I am lucky. Over the past twenty-five years, I have known Kevin Henkes as a very young author, a new husband, a brand-new father, a newly successful author-artist, an experienced father, an extremely successful author and supremely successful author-artist, a non-temperamental star on business trips, a joyous companion on holidays, and, always, a much-loved and loving friend.

It all started when Kevin was nineteen and came to New York with his portfolio and the dummy for his first picture book. He had made a list, in order of preference, of his choices of publishers. Greenwillow was number one. I remember looking up and seeing this apparent child walk into my office. I said something like, “What did your mother say when you told her you were coming to New York?” He looked slightly embarrassed and said, “Well, she cried.” Then I looked at his portfolio. It was the work of a young man, but it was the work of someone who knew what he was doing and where he wanted to go. There was nothing tentative or out of place. And the dummy—a completely finished dummy of his first book, All Alone—showed that he knew what a picture book was, and that it was an art form in which he was completely at home.

I remember thinking that talent like this did not stay undiscovered for long. “Where is your next appointment?” I asked. And when he said “Harper,” I accepted the dummy on the spot. Then I went to the telephone to call his mother.

A few weeks later, Kevin called to tell me he planned to drop out of college and devote himself to working on his book. “You can’t,” I said. I predicted every doom I could think of. A college degree was obligatory. How could he support himself? It was a precipitate and crazy decision. He was polite—and adamant. And as on so many other occasions over the years, he knew what he was doing.

In those early years, Kevin came to New York once or twice a year. We would give him an empty office, and he would write. By the end of the visit, his next book would be well under way. He would also help my assistant with the mail, read and report (brilliantly) on the unsolicited manuscripts (years later, he was the first reader of Suzanne Freeman’s The Cuckoo’s Child, and I will always remember his excitement when he told me about it), go out to get coffee for anyone who would let him, read every Greenwillow F&G and bound galley, and lunch with the younger members of the department, all of whom were his friends. He found Manhattan stimulating and wonderful. He went to the theater, he walked all over, he conquered the subway, and he stayed in a hostel run by nuns and paid $8.50 a night for his room.

I remember when he first showed that he could be funny in his books—when the little boy in Clean Enough iced the soap with his father’s shaving cream. I remember when he enlarged Margaret & Taylor from a brief picture book to an early chapter book—presaging the novels to come. I remember when he changed his human characters to his signature mice—which allowed them the freedom to act in ways that are acceptable for mice but questionable for humans. And I remember when he wrote Words of Stone.

It was the winter of 1991. I read it, Elizabeth Shub read it, and oh, we talked. It needed work. Lots of work. But Kevin was becoming known for his mice, had written several very interesting shorter novels, and his popularity was growing. Would he listen to us, or would he want to show the novel to another publisher? And would they publish it as it stood, in order to have him on their list? It is a perennial problem for publishers, and in this case the ending was a happy one for Greenwillow. I did not know then what a perfectionist Kevin is. I did not know that there is no limit to the amount of work he will do to make something right. But I learned. And I think he learned. He never again showed us anything until he felt that each word, each sentence, each punctuation mark was exactly as he wanted it. I have known him to go over a picture-book manuscript for weeks and even months, refining, perfecting, honing, reading it aloud, listening, and listening some more. He is always open to suggestion, but he trusts himself, and certainly that trust has proved to be merited.

One of the things that distinguished Kevin as a young author, and has continued and grown as the years have passed, is his love and respect for the children’s books that came before. When I first knew him, he was a regular at the Cooperative Children’s Book Center in Madison. He was a passionate admirer of Crockett Johnson, Ruth Krauss, Margaret Wise Brown, Marvin Bileck, James Marshall, and many other authors and artists from the forties, fifties, and sixties. Of course that thrilled me, having grown up at Harper and learned almost everything I knew from Ursula Nordstrom. Kevin was always willing to listen to a “When I Was Young at Harper” story. And his was not an academic love. Recently he and his children, now aged ten and seven, made a list of the books he had read aloud to the two of them in the last couple of years. There were fifty-four novels on the list, including Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Freddy the Detective, all the Ramona books, The Moffats, Gone-Away Lake, and The Twenty-One Balloons. Both kids are avid readers on their own, and both kids have always been read to separately as well as together.

Kevin and his wife, Laura Dronzek, live in a big house at the end of their street. The large yard is a gathering place for the neighborhood children. Laura is a superb painter as well as a children’s book artist. She is talented, generous, wise, funny, loving, unflappable—and the best cook I know. When Olive’s Ocean was named a Newbery Honor Book, she picked up the phone, and every friend and neighbor arrived at the house that evening to celebrate. Laura bakes with the ease of someone opening a jar of peanut butter, and there was a huge cake with a facsimile of the Newbery Honor Medal, cookies, and champagne. I think the neighborhood was as excited and as happy as the Henkes family. And I understand that this year the celebration was even bigger and better. A friend of theirs recently wrote me, “Sometimes I just can’t believe the amount of artistic talent, grace, and friendliness that dwells in that house.” Anyone who has read his novels or his picture books knows how important family is to Kevin. Parents are three-dimensional and interesting. Children are respected and thoughtful. They enjoy each other, and they listen, eat, laugh, work, and play—together. Lilly, Julius, and their parents; Fanny and her father; Owen and his parents; Martha Boyle and her mother, father, grandmother, and siblings; Spoon, Joanie, and the other Gilmores; Sheila Rae and Louise—families all. Just like Kevin, Laura, Will, and Clara.

Kevin is almost as old now as I was when we first met. And his son, Will, is just nine years younger than Kevin was on his first trip to New York. Time is a funny thing. But what has not changed in all these twenty-five years is Kevin’s joy in his work, his appreciation of what preceded him, and his excitement at the possibilities of perfecting his craft. At any signing, people tell him about their daughter Lilly or their son Owen. And in the last few years they have begun telling him that they grew up on his books. They tell him what his books have meant to them and to their children. The emotion in the air is love. But then, that is the emotion that surrounds Kevin—from family, friends, readers, librarians, colleagues, teachers, and booksellers.

Someone once asked me, years ago, if I knew from the very beginning where Kevin was going and what he would do in the future. I said I had always known he was bursting with talent but no, I had had no idea of what the future would hold. That is equally true today. But I knew then, and I know now, that whatever it is, it will be worth the wait. And for now, all I can say is, “WOW.”

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Upon hearing such requests posed by education students and teachers, a librarian’s first thought might be, Do these poems even exist? Of course, the next thought might be, Why in the world would someone think poetry books about personal hygiene should exist? Are hand-washing and nail-clipping the stuff of which poetry is made? And what does it teach students about poetry to give them a poem about, say, the flu?

Wonderful poetry can, of course, be written on almost any subject. This haiku from Jack Prelutsky’s If Not for the Cat (Greenwillow) would fit with a unit on invertebrates and is a genuinely evocative poem that in seventeen syllables captures the essence of jellyfish:

The problem comes in when poets begin writing poetry to fit a particular subject in order to satisfy curriculum needs. Then it becomes purposeful poetry, where the poet’s intention isn’t self-expression or revelation or even merely observation. Instead, the poet intends to teach children something finite and factual.

In some ways, poetry for children has always been a strange beast. Poetry, more than other forms of writing, tends to be an intensely personal expression. No characters spark a story to life, and generally no plot dictates the form of the work (putting aside the narrative poem or free-verse novel). Instead, poems spring from experience and the desire to put feelings or thoughts into words, using meter and rhythm to further evoke the experience. Adults writing poetry for children is almost incongruous — adult lives are not children’s lives, and children aren’t very interested in adult experience. They might be willing to read poetry about how cool it is to drive a car, or how it feels to have power to make choices with money beyond which video game to buy. But the themes are limited, and most adult feelings that could be expressed in poetry would be of very little interest to a child audience.

So adult poets writing for the child audience must take a different path. They can draw from memories of their own childhood, trying to recapture, say, the joy of riding a bike or the fear of dark places. They can look at the lives of children today and try to write poems about that, resulting in poems that often are more mundane or aiming for the funny rather than the experiential — the school poetry of Kalli Dakos in The Goof Who Invented Homework (Dial) is an example. Or adult poets can try to write about areas of common interest between children and adults, like animals (which Douglas Florian has done very successfully, beginning with beast feast [Harcourt]). They can write about things they observe in the world, which children can also observe with their keen insight if they take the time and wonder about, as the late Valerie Worth did so beautifully in her small poems (Farrar):

Out of these shared interests come poems where the adult experience and the child experience intersect. The shock of recognition can be felt on both sides of the age divide, as long as the reader has ever had the experience of holding a handful of marbles and pouring them out. The poem tells the truth but isn’t attempting to explain anything about the manufacturing process of marbles, or inform readers that gravity is responsible for making the marbles move down, or describe how marbles were used in ancient Egypt.

Increasingly, adult poets write poems that don’t come out of their own experience, either as an adult or a child, and that don’t come out of the experiences of modern-day children. They write poems that fill a niche, that serve a purpose — poems that will be useful, where children will learn something by reading them.

From the publishers’ perspective, this must seem like a good thing: it must be much easier to successfully market a book that serves a purpose. Humorous poetry has always been easier to sell, partly because teachers and other well-meaning adults believe children only like funny poems. Perhaps they have been turned off to poetry themselves by years of deconstruction in school, and by the feeling that understanding poetry is a lot of work with too many pitfalls. In any case, Shel Silverstein’s or Jack Prelutsky’s funny modern poems can be very profitable, inclining publishers toward publishing a book that aims for the funny bone. Experiential poetry — poetry written as pure art — can be a tough sell in this practical world. Poetry that extends a school curriculum is much easier to market because there is a built-in audience (teachers), and even public libraries will purchase such poetry on the theory that boys like information best.

Purposeful poetry edifies rather than illuminates, and sometimes makes no bones about doing so. Take Nancy Elizabeth Wallace’s picture book Leaves! Leaves! Leaves! (Marshall Cavendish), which includes this poem as part of the informational back matter:

Clearly, this poem was written to teach children about photosynthesis, to be used as part of an overall lesson on trees in the fall. The author chose words to fit with the facts rather than carefully selecting the perfect words to capture the essence of leaves or a sense of wonder at the way nature fits together—the poem is strictly to help children understand that leaves turn the sun’s light into chlorophyll and that’s what makes the leaves green.

Teachers — or many of them, anyway — must be applauding the increase in poetry that teaches. With the emphasis today on cross-curricular teaching, a poem about volcanoes covers two subjects at once. So a series like Children’s Press’s Modern Rhymes about Ancient Times may appeal greatly to a teacher who is hard-pressed to find time to teach either social studies or poetry. And yet, one wonders how much of either subject a child learns from a verse like this from the volume on ancient Rome:

True, such poems may well help children retain the facts — they work quite well as memory devices. But bumpy, lurching meter and dubious rhymes fill the series, and the amount of information communicated is necessarily very limited. The Fresh Squeezed poetry series by Carol Diggory Shields also tries to teach facts through poetry, and these poems at least are frequently witty, incorporating imagery to convey the information and make better poetry, as this poem from BrainJuice: Science, Fresh Squeezed! (Handprint) shows:

Gravity’s the law,
And you may not adore it,
But I can tell you, buddy—
You’d better not ignore it.
Without our good friend gravity,
We’d be in big trouble,
Your bed, your house,
Your dog, your cat,
Would float around like bubbles. . . . .

nterestingly, science, with its leaps from what is easily understandable (flowers are plants) to what is unseen and hard to imagine (plants are made up of molecules), may make for better poetry because it forces the writer to put the almost unfathomable into words and therefore requires more imagination to articulate. In Myra Cohn Livingston’s poem “Comets,” from Space Songs(Holiday), she includes the science of comets but also expresses their wondrousness:

Many teachers use poetry as a way to practice writing, and if they have a child write a poem on Martin Luther King Jr., say, that assignment covers several subjects simultaneously. But what is a child being taught when (true story) he is reprimanded for not including enough facts in his poem? Such pointed writing assignments drive parents into libraries looking for samples of poems to match the child’s homework, and so demand is being created on the library end for poetry for the child who has to write a “career poem” or the one who is assigned to write a sonnet about his favorite food for a nutrition unit.

Sensing the market, poets begin trying to come up with poetry because it will fit into lesson plans. Betsy Franco created a book ingeniously pairing math with poetry in her Mathematickles! (McElderry). In it, she uses mathematical concepts together with words in a way that makes the reader look at the world a little differently, makes the reader’s brain twist just a bit:

Unfortunately, she followed up this elegantly succinct foray into cross-curriculum activity with the sprawling Counting Our Way to the 100th Day! (McElderry), a book clearly targeting teachers looking for material to celebrate that new school holiday, the Hundredth Day. Franco hasn’t lost her talent, and some of her 100 poems about the number 100 delight:

But because it is purposeful poetry — poetry written to serve a purpose — Franco must strain to incorporate the number 100, and she must pad the book to reach the total of 100 poems:

All poetry is purposeful in some way. But true poetry’s purpose must always be art in order to be true poetry. There’s tremendous variety in the forms art can take, and poetry is no exception, but we cannot truly say children are being exposed to poetry when the poetry they are being taught was written to teach about something factual. It’s a step back into the schoolroom of Mr. Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’s scathing indictment of education, Hard Times. In the intervening 150 years since Dickens was writing, we surely have learned that children need more than “Facts, sir.” They need poetry.

From the May/June 2005 Horn Book Magazine

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