April 1990): 110.
PreS-Gr. 3—An engaging collection of 70 nonsense verses by that most prolific of poets, A. Nonny Mouse (long misspelled Anonymous due to a fateful typo). Prelutsky, a fellow poet and unabashed admirer, has compiled (along with four of his own creations) some of her most playful rhymes, limericks, quips, and chants [in Poems of A. Nonny Mouse ]—all with a touch of the wacky, the way-out, and the wonderful. Selections are illustrated with Drescher's signature watercolors highlighted with black-ink scratches and splatters of color. Fluid and exuberant, the crazy cast of characters (many of whom Drescher fans will recognize) gaily prance across the double-page spreads, while observant readers will enjoy spotting the disarming, diminutive poet in each drawing. Dancing sausages, talking shoes, an assortment of bizarre feathered creatures and outlandish insects abound. The people are surreal at best, and often grotesque, but perfectly suit the divine silliness of the verses—"As I went out / The other day, / My head fell off / and rolled away. / But when I noticed / It was gone, / I picked it up / And put it on." Even the youngest readers will nevermore see the ubiquitous nom de plume without thinking of the irrepressible Ms. Mouse.
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BENEATH A BLUE UMBRELLA (1990)
Ann A. Flowers (review date March-April 1990)
SOURCE: Flowers, Ann A. Review of Beneath a Blue Umbrella, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Garth Williams. Horn Book Magazine 66, no. 2 (March-April 1990): 216.
As in his Ride a Purple Pelican (Greenwillow), Jack Prelutsky has written a collection of simple poems [Beneath a Blue Umbrella ], close to nursery rhymes, for the young child. His poetic skill has not deserted him—the poems are bright, bouncy, and eminently recitable. Internal rhymes abound: "John Poole left Sedalia / upon his blue mule, / the mule galloped fast / for the weather was cool." The subject matter is made up of very small incidents—a tailor makes himself a nightgown, three small animals escape a bullfrog—or even complete nonsense. Although Garth Williams's illustrations have a much rougher line than, and lack the charming detail of, his earlier pictures, the large, colorful pages and cheerfully ridiculous verse will appeal to young listeners.
Carolyn Phelan (review date 1 May 1990)
SOURCE: Phelan, Carolyn. Review of Beneath a Blue Umbrella, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Garth Williams. Booklist 86, no. 17 (1 May 1990): 1701.
Ages 4-7. In the format of the author and illustrator's popular Ride a Purple Pelican, this collection of rhymes [Beneath a Blue Umbrella ] features verse on the left side of each double-page spread and a bordered, full-page illustration on the right. As many Mother Goose rhymes mention English places, Prelutsky delights in dropping American place-names, from Nome to South Carolina to the Great Salt Lake. He even mimics the political origin of many Mother Goose rhymes in "They marched around the Capital / while playing songs so sweet, / that donkeys danced with elephants / on light and happy feet." Nursery rhymes are notoriously difficult to write, but Prelutsky's foot-tapping foray into American territory is worth the trip, particularly for reading aloud. Even the children in the back row of the classroom will enjoy Williams' illustrations, brimming with color, energy, and bright, bold images.
Phyllis G. Sidorsky (review date fall 1990)
SOURCE: Sidorsky, Phyllis G. Review of Beneath a Blue Umbrella, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Garth Williams. Childhood Education 67, no. 1 (fall 1990): 50.
[Beneath a Blue Umbrella is a] lively collection of verses, bouncy and whimsical, ideal for memorizing or reading aloud. The imagery and language are rich and reminiscent of Mother Goose rhymes (e.g., "Patter Pitter Caterpillar" and "Ida Rose, dressed in polkadot clothes"). Children will find added pleasure in discovering that many of the poems focus on familiar American cities and states. Garth Williams' full-page, brightly hued scenes tickle the funny bone and contribute to general merriment. Ages 3-8.
SOMETHING BIG HAS BEEN HERE (1990)
Carolyn Phelan (review date 1 September 1990)
SOURCE: Phelan, Carolyn. Review of Something Big Has Been Here, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by James Stevenson. Booklist 87, no. 1 (1 September 1990): 50.
Gr. 4-6, younger for reading aloud—Here's a new treat for the multitudes who devoured Prelutsky and Stevenson's The New Kid on the Block and asked for more. Prelutsky's bountiful collection of witty poems [Something Big Has Been Here ] makes the urge to quote irresistible: "Something big has been here, / what it was, I do not know / for I did not see it coming / and I did not see it go, / but I hope I never meet it, / if I do, I'm in a fix, / for it left behind its footprints, / they are size nine-fifty-six." On the same page, an ink drawing washed with gray shows a small boy, seen from above, treading warily between the toes of an ominous footprint. Prelutsky adopts a child's perspective to a remarkable degree—technically through his frequent use of the first person, but more fundamentally through his unerring sense of kids' concerns and their humor. Spacious and pleasing in design, the book devotes a page or two to each poem, which is accompanied by one or more illustrations. Fresh and funny as the verse, Stevenson's art seems brighter in black and white than many artists' full-color work. With his usual wry humor, he makes improbable situations seem not just possible, but inevitable. Good for reading aloud in homes and classrooms, this will be a popular addition to library poetry shelves, though it will not sit there long.
Ethel R. Twichell (review date November-December 1990)
SOURCE: Twichell, Ethel R. Review of Something Big Has Been Here, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by James Stevenson. Horn Book Magazine 66, no. 6 (November-December 1990): 756.
For children and grown-ups complaining of boredom or malaise, a brief plunge into Prelutsky's newest collection of verse [Something Big Has Been Here ]—a companion volume to the author and artist's previous collaboration, The New Kid on the Block (Greenwillow)—should provide at least a temporary cure. What offers better medicine than the plights and inanities of unfortunates like Wilhelmina Wafflewitz, Fenton Phlantz, and Sir Bottomwide? Can one really not smile at the neatly versified portrayal of a popcorn-stuffed turkey exploding out of the oven, or delight in a meatloaf which defies slicing by cleaver, ax, or power saw? Puns and verbal surprises abound. Clever use of alliteration and abundant variety in the sound and texture of words add to the pleasure. But it is the author's joyous sense of the absurd and the rich resources of his zany imagination that propel the reader from page to page. Stevenson's small cartoons of snaggle-toothed animals and deadpan children extend and expand the mad humor of the poems, supporting but never overwhelming their good-natured fun. A fine prescription against the blues at any time of year.
FOR LAUGHING OUT LOUD: POEMS TO TICKLE YOUR FUNNYBONE (1991)
Diane Roback and Richard Donahue (review date 26 April 1991)
SOURCE: Roback, Diane, and Richard Donahue. Review of For Laughing Out Loud: Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone, edited by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Marjorie Priceman. Publishers Weekly 238, no. 19 (26 April 1991): 60.
Prelutsky introduces this volume of humorous poems [For Laughing Out Loud: Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone ] with a verse of his own: "If you have got a funnybone, / and I've no doubt you do, / then this completely silly book / is sure to tickle you." The poems are silly, full of high jinks and clever nonsense. Although the author and title indexes at the end of the book are useful, a table of contents would have clarified the book's loose organization. A verse about Bella's new umbrella is followed by one about ghouls' ghoul-oshes. Poems about nuts, noodles and bananas fill one double-page spread while verses about rattlesnake meat, jellyfish stew and eating eels occupy another. Priceman's (Friend or Frog; Rachel Fister's Blister) slapdash watercolor illustrations are full of energy and high spirits, perfectly suited to this eclectic collection that includes work by such favorites as Nash, Lobel, Kennedy, Kuskin, Yolen and Raskin. Ages 7-12.
Mary M. Burns (review date July-August 1991)
SOURCE: Burns, Mary M. Review of For Laughing Out Loud: Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone, edited by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Marjorie Priceman. Horn Book Magazine 67, no. 4 (July-August 1991): 472-73.
If "music be the food of love," then certainly humor is the staff of life. And for those who believe in laughter, here is a collection of one hundred thirty-two rib-tickling verses [For Laughing Out Loud: Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone ] to suit almost every taste and age from a varied gathering of luminaries among rollicking rhymsters, including Gelett Burgess, John Ciardi, John Gardner, Ogden Nash, Shel Silverstein, X. J. Kennedy, and Judith Viorst, as well as some wonderful contributions by that modest genius, Anonymous. The compiler, quite justifiably so, has included samplings of his own wit, beginning with a jolly rhymed introduction that concludes: "I wish you lots of belly laughs, / I hope you have to roar, / and if you almost split your sides, / that's what this book is for." William Jay Smith's "Laughing Time," the opening selection, sets the appropriate tone. Dorothy Aldis's delightful quatrain "Bursting" brings the whole full-circle by observing: "We've laughed until my cheeks are tight. / We've laughed until my stomach's sore. / If we could only stop we might / Remember what we're laughing for." And there are a few surprise contributors, usually associated with other genres, who, like Jane Yolen in "The Dinosore" and "The Bluffalo," demonstrate their facility for alliterative word play. The poems are arranged in clusters around similar themes or topics, which allows Marjorie Priceman ample latitude for producing imaginative, lively, zany impressions that link each set of poems.
A. NONNY MOUSE WRITES AGAIN!: POEMS (1993)
Mary M. Burns (review date November-December 1993)
SOURCE: Burns, Mary M. Review of A. Nonny Mouse Writes Again!: Poems, edited by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Marjorie Priceman. Horn Book Magazine 69, no. 6 (November-December 1993): 750-51.
Emboldened by her first success—and the letters from her fans—Ms. Mouse has prevailed upon that master wordsmith Jack Prelutsky to prepare a second collaborative effort. Their fans will not be disappointed with their efforts in producing an attractive new collection of old favorites [A. Nonny Mouse Writes Again! ] that incorporates four original works by Mr. Prelutsky himself as an added bonus. Designed more for browsing than ready reference, the selections are incorporated into picture-book format and loosely categorized in related groupings; there is a double page spread devoted to affairs gastronomical and one dedicated to obnoxious children, as described in the following Prelutsky quatrain: "My sister likes to gross me out, / And she knows how to do it— / She fills her mouth with sauerkraut / And makes me watch her chew it." As in most popular gatherings of playground verses, there are a few selections which fea-ture double entendres—the kind guaranteed to satisfy a certain youthful yearning to be just a little bit risqué. One such deals with matters of astronomy: "O Moon! When I look on your beautiful face / Careening along through the darkness of space, / The thought has quite frequently come to my mind / If ever I'll gaze on your lovely behind." And then, of course, there's the wonderful tongue-twisting tale of the two-toed tree toad's unrequited love for a three-toed she-toad tree toad. Yes, there's something here for every taste—all enlivened by Marjorie Priceman's fluid, inviting watercolors.
THE DRAGONS ARE SINGING TONIGHT (1993)
Mary M. Burns (review date September-October 1993)
SOURCE: Burns, Mary M. Review of The Dragons are Singing Tonight, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Peter Sís. Horn Book Magazine 69, no. 5 (September-October 1993): 615.
This book [The Dragons are Singing Tonight ] is irresistible: the subject is popular; the poems are Jack Prelutsky at his best; the artwork is spectacular. The text dazzles, as do the illustrations; both combine beauty with wit in a production which lifts the spirits, tickles the imagination, and leaves one with a sense of exhilaration—and in firm agreement with the final four lines of the concluding poem, "Once They All Believed in Dragons" : "We must make them all remember, / In some way we must reveal / That our spirit lives forever— / We are dragons! We are real!" There are seventeen poems in all, each crafted to capture the voices of the individual narrators: "I'm an Amiable Dragon" has the sing-speak quality of a soliloquy by Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady; "Dragonbrag" is a quatrain in the Ogden Nash tradition which niftily rhymes "knight in armor" with "four-alarmer"; the title poem, "The Dragons are Singing Tonight" is an invitation for everyone to "listen, / Enchanted and filled with delight." This is a collaboration of two magicians, so enjoy—and believe!
Diane Roback and Elizabeth Devereaux (review date 11 October 1993)
SOURCE: Roback, Diane, and Elizabeth Devereaux. Review of The Dragons are Singing Tonight, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Peter Sís. Publishers Weekly 240, no. 41 (11 October 1993): 88.
Prelutsky (Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast ) and Sís (An Ocean World; Komodo!) outdo themselves with this fanciful series of poems about dragons [The Dragons are Singing Tonight ]. Prelutsky wrings a range of surprising verse from a seemingly limited theme. Stock images get a face-lift: in "A Dragon's Lament," for example, the narrator declares, "I'm tired of being a dragon, / Ferocious and brimming with flame, / The cause of unspeakable terror / When anyone mentions my name." An unerring sense for rhythm lends punch to the light verse, while more atmospheric selections, like the title poem, conjure up a fantasy world, where dragons come out of their lairs and "sing of their exploits of old / Of maidens and knights, and of fiery fights / And guarding vast caches of gold." Sís adds a new depth to Prelutsky's poetry. The artist's trademark antique gold borders enclose dramatically colored full-spread oil and gouache paintings. Old-fashioned imagery collides happily with whimsy: a Tenniel-style girl "walks" her leashed dragons, which soar in the air like kites; an ailing scaly dragon, reclining in its fairy-tale-like stone house, sips from tanks of gasoline; a goggle wearing pilot in an open-air cockpit steers a mechanical dragon made from charmingly low-tech components (an umbrella serves as propeller). An enchanted pairing. Ages 4-up.
MONDAY'S TROLL (1996)
Ann A. Flowers (review date May-June 1996)
SOURCE: Flowers, Ann A. Review of Monday's Troll, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Peter Sís. Horn Book Magazine 72, no. 3 (May-June 1996): 345-46.
Jack Prelutsky is up to his usual hilarious no good in this new collection of witchy, wizardly, ogreish poems [Monday's Troll ]. The title poem, a takeoff of "Monday's child is fair of face," recounts the more unpleasant aspects of trolls: "Monday's troll is mean and rotten, / Tuesday's troll is misbegotten," and so on. Among the subjects of these briskly amusing poems is a wizard who rashly makes himself disappear, a seven-century-old apprentice witch who still has trouble with her spells and can't manage her broom, and a family-type ogre who plants flowers in vanquished knights' armor. Prelutsky's skill with catchy rhymes and delightfully fiendish subject matter is complemented by Peter Sís's humorously foreboding and cheerfully nonchalant illustrations. Another treat for Prelutsky fans.
A PIZZA THE SIZE OF THE SUN: POEMS (1996)
Maria B. Salvadore (review date September-October 1996)
SOURCE: Salvadore, Maria B. Review of A Pizza the Size of the Sun, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by James Stevenson. Horn Book Magazine 72, no. 5 (September-October 1996): 605-06.
The duo responsible for The New Kid on the Block and Something Big Has Been Here (both Greenwillow) have again combined talents to create an appealing collection of short poetry [A Pizza the Size of the Sun ]. Stevenson's spirited line and wash drawings effectively convey the tone of the jaunty, usually funny, often silly, sometimes gross, and always child-like poems. Memorable characters are quickly sketched in words and in pictures: Chuck, "the chore evader and adept procrastinator," has many strategies and will gladly "demonstrate them later." Sara Sue does not wish to go to school "and Mother, if you make me, / I will eat a worm or two.' / 'Do you mean worms like these, my dear?' / her mother firmly said. / I got them in the garden, / they're extremely long and red." Poems play with words, with the form and shape of language. "I'm AlL mIxED up … / i'M lOokinG cLOsELy at This pOEm, / bUT STIlL dOn'T HAvE a CLue." "A Dizzy Little Duzzle" meanders all around the page, while the presentation of "Zeke McPeake" is as small as his voice, "but a teeny squeak." Poems in varied typeface and placement in an open format combine with the economical line of well-placed sketches to create a fast-paced and accessible collection that's loads of fun.
THE BEAUTY OF THE BEAST: POEMS FROM THE ANIMAL KINGDOM (1997)
Nina Lindsay (review date January 1998)
SOURCE: Lindsay, Nina. Review of The Beauty of the Beast: Poems from the Animal Kingdom, edited by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Meilo So. School Library Journal 44, no. 1 (January 1998): 104.
K-Gr. 5—Beware—this book [The Beauty of the Beast: Poems from the Animal Kingdom ] may let a zoo loose in your library! These poems are alive, from one set of endpapers to the other. Prelutsky has selected a remarkable array of poems full of movement and sound from primarily English and American contemporary writers, proving that he has as good an ear for other poets' work as he does for his own. Each page has several poems and bright watercolors that writhe with texture. From an explosion of insect color to a steady wintery stream of reindeer, Meilo So's illustrations lend a different mood to each spread and bind the selections more securely than paper and thread. Almost overwhelming at times, the pictures force readers to take it slow: this is a collection to savor for years, either as a read-alone or read-aloud. A well-designed, comprehensive, and satisfying book, this is certainly a superlative collection. Of smaller breadth, Ann Carter's Birds, Beasts, and Fishes (Macmillan, 1991) contains completely different poems in the same style, and complements this one nicely. In sound and sight, this book is a beauty.
HOORAY FOR DIFFENDOOFER DAY! (1998)
Publishers Weekly (review date 16 February 1998)
SOURCE: Review of Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!, by Jack Prelutsky and Dr. Seuss, illustrated by Lane Smith. Publishers Weekly 245, no. 7 (16 February 1998): 211.
Dr. Seuss's name towers over the title on the jacket here [in Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! ], setting up readers to measure the book within—extrapolated from scanty manuscript and sketches—against the late artist's classic works. While such a comparison is almost certain to disappoint, it also distracts from an appreciation of the fruitful collaboration between the ebullient Prelutsky (The Dragons are Singing Tonight ) and the innovative Smith (The Stinky Cheese Man). Given some rough art and verses and a list of characters that were compiled by Seuss in 1988 or 1989, Prelutsky and Smith fashion a plot, message and visual milieu. Zesty rhymes, some of them Seuss's own, catalogue the eccentric staff of Diffendoofer School. Then trouble threatens: the students must take a standardized test to prove Diffendoofer's worth, lest the school be closed and everyone sent to Flobbertown ("And we shuddered at the name, / For everyone in Flobbertown / Does everything the same"). The valiant Miss Bonkers inspires her troops. Balancing a globe on one finger, she proudly declaims: "We've taught you that the earth is round, / That red and white make pink, / And something else that matters more— / We've taught you how to think." Smith pastes in some Seuss sketches and invites Seuss characters and book jackets into his collages. The look, however, is very much Smith's; his style is so strong that it subsumes the Seussian elements in evidence (not just the collaged art but the typeface, the colored pages, the tilt of a given character's nose, etc.). Perhaps the richest reward—for adults if not for children—is the absorbing, meaty afterword by editor Janet Schulman, which allows readers a view of Seuss's draft and gives rare insight into the creative process. Ages 5-up.
Nancy Menaldi-Scanlan (review date June 1998)
SOURCE: Menaldi-Scanlan, Nancy. Review of Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!, by Jack Prelutsky and Dr. Seuss, illustrated by Lane Smith. School Library Journal 44, no. 6 (June 1998): 121-22.
K-Gr. 6—The original talents of Prelutsky and Smith bring an unfinished Dr. Seuss story to life—and what a story it is! [In Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!, t]he tale revolves around Diffendoofer School, a place where teachers make their own rules and students are taught to think. Their curriculum is an unusual one, covering such topics as "smelling," "laughing," and "how to tell a cactus from a cow," and the school is staffed by people who break all the stereotypes. When the principal informs the students that they must pass a rigorous test or risk being sent to dreary Flobbertown, the tension is palpable, but the inimitable Miss Bonkers is certain they'll pass. In fact, they receive the highest score, saving their school and their rather unorthodox education as well. The story fairly jumps off the page, as do the bright, exuberant collage and oil illustrations, which look like a combination of the familiar Seussian style and Smith's own. A sense of fun reigns supreme, and school comes off looking like a great place to be. Dr. Seuss's well-known books and characters (and even Ted Geisel himself) make cameo appearances throughout the work. The editor's notes on the process of creating the book include original sketches and ideas from Geisel's notebooks. This outstanding work is a must for all collections. Buy extra copies—and be sure to include one for the professional shelf as well. It's a great tribute to the importance of creative thinking in the classroom.
Joanna Rudge Long (review date July-August 1998)
SOURCE: Long, Joanna Rudge. Review of Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!, by Jack Prelutsky and Dr. Seuss, illustrated by Lane Smith. Horn Book Magazine 74, no. 4 (July-August 1998): 479-81.
After Dr. Seuss's death, editor Janet Schulman retrieved the unfinished manuscript on which this book is based [Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! ]: fourteen pages of sketches, snippets of verse, and jottings of names—but no plot. With becoming respect for both Seuss's unique creativity and their own, Prelutsky and Smith have brought this fragment to fruition in a style that does credit to all three artists. Prelutsky's was the easier task. Long a master of the kind of ribtickling verse that Seuss pioneered, he has come up with a satisfying conflict: if the kids at freewheeling Diffendoofer School don't pass a demanding test, they'll be sent to school in dreary, regimented Flobbertown. Fortunately, their wacky teachers have taught them how to think (a worthy message, though it's hard to fathom just how the pictured classroom activities would have that result, but never mind); therefore, they pass with a resounding "10,000,000%." Since Seuss's entire manuscript is reproduced here as an endnote, it's possible to see how Prelutsky has folded it into his own deliciously Seussian text, which features a preposterous school staff ("Miss Twining teaches tying knots / In neckerchiefs and noodles, / And how to tell chrysanthemums / From miniature poodles," while librarian Miss Loon "… hides behind the shelves / And often cries out, 'LOUDER!' / When we're reading to ourselves"). Illustrations were a greater challenge. Though the absurdity of Smith's art has always been akin to Seuss's antic spirit, his mixed-media collages, with their smoothly rounded forms, complex textures, and subtle palette, are a far cry from the deceptive simplicity of Seuss's deft, airy cartoons. Smith's illustrations here are like translations: satirical renditions, in his own distinctive, sophisticated style, of such zany folk and weirdly expressive settings as Seuss might have dreamed up to finish this book. As an additional tribute, Smith tucks a number of Seuss drawings (e.g., a surprised Horton) into his pictures. It works, and it's fun, though comparing the whimsical energy of Seuss's sketches with Smith's polished art is a telling reminder of what made the good Dr.'s work so popular, and so great. Grown-ups will enjoy figuring out who's responsible for what here. Kids will simply delight in the teachers' outlandish capers. What better honor could be paid to the memory of Dr. Seuss?
DOG DAYS: RHYMES AROUND THE YEAR (1999)
Nina Lindsay (review date October 1999)
SOURCE: Lindsay, Nina. Review of Dog Days: Rhymes around the Year, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Dyanna Wolcott. School Library Journal 45, no. 10 (October 1999): 141.
PreS-Gr. 1—These verses about the months of the year [Dog Days: Rhymes around the Year ], from the point of view of a dog, are uncharacteristically lackluster. The four-line poems exhibit Prelutsky's usual skillful rhyme and meter, but give little sense of doggishness, or of the month that they are intended to describe. "It's late November, sing hooray, / For now it is Thanksgiving Day. / I do not think that I can wait / To taste that turkey on the plate." The illustrations are similarly disappointing. The bright palette is pleasing, but hardly changes from page to page, so there is no sense of the seasons passing. Wolcott's images of dogs (who, confusingly, sometimes act like dogs, and sometimes like humans) are playful, but ultimately two-dimensional and expressionless. Though most of the compositions are satisfying, a couple of illustrations look so much like imitation Matisse that the effect is jarring. The unexciting writing, illustration, and design result in a flat book that holds little appeal.
THE GARGOYLE ON THE ROOF (1999)
Lee Bock (review date October 1999)
SOURCE: Bock, Lee. Review of The Gargoyle on the Roof, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Peter Sís. School Library Journal 45, no. 10 (October 1999): 141-42.
Gr. 1-5—With a characteristic blend of humor and surprise, Prelutsky has created appealing poems about just about every frightening creature kids could imagine [in The Gargoyle on the Roof ], from trolls and vampires to gargoyles and bugaboos. Plus, he has thrown in a few unfamiliar beasts for good measure, such as the basilisk: "My breath so sharp, my stare so hot / Petrified them on the spot. / Here those hapless knights remain, / Slowly rusting in the rain." Several poems about the daunting gargoyle create a simple thread throughout the book. Although the vocabulary is challenging at times, the poems are accessible to a wide range of readers, given their predictable rhymes, frequent humor, strong context clues, and complementary illustrations. Sís's full-color oil-and-gouache paintings are imaginative and provide just the right amount of scary details to create tension for each frightening subject. Children will enjoy the artist's signature style of odd perspectives, primitive body shapes, and funny details. Borders provide an additional space in which the subjects can be explored. This title is sure to be received with as much enthusiasm as this team's highly acclaimed The Dragons are Singing Tonight (1993) and Monday's Troll (1996, both Greenwillow).
Linnea Lannon (review date 16 January 2000)
SOURCE: Lannon, Linnea. Review of The Gargoyle on the Roof, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Peter Sís. New York Times Book Review (16 January 2000): 27.
Jack Prelutsky, who has converted thousands of children to poetry, and Peter Sís, whose intriguing and mysterious artwork has earned him two Caldecott Honor awards, have teamed up again to go where none but Disney animators have dared to tread: the world of gargoyles. The Gargoyle on the Roof (Greenwillow, ages 6 and up), 17 poems about all manner of creepy creatures, including werewolves and trolls, follows the pair's enormously successful collaborations, The Dragons are Singing Tonight and Monday's Troll, in bringing voice to fantastic fiends. Some strike closer to home than others. What brother wouldn't enjoy "My Sister Is a Werewolf" ?
Her arms and face grew hairy,
And her voice became a roar.
In some ways she looked better
Than she'd ever looked before.
Similarly, baby gargoyles pledge to be "three perfect demons" if they don't have to go to bed, and "Mother Gargoyle's Lullaby" urges her brood to "Dream your lovely daymares, / Where terror is delight." "Gremlins" sounds like most kids' idea of a good time:
When spaghetti fills the bathtub,
And the shower starts to sneeze,
You have gremlins running rampant,
Doing anything they please.
Yet some of these are hardly the stuff for bedtime reading, especially for those who see something sinister in every ceiling shadow. "Bugaboo" is about a boogeyman who's "apt to snatch you by your ears / And turn you inside out." In "Gobbleup," a goblin admits to being "heinous, harsh and horrible" and confesses "I do not wish you well." "A Werewolf of Distinction" may appeal more to parents than to their listeners, since it's a werewolf's lament about growing old. But as in so much of Prelutsky's poetry, there is genuine delight—no matter how offbeat the topic—that comes from reading aloud rhymes that are both silly and sublime.
AWFUL OGRE'S AWFUL DAY (2000)
Diane Roback, Jennifer M. Brown, and Jason Britton (review date 16 July 2001)
SOURCE: Roback, Diane, Jennifer M. Brown, and Jason Britton. Review of Awful Ogre's Awful Day, by Jack Pre-lutsky, illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky. Publishers Weekly 248, no. 29 (16 July 2001): 180-81.
Prelutsky uncorks his latest collection of light verse, a divinely wretched celebration of subversity [Awful Ogre's Awful Day ]. Every detail of Awful Ogre's day offers possibility for gross-outs, from sun-up ("I flick aside the lizard / Clinging grimly to my chin, / And now I feel I'm ready / For my morning to begin") to sundown (a sly swat at Goodnight Moon as Awful Ogre drifts off to sleep with "Good night to furtive spiders / That lurk in murky wells. / Good night to loathsome vermin / With nauseating smells"). Whether he's writing a love letter to an ogress ("I long for the sight / Of your craggy gray face, / The might of your bone-breaking, / Painful embrace") or puttering in the garden ("I'm growing carnivorous roses / And oceans of overblown mold"), Awful Ogre proves an ideal agent for Prelutsky's oversize humor. Switching gears from the lushness of his Caldecott-winning Rapunzel, repeat collaborator Zelinsky presents Awful Ogre as a grotesque but goofy innocent, sillier than he is sinister. Awful may have only one eye and green hair, and a skunk might indeed curl up in his left nostril, yet he has a childlike sweetness as he dances (shown in a series of a dozen panels) or snuggles up in bed with his cactus. A virtuoso performance by two master funny-bone-ticklers. Ages 6-up.
Lisa Gangemi Krapp (review date September 2001)
SOURCE: Krapp, Lisa Gangemi. Review of Awful Ogre's Awful Day, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky. School Library Journal 47, no. 9 (September 2001): 220.
Gr. 1-5—This collection of 18 witty poems [Awful Ogre's Awful Day ] chronicles a day in the life of Awful Ogre. He towers over buildings and ordinary folk with his carpet of grass-green hair; red, bulbous nose; and single, large, green-and-yellow eye. He doesn't sound real cute, but underneath he's one swell guy. In "Awful Ogre's Breakfast," Prelutsky has fun with the normal breakfast routine. The spread depicts the ogre leaning back on his chair, gazing into his bowl of, yes, scream of wheat, complete with tongues and teeth. Children are sure to memorize Prelutsky's inventive verse and will avidly search the illustrations for their hidden jokes. Take for instance "Awful Ogre's TV Time," in which his favorite channel is the Chopping Network. In "Awful Ogre Dances," Prelutsky's prose stretches across the bottom half of the spread in perfect accompaniment to Zelinsky's dozen frames of Awful Ogre lithely (honestly) gliding across the top half. "I dance with abandon / Bravura, and zest, / I carom off boulders / And beat on my chest. / I pirouette wildly / And leap into space / With power, panache, / And unparalleled grace." Even though Awful Ogre claims to be the awfulest of all, he remains awfully appealing throughout his rants and misadventures. Consider purchasing an extra copy—just in case he is checked out for an awfully long time.
IT'S RAINING PIGS AND NOODLES: POEMS (2000)
Margaret A. Bush (review date November-December 2000)
SOURCE: Bush, Margaret A. Review of It's Raining Pigs and Noodles: Poems, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by James Stevenson. Horn Book Magazine 76, no. 6 (November-December 2000): 766-67.
"Rabbits and parrots play tag in the stars, / marsh-mallows march in the meadows of Mars … / these are a few of the wonders I find / in the magic museum I keep in my mind." And what a museum it is! In his customary tumbling rhyme, Jack Prelutsky plays his way through silly images, nonsense words, and corny punch lines. Some of the one hundred and six poems here [in It's Raining Pigs and Noodles ] celebrate childhood mischief. "My sister whispered magic words / directly in my ear. / The second that she said them / I began to disappear." And it wouldn't be Prelutsky without a bit of the gross. "Worms with cheese, mashed with peas, / you are guaranteed to please." Most of all, the curator of the magic museum is a quirky word guy. There's the fetching young gnu with a penchant for song who "stars on the Grand Antelopera Stage" and the passengers who board the Bunny Bus because "when you're going anywhere, / Rabbit Transit gets you there." As in previous excursions—The New Kid on the Block, Something Big Has Been Here, A Pizza the Size of the Sun —James Stevenson deftly follows the goofy tone in small homely pen sketches sprinkled among the verse. Several of the poems appeared in earlier collections. Some of the jokes will be best understood by adults, who will groan at the punny humor, but the book is sure to tickle readers young and old.
Steven Engelfried (review date June 2005)
SOURCE: Engelfried, Steven. Review of It's Raining Pigs and Noodles: Poems, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by James Stevenson. School Library Journal 51, no. 6 (June 2005): 56.
K-Gr. 5—A croaking princess, dancing hippopotami, and a sniffling piglet with an "oinkerchief" populate these inventive poems [in It's Raining Pigs and Noodles ]. Strong rhythms and flawless rhymes combine with mirthful cartoons to provide a rich variety of verbal and visual humor. Thick-skulled moose who attempt arithmetic are funny subject matter in Prelutsky's hands, while the closing pun ("Those numbers have us moostified") makes for a typically satisfying finish.
THE FROGS WORE RED SUSPENDERS: RHYMES (2002)
Deborah Stevenson (review date March 2002)
SOURCE: Stevenson, Deborah. Review of The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders: Rhymes, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Petra Mathers. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 55, no. 7 (March 2002): 252-53.
Perennial poetic performer Prelutsky returns here with twenty-eight new poems [in The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders ], featuring various people ("Peanut Peg and Peanut Pete," "Granny Gooding" ) and animals ("One Old Owl," "Seven Snails and Seven Snakes" ) in various locations ("In Indianapolis," "Down in the Grand Canyon" ). The anthology is easygoing and meandering, roaming from a winter meadow where "snowshoe hares are running / softly through the snow" ("Winter Meadow" ) to Seattle, where "without an umbrella / it's hard to stay dry" ("One Day in Seattle" ) to Fort Myers, where "there's a flock of puzzled penguins / looking high and looking low" ("Every Morning in Fort Myers" ). The result is a lower-key collection than his monster poems (Monday's Troll, etc.) or larger compendia (A Pizza as Big as the Sun, ); the language and verse forms are simplified (octets predominate), and the feel is more gently playful and sometimes even lyrical. Mathers' watercolors offer a sense of serene but well-anchored wonder that plays effectively off of the verses. Her subtly iridescent landscapes quietly emphasize the breadth of geographical beauty in the world, while her animals are always sweetly personable (the monkey in spats fleeing Winnemucca and the bundled-up mice gleefully romping in a North Dakota snowstorm are sure to be favorites); she's also got a nice line in additional detail, whether it be the sunburned penguins who are starting to be black and white and red all over or the green-faced bear who clearly ate too many "plates of apple pies." Primary-graders who've been coveting their older sibs' Prelutsky will be happy to have this suitable volume.
Hazel Rochman (review date 15 March 2002)
SOURCE: Rochman, Hazel. Review of The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders: Rhymes, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Petra Mathers. Booklist 98, no. 14 (15 March 2002): 1260-61.
Ages 3-8. In a companion to Ride a Purple Pelican (1986) and Beneath a Blue Umbrella (1990), Prelutsky's animal nonsense rhymes for younger children [in The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders: Rhymes ] range across the country, from "Peanut Peg and Peanut Pete" on a bright Atlanta street to "Seven Snails and Seven Snakes" that swam across the five Great Lakes. There are also fantasy settings, such as the garden where clothes grow and the place where 10 brown bears with big bow ties gobble plates of apple pies. The large-size book is spacious in design, great for reading aloud, and Mathers is at her best with double-page watercolors that combine farce and silliness with clear, precise characters and landscapes that range from one small hen's awe-inspiring view of the Grand Canyon to a tender close-up of an old owl in a silent forest. Prelutsky does what he says in his letter in Seeing the Blue Between: he makes the ordinary special.
Joanna Rudge Long (review date March-April 2002)
SOURCE: Long, Joanna Rudge. Review of The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders: Rhymes, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Petra Mathers. Horn Book Magazine 78, no. 2 (March-April 2002): 225.
In the spirit of the author's Ride a Purple Pelican, here are twenty-eight more lighthearted poems [The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders: Rhymes ], many of which invoke place names in the United States ("Through the streets of Minneapolis, / Winnie Appleton bounced that ball, / … bounced and bounced it all that morning / till she finally reached St. Paul"). Setting aside the gruesome glee of his verse for older readers, Prelutsky is content here to describe scenes that vary from realistic to whimsical ("In Indianapolis, what did we see? / An elephant perched on a sycamore tree, / sipping warm milk through an oversize straw— / In Indianapolis, that's what we saw"). The mild humor lies not in the action but in Prelutsky's deft use of language, particularly effective shared aloud. The result is enjoyable, but it is Petra Mathers's illustrations that make the book memorable. Demurely naive, her cheerful, delicately delineated human and animal characters focus on their activities with becoming modesty and grace, whether in expansive scenes glowing with subtle color or in vignettes set off by ample white space. This beautiful volume makes an appealing introduction to light verse.
HALLOWEEN COUNTDOWN (2002)
Deborah Stevenson (review date September 2002)
SOURCE: Stevenson, Deborah. Review of Halloween Countdown, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Dan Yaccarino. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 56, no. 1 (September 2002): 31.
The nameless narrator of this pithy board book [Halloween Countdown ] lives in a residence absolutely infested with ghosts, and he enumerates their in-house hangouts as he counts down in rhyme ("There are ten ghosts in the pantry, / There are nine upon the stairs / There are eight ghosts in the attic, / There are seven on the chairs"). Prelutsky's verse, first published in 1977, converts well to board-book use, with its precise rhythm suitable for both a speedy chant and a slow, sonorous intonation; there's clever use made of the naturally suspenseful structure when the quiet "one ghost right behind me" lets go with a climactic "Boo!" Yaccarino's sturdily drafted illustrations tame the proceedings suitably for the younger audience, emphasizing the domestic rather than the otherworldly: the roundheaded, flickery-tailed ghosts look like microscopic pond creatures turned humongous rather than shades from beyond the grave, and they're clearly more of a vexation than a terror to the put-upon young lad sharing space with them. Occasionally the artwork is less than rigorously accurate in its interpretation of the text (only six of the seven ghosts are actually "on the chairs," for instance), but the final page-turn-reveal of the ghostly closeup on "Boo!" will provide just the right amount of shivers for little Halloween novices.
SCRANIMALS (2002)
Deborah Stevenson (review date October 2002)
SOURCE: Stevenson, Deborah. Review of Scranimals, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Peter Sís. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 56, no. 2 (October 2002): 45-6.
[In the following review, Stevenson offers a positive assessment of Scranimals, calling the book a "stunning achievement."]
Ah, landmark authors, those whose contributions are so reliably rewarding that each new book can be safely anticipated and opened with glee. And ah, the sweetness of surprise and delight when it's discovered that said author has actually managed to exceed expectation.
And so it is with Jack Prelutsky's Scranimals, in which Prelutsky takes the familiar concept of scrambled animals to dazzling new heights in this series of nineteen poems describing a visit to mythical Scranimal Island. Rejecting mundane mammalian combinations, poems here soar into the creative stratosphere with bizarre but linguistically plausible hybrids between vegetables and amphibians ("The Potatoad" ), mammals and fungi ("The Hippopotamushrooms" ), and birds and fish ("The Cardinalbacore" ). The verse sparkles with wit and mad invention, the wordplay elegant enough to impress sophisticated readers yet precise enough to be funny to youngsters still grappling with the possibilities of poetic language; in fact, there's a Beatrix-Potteresque tendency to play elevated vocabulary for comic effect and then puncture it with the bathos of simple earthiness ("The Hippopotamushrooms / Suffer from deficient grace / And their tubby, blobby bodies / Tend to take up too much space"). There are plenty of inventive riffs on biology true and mythical (the Ostricheetahs hide their heads in the sand), and concepts are accessible enough to amuse younger audiences: they'll snicker not just at the lumbering awkwardness of the Stormy Petrelephant, an elephant with sadly insufficient wings, but at the narrators' understandable relief at its groundedness ("The Stormy Petrelephant's failures / Relieve us of absolute dread. / We love it in fields of azaleas— / We'd hate if it soared overhead").
Yet there's more than just humor here: Prelutsky keeps the uneasy strangeness of these odd mongrels lurking in every verse, and he impeccably orchestrates sounds and cadences to suit a variety of moods. One of the finest poems, "The Detested Radishark" (see cover for a glimpse of his horrific visage), is as jubilantly sinister as Silverstein's classic "The Slithergadee." The enduring theme of rapaciousness ("For it eats what it wants, / And it always wants to eat") is made more dramatic by the vivid description ("Its appalling, bulbous body / Is astonishingly red") and the pounding and relentless pace: "And the only thought it harbors / In its small but frightful mind, / Is to catch you and to bite you / On your belly and behind." A lot of families will happily evolve a tradition of gently acting out the "catch you" and "bite you" portions, and a lot of delighted victims will happily squeal with shivery glee.
Sís' art picks up on the strange and otherworldly aspects of the poems, evincing a surreal and haunting edge to its intricately lined visions that recalls Odilon Redon (especially in the sepia-toned puffed-up Potatoad with its little potato-toad eyes). That's an additional lure for older readers, but there's enough restraint to keep things from becoming purely monstrous, especially in every picture's inclusion, in brighter, reassuring hues, of the intrepid boy and girl who are touring the island; happy tourists on their magical scooter (which has all the transportational versatility of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), they're intrigued but unintimidated by the wonders they view. The depictions of those wonders also suggest the poetic yet thorough detailing of an old bestiary, and the mock-scientific approach (also evident in the helpful inclusion of a pronunciation guide for each animal's coined name) is enhanced by the artist's creation of an actual geography for the island (there's a table-of-contents map keyed to the poems, and endpapers sport an overhead view of the whole island). Throughout the book, the individual scenes faithfully and amusingly adhere to this geography, so readers can further entertain themselves with glimpses of neighboring habitats and their residents: a distant Petrelephant flounders amid the trees beyond the savanna wherein the Broccolions stalk the Antelopetunia, a Camelberta Peach's hump protrudes from the hills behind the Spinachicken patch. Those in the mood for more playful science can turn to the back cover, where Sís helpfully visually enumerates the biology of each Scranimal in mathematical terms: a banana + an anaconda = a Bananaconda, a panda + a daffodil = a Pandaffodil, and so on.
There's something here for just about every poetic need—for readalouds, for performances, for readalones, for reading with a flashlight at sleepovers, for taunting and amusing younger siblings. Ultimately, this is a stunning achievement—Carrollian-level poetry with art to match—that's sure to provide delight for years.
Martha V. Parravano (review date January-February 2003)
SOURCE: Parravano, Martha V. Review of Scranimals, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Peter Sís. Horn Book Magazine 79, no. 1 (January-February 2003): 91.
[In Scranimals, o]n Prelutsky and Sís's Scranimal Island, intrepid explorers will find such scrambled creatures as Ostricheetahs (who run very fast but also stick their heads in the sand) and Spinachickens (rather dimwitted green creatures who wilt in the heat). The verses are humorous, in the usual Prelutsky way—peppy, singsongy, and clever—as in this on the "ponderous Stormy Petrelephant … futilely trying to fly": "Its wings are too small to support it, / They're patently only for show, / And so it is constantly thwarted … / Up isn't a place it can go." Kids will easily get and appreciate most of the combinations (the Potatoad, the Radishark); others require a greater level of sophistication (the Camelberta Peach, the Cardinalbacore), though a helpful chart appears on the back cover. Sís's simultaneously imaginative and concrete illustrations transform a nice-enough collection of related poems into a unified whole. A picture of Scranimal Island appears on the endpapers; a map on the table of contents. Two child tourists, armed with map, binoculars, and a jauntily striped inflatable life preserver, propel themselves to the island via skateboard, using an umbrella as a sail. Though muted colors characterize Scranimal Island and its denizens, on every double-page spread Sís portrays the children and their paraphernalia in bright colors, keeping the focus on them and on the power of imagination.
IF NOT FOR THE CAT: HAIKU (2004)
Carolyn Phelan (review date 1 October 2004)
SOURCE: Phelan, Carolyn. Review of If Not for the Cat: Haiku, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Ted Rand. Booklist 101, no. 3 (1 October 2004): 336-37.
PreS-Gr. 3—Quiet in tone and, like traditional haiku, taking inspiration from the natural world, these 17 poems [in If Not for the Cat ] express the points of view of individual animals, from mouse to moth, from skunk to crow. Each turn of the page brings a new verse, illustrated with a variety of media but primarily brushed ink and watercolors. The wide, double-page spreads offer plenty of space for illustrations, but Rand approaches the compositions with admirable subtlety and restraint in the use of color and detail, and he creates a series of dramatic scenes. In the title verse, a little mouse cowers on the dark side of his mouse hole while a cat's nose, mouth, and whiskers appear in his lighted doorway. White letters on the black page proclaim, "If not for the cat, / And the scarcity of cheese, / I could be content." The best of these poems play with sounds and words in an illuminating, satisfying manner, and even the more prosaic have the requisite 17 syllables, which teach-ers will appreciate. The appealing, accessible haiku verses and the large-scale, beautiful artwork will make this the go-to book for haiku to read aloud in classrooms.
Diane Roback, Jennifer M. Brown, and Joy Bean (review date 18 October 2004)
SOURCE: Roback, Diane, Jennifer M. Brown, and Joy Bean. Review of If Not for the Cat: Haiku, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Ted Rand. Publishers Weekly 251, no. 42 (18 October 2004): 62.
At once elegant and droll, [If Not for the Cat, ] this fine collaboration spotlights various animals through 17 haiku, each set against a stunning full-spread, close-range illustration of the featured creature in its natural habitat. Author and artist tip their hats to Eastern traditions with the poetic form and with mix-media compositions that echo Chinese silkscreen. The book takes its title from the first line of the inaugural poem ("If not for the cat, / And the scarcity of cheese, / I could be content"), and Rand's (Here are My Hands) wry image of a mouse looking out from the darkness that dominates the spread, safe behind the wall, to the whiskered snout of a cat perched by the mouse hole, provides ideal accompaniment. By contrast, the brilliantly lit scene that follows highlights a glorious tangle of nasturtiums visited by a hummingbird. Prelutsky's (Scranimals ) versatile verse adopts a pleasing range of first-person voices. Against a symphony of blues, the words of the jellyfish emulate its motion as it seems to swim across the spread ("Boneless, translucent, / We undulate, undulate, / Gelatinously"). A moth asks ponderously, "How foolish I am. / Why am I drawn to the flame / Which extinguishes?"; Rand visually links the color of the moth with the halo around the candle, making its attraction seem inevitable. Though it's not difficult to identify the critters (specified on the final page), younger children especially will have fun naming each species. Deceptive in their simplicity, these haiku will send aspiring wordsmiths off to try their own. Ages 3-up.
Deborah Stevenson (review date December 2004)
SOURCE: Stevenson, Deborah. Review of If Not for the Cat: Haiku, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Ted Rand. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 58, no. 4 (December 2004): 181-82.
Veteran and versatile poet Prelutsky turns his hand here to a collection of seventeen elegant haiku featuring members of the animal kingdom [If Not for the Cat ]. Within the strict syllabic formula of the haiku, the poet achieves not only the traditional spare specificity but also some interesting variations in tone, from the anteater's colloquial summation ("It's a busy life") to the ants' groupthink chant ("We are we are we") to the moth's formal rhetoric ("Why am I drawn to the flame / Which extinguishes?"). Prelutsky's gift for word choices that shimmer with sense and sound displays itself in phrases such as "wrinkled hulks / with astonishing noses" (elephants, of course), counterpointed deftly with deliberately paced monosyllables ("Our ears block the sun"). Rand's mixed-media illustrations rely largely on limpid watercolor and fluid strokes of ink, with delicate nubbly effects from spatterwork and chalk. While the draftsmanship is occasionally somewhat literal, other images are eloquent and evocative; balanced compositions tacitly emphasize the significance of structure throughout, while dark/light contrast creates particularly dramatic images in the depiction of the mouse, the skunk, and even the army of ants. As one of the least threatening forms of poetry, haiku is too often sentenced to mediocrity: this polished collection will demonstrate the genre's merits to a wide range of audiences. The final page provides both index and subject identification for the poems.
Lester L. Laminack and Barbara H. Bell (review date May 2005)
SOURCE: Laminack, Lester L., and Barbara H. Bell. Review of If Not for the Cat: Haiku, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Ted Rand. Language Arts 82, no. 5 (May 2005): 400.
[In If Not for the Cat, s]eventeen well-known creatures are presented in these haiku, cleverly crafted as riddles by Jack Prelutsky who is known for his playful and inventive wordplay. The brief poems will tease the imagination and give just the right detail to enable readers to identify the creature. In addition to a fresh look at these seventeen creatures, readers will be surprised to think of the clues as haiku. Ted Rand's art fills the page and delights the eye, giving the reader a visual clue to pair with Prelutsky's language. This one is a treat for the eye and the ear.
WILD WITCHES' BALL (2004)
Terry Glover (review date August 2004)
SOURCE: Glover, Terry. Review of Wild Witches' Ball, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Kelly Asbury. Booklist 100, no. 22 (August 2004): 1944.
PreS-Gr. 1—The poet laureate of the prepubescent set is at it again! Prelutsky sets his sights on the divas of the dark in this counting rhyme about the annual fete of witches [Wild Witches' Ball ]. With "ten tall crones" battling in barrels, six witches "in shaggy rags playing toss and tag," and "nine queer dears with pointed ears," the text will both amuse young readers and help them hone newfound counting skills. Asbury, a prominent film animator whose children's book credits include the color-concept trilogy Rusty's Red Vacation, Yolanda's Yellow School, and Bonnie's Blue House (all 1997), does fine justice to the imaginings of Prelutsky, his quirky, Quentin Blake-like illustrations flowing into every nook and cranny. Highly recommended as a not-too-scary Halloween read-aloud.
Susan Weitz (review date August 2004)
SOURCE: Weitz, Susan. Review of Wild Witches' Ball, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Kelly Asbury. School Library Journal 50, no. 8 (August 2004): 92-3.
K-Gr. 2—This poem first appeared in Daisy Wallace's Witch Poems (Holiday, 1976). It is a simple counting rhyme that strains to include a variety of witchy synonyms: "ten tall crones"; "two fierce furies"; and "nine queer dears." Unfortunately, it is lyrically and rhythmically clumsy and thematically uninspired. For example, "In every size and shape and weight, / we witches came to celebrate…. Witches eight with mangy tresses danced with seven sorceresses." Asbury's illustrations don't gel. The color schemes appear to have been chosen at random so that there is no sense of continuity from page to page. The shapes and characters are neither pleasingly intriguing nor intriguingly scary. The print is large and the font, which often dips and dashes across the page, is charmingly Halloweenish. Occasionally the words are difficult to locate because they're mired in a cluttered illustration and/or printed in black ink against a dark background color. Stick with Prelutsky's Monday's Troll (1996), Awful Ogre's Awful Day (2001), The Dragons are Singing Tonight (1993, all Green-willow) or one of his enchantingly ghoulish Halloween books. Skip the Wild Witches' Ball.
READ A RHYME, WRITE A RHYME (2005)
Publishers Weekly (review date 29 August 2005)
SOURCE: Review of Read a Rhyme, Write a Rhyme, edited by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Meilo So. Publishers Weekly 252, no. 34 (29 August 2005): 58-9.
Prelutsky's (It's Raining Pigs and Noodles ) latest poetry anthology [Read a Rhyme, Write a Rhyme ] (which includes a couple of his own pieces) encourages youngsters to try their hand at the art of verse, offering them a boost with his "poemstarts" (a concept he has used successfully on the Web, according to his opening letter to readers). On each spread, he presents three poems and one "poemstart," covering one of 10 topics, from dogs and birthdays to friendship and feelings. The "food poemstart," for instance, begins, "I'm hungry, so I think that I / Will have a piece of penguin pie. / When that is finished, I will eat / A ――――――――." Backed by a block of bright color in the upper right corner of every spread, the poemstarts also build in a list of rhyming words or helpful hints to get writers going, (e.g., "Just imagine all the ridiculous things you might eat that rhyme with the word 'eat'"). So's (Hurry and the Monarch) lively watercolors light up the pages with their whimsy and vividness. For the turtle theme, the artist riffs on Douglas Florian's poem ("This bony dome's / My mobile home"): several critters crawl across the pages, each supporting a teepee or igloo on its back. With poems from the likes of Aileen Fisher, Ogden Nash and Dr. Seuss, and some pragmatic advice ("Don't worry too much about making the poem rhyme—it's more important to express your feelings"), Prelutsky's poetry primer will have children eager to play with words. Ages 5-8.
Kirkus Reviews (review date 1 October 2005)
SOURCE: Review of Read a Rhyme, Write a Rhyme, edited by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Meilo So. Kirkus Reviews 73, no. 19 (1 October 2005): 1086.
Prelutsky has invented a method he calls "poemstarts" to help children get started in writing poetry. He provides several introductory lines of a simple poem and then offers some open-ended suggestions for its completion. In this thematically organized collection, [Read a Rhyme, Write a Rhyme, ] Prelutsky offers ten poemstarts on different popular themes, complemented by three short poems on the same subject by different authors. The poemstart and related text is set off on a gold background on the upper right of each spread, with the three short related poems incorporated within a thematic illustration in So's delightfully loose watercolors. Some of the subjects covered are dogs, bugs, snow and best friends. Prelutsky's short suggestions for young writers include possible rhyming words, point of view and incorporating personal experiences and feelings into poetry, all offered in a light-handed manner. Though the vol-ume's intent is as a springboard to writing poetry, the thoughtful selections and So's winning watercolors make this a successful poetry collection even without the writing prompts. (Picture book. 5-8)
FURTHER READING
Criticism
Brabander, Jennifer M. Review of If Not for the Cat: Haiku, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Ted Rand. Horn Book Magazine 80, no. 6 (November-December 2004): 723-24.
Praises Prelutsky's "adroit and memorable" verse in If Not for the Cat: Haiku.
Engelfried, Steven. Review of Scranimals, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Peter Sís. School Library Journal 50, no. 6 (June 2004): 58.
Evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Scranimals.
Maughan, Shannon. "And Now for Something Completely Diffendoofer." Publishers Weekly 245, no. 6 (9 February 1998): 24.
Discusses Prelutsky and illustrator Lane Smith's involvement in completing the posthumous Dr. Seuss book Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!
Nye, Naomi Shihab. "Children's Books." New York Times Book Review (11 August 2002): 18.
Reviews four works of children's poetry, including Prelutsky's The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders.
Review of It's Raining Pigs and Noodles, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by James Stevenson. Reading Teacher 55, no. 3 (November 2001): 246-47.
Compliments Prelutsky's "creative and witty poems" in It's Raining Pigs and Noodles.
Additional coverage of Prelutsky's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Children's Literature Review, Vol. 13; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 93-96; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 38, 118; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 61; Literature Resource Center; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Eds. 1, 2; St. James Guide to Children's Writers, Vol. 5; and Something about the Author, Vols. 22, 66, 118.