From Cover to Cover (8 page)

DOCUMENTATION OF SOURCES

Even when stories come from a common cultural source, the reteller generally consults a variety of original source material to pull together a collection of stories. Because this is most often the case, we expect the author to provide documentation and source notes for each story included in the collection.

Author Alvin Schwartz sets the standard for this sort of documentation in his collections of folklore aimed at children. Even in his simplest books, such as the beginning reader
In a Dark, Dark Room, and Other Scary Stories
, he includes source notes titled “Where the Stories Come From” that are aimed at the beginning readers themselves. His popular collections of frightening folklore for older children include extensive notes; for the twenty-nine stories included in
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
, for example, Schwartz provides what Betsy Hearne has referred to as “model source notes.” To research and document the stories he retold, he consulted eighty-four print sources and more than a dozen informants (both children and adults who shared their scary stories with him). In his
notes he acknowledges the sources he used, discusses variants, and tells how he arrived at the final version that appears in his book.

ORGANIZATION

Schwartz also organizes the stories into sections by type: jump stories, ghost stories, scary things, urban legends, and humorous stories. Each section is introduced with a one-or two-sentence description of the story type, and at the end of the book more extensive notes give further background about each of the tale types, including such things as various techniques for telling a jump tale and the current social environment that makes urban legends appealing.

Other compilers have chosen to organize collections by places or cultures of origin, or by subject. When you evaluate a collection of traditional tales, think about how it is organized. Will the organization assist readers who may be looking for just one or two particular tales? Will it invite readers to approach the collected stories as one continuous narrative? Does the author provide a written introduction to the stories in each section that explains how the part is distinctive and how it relates to the collection as a whole? What is the range of tale types within each section, as well as the range of tales in the entire book?

LITERARY FOLKTALES

These tales are not part of traditional literature, but I will mention them here because they are often confused with traditional tales. Rather than originating within a particular culture’s oral storytelling tradition, a literary folktale is written by a known author who uses the characteristics we associate with folktales: concentrated action, stock characters, elements of fantasy, and simple themes. Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde are perhaps the best-known authors of this type of tale; however,
many contemporary authors try their hands at this as well. They are often difficult to distinguish from true folktales, so be on the lookout for descriptive phrases, such as “an original tale,” in subtitles or flap copy. Also, check the CIP on the copyright page. The Library of Congress assigns the Dewey decimal number 398 to traditional literature, 290 to mythology, and [FIC] or [E] to literary folktales, although it is not always infallible in its classifications.

FRACTURED FAIRY TALES

Somewhere between true folktales and literary folktales fall
fractured fairy tales
, playful variants on familiar stories and characters. Many scholars cite James Thurber as the first American writer to fracture a tale, with “The Little Girl and the Wolf,” a send-up of “Little Red Riding Hood” that was published in
The New Yorker
in 1939. The term “fractured fairy tale” itself comes from a regular segment that was part of the
Rocky and Bullwinkle
cartoon series that ran from 1959 to 1964. Julie Cummins defines it as “A classic folk or fairy tale rewritten with tongue-in-cheek humor or as a spoof using twists and spins on the story’s features; text and visual references poke fun at the original, resulting in a witty, clever, and entertaining tale.”

In children’s literature, Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith have set the standard for fractured fairy tales, beginning with their popular recasting of “The Three Little Pigs,”
The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs
by A. Wolf. They turn the original on its head by telling the story from the wolf’s point of view. He was merely trying to borrow a cup of sugar from his porcine neighbors so he could bake a cake for his grandmother. Was it his fault that their houses were so poorly constructed that they fell down when he sneezed? Smith’s illustrations add to the humor by consistently contradicting the wolf’s claims of his innocence. David Wiesner uses illustration to twist the same story in a completely different
direction in
The Three Pigs
by inviting us to look beyond the borders of the page itself. In his fractured tale, the wolf huffs and puffs and blows the pigs right out of the story. Outside the tale, they become realistic, three-dimensional pigs who look right at the reader before they wander through other traditional tales, taking on the characteristics of the various art styles represented in each one.

“The Three Little Pigs” seems to be a favorite target for fracturing, but any familiar tale can find new life when an author and artist play with setting, characters, point of view, or a reversal of standard elements. For fractured fairy tales to be completely successful with children, they must begin with traditional tales that children know well. Otherwise, the humor will probably fall flat. Happily, authors have a wealth of traditional tales from which to choose.

Rhythm, rhyme, and the pleasurable sounds that words make can appeal to children from a very early age. It is no accident that lullabies are sung to soothe babies and nursery rhymes are recited to entertain them. Children of all ages like the sounds of poetry in language. Older children chant rhymes as they play games and jump rope. They revise the lyrics of commercial jingles to amuse their peers and twist names and words to taunt their enemies. They re-create the rhythms and rhymes of popular music to pass the time as they wait for the school bus in the morning. We find an appetite for poetry everywhere we find children.

Yet many children claim to dislike poetry. In all likelihood what they dislike is the
study
of poetry. Because poetry is defined in part by form and structure, over the years, children in school have been forced to think about poems in these terms. Many adults themselves have unpleasant memories of being forced to dissect a poem to analyze its meaning, and they have come to associate this unpleasantness with poetry in general. But poetry need not be picked apart to be understood and appreciated. Poems speak to children through sound, images, and ideas.

THE SOUND OF POETRY

Poetry uses words in musical, rhythmic patterns that delight small children, even before they understand the meaning of the words. As children get older, they are better able to appreciate the subtleties of poetic form and content, but young children seem to be especially attracted to the regular structured patterns, more aptly called
verse
.

Rhyme
, the repetition of the same or similar sounds, is an important part of verse and, to some extent, poetry. There are many kinds of rhyme, but when most people use the word, they are generally referring to
end rhyme
only. End rhyme is the regularly occurring echo that is used in a uniform pattern at the conclusion of lines, and it is the hallmark of conventional verse, particularly verse that is aimed at very young children. While it can be pleasing to the ear and may make a poem easier to listen to and remember, it can also lead to a singsong regularity that deadens the senses. In fact, many believe that end rhyme is such an artificial and unnatural way of using language, in the hands of a lesser poet, it can destroy the essence of poetry. Writers can easily become so bound to rhyme that it dictates the word choice, and the words lose their power and meaning. That is the opposite of what a poet strives for.

Many other devices of sound contribute to rhyme in a pleasurable but less obvious way. These include
alliteration
(the repetition of initial consonant sounds),
assonance
(the repetition of vowel sounds), and
consonance
(the repetition of final consonants). Karla Kuskin uses all the above sound devices in her poem “Thistles.”

Both poetry and verse have some sort of rhythm, called
meter
. The lengths of a poem’s lines and the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables constitute its meter. It not only contributes to the way a poem sounds but also can reinforce the poem’s meaning. Meter can be used to slow the reader down and give us a sense of quiet contemplation or dreaming, or to move us along quickly to communicate such things as playful movement. Note how the poet Eloise Greenfield uses short lines to reinforce meaning in this stanza from her poem about a child in motion:

The two-and three-word lines list the people and things Lessie passes as she’s running, and also give a sense of her feet pounding on the pavement in her breathless sprint down the street, until she finally slows down when she reaches the corner.

Contrast this with the effect that meter has in Douglas Florian’s poem about waiting for winter to end.

Florian has cleverly used meter to slow down the reading of the first line of each stanza and to speed up the reading of the second, giving us a sense of winter’s prolonged stay and the spring’s welcome arrival.

Modern poetry had gradually moved away from a reliance on a strict rhythm and the use of end rhymes. Poems need not rhyme at all, and
free verse
breaks away from formal metrical patterns altogether. Arnold Adoff is one of the best-known children’s poets who brings a
modern vision to poetry. His poems often tell a story by combining strong feeling with action.

In Adoff’s poems, the placement of the words on the page is almost like a road map, giving readers guidance as to how they should read the poems aloud.

THE IMAGES OF POETRY

Since poems are compact, there can be no wasted words. The poet carefully chooses precise, exact words to evoke the desired mood or feeling, or to surprise the reader with an unexpected—but perfect—comparison. Poetry uses
metaphor
, bringing unrelated things together to point out similarities or differences. Pay close attention to the way Gwendolyn
Brooks uses words to create images and feelings in “Cynthia in the Snow” from her book
Bronzeville Boys and Girls
:

Brooks uses imagery to appeal to the senses of hearing, sight, and touch, making us feel as though we are right in the midst of a snow flurry. Her playful use of words—“laughs away from me,” “whitely,” and “otherwhere”—is original and inventive and yet can be immediately understood. On a metaphorical level, Brooks writes about snow as if it were a person, another child perhaps, teasing and enticing Cynthia as a playmate might do.

THE IDEAS OF POETRY

Like “Cynthia in the Snow,” good children’s poetry gives fresh vision to common things and experiences. It can appeal to the intellect as well as the emotions, as it extends and enriches meaning in everyday life. In looking at children’s poetry on an intellectual level, we need to keep in mind the typical interests and concerns of childhood: relationships with friends and family, the outdoors, daily routines, play, animals, and
ordinary everyday things such as safety pins or socks—these are pieces of the child’s world. We can find them all in good poetry for children.

When we evaluate children’s poetry, we need to consider the quality of the poetry itself by thinking about how it sounds, what it says, and how it says it. Read poetry aloud. A good poem sounds natural, even if it rhymes. Look at the words that have been used to compose the poem. Do they seem unchangeable? What kinds of specific and implied comparisons has the poet made? How has imagery been used? Think about the idea presented in the poem. Does it show a fresh view of something with which a child is likely to be familiar? Does it appeal to the mind through the senses? Does it leave a lingering image in the mind of the reader?

In addition to thinking about the quality of the poetry itself, we also need to consider the manner in which it is presented in a book. Poetry published for children exists in great quantity and variety. We find books that appeal to all ages from infancy up through the teen years. There are anthologies of classic poems, some of which were written specifically for children and some of which were written for adults but can be enjoyed by children. There are collections of poems by individual poets. There are single poems that are illustrated and published as individual picture books, as well as picture-book texts written in verse. And there are collections of songs published in anthologies, in addition to single songs published in picture-book editions. There are novels written in verse. Because poetry, rhymes, and verse appeal to a broad range of ages, we need to think in terms of audience when we evaluate individual volumes of poetry. Let’s take a look at some of these categories, beginning with rhymes for the very youngest.

NURSERY RHYMES

Nursery rhymes recited to children and handed down through generations have come to be associated with the appropriately fanciful name
Mother Goose. In their authoritative work on the subject,
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
, folklore scholars Peter and Iona Opie remark that while many scholarly studies have attempted to analyze the symbolic and historical nature of the rhymes, these interpretations are largely speculative. The rhymes themselves have survived not because of a great underlying meaning—indeed, many of them make little sense at all—but because of their sound: “[T]hese trivial verses have endured where newer and more ambitious compositions have become dated and forgotten. They have endured often for nine or ten generations, sometimes for considerably more, and scarcely altered in their journey.”

While surviving as oral literature for generations, the rhymes began to be published in books especially created for children in the early eighteenth century. They are among the earliest children’s books published in both England and the United States. For the most part the rhymes they contain are familiar to English-speaking children today: “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” “Little Jack Horner,” and “This Little Pig Went to Market” among them.

The rhymes themselves don’t change, but the illustrations do. Each year new editions of Mother Goose nursery rhymes are added to the selection of contemporary children’s books. Illustrations offer new interpretations or fresh presentations of familiar characters. In his collection
Three Little Kittens, and Other Favorite Nursery Rhymes
, Tony Ross uses a cartoon style to bring out the playful nonsense inherent in most of the rhymes. He also makes visual asides at some of the more perplexing or archaic references; for example, when Jack (of “Jack and Jill” fame) winds up in bed “to mend his head / with vinegar and brown paper,” Ross shows him with a huge wad of brown paper stuck loosely atop his head, staring blankly at a bottle of vinegar he’s holding in his hand. Ruth Sanderson takes the opposite tack in
Mother Goose and Friends
. Her realistic oil paintings offer a more literal interpretation of the rhymes,
showing characters from a past time. She adds a sense of whimsy by including elves and fairies in some of the illustrations. Nina Crews takes a completely different approach with
The Neighborhood Mother Goose
. Forty-one traditional rhymes are illustrated with photographs of contemporary city children that offer a new multicultural dimension to the age-old verses.

How do we evaluate these collections? Look at the illustrations to determine what they add to the rhymes. What scenes did the illustrator choose to show? Due to the harsh and violent nature of many of the rhymes, literal interpretations will not always work. We may enjoy the image of the baby rocking in his cradle on a treetop, but few parents will want to share a picture that shows his unfortunate descent when the bough breaks. Conversely, everyone wants to see Jack and Jill falling down the hill and Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall. A skilled and thoughtful illustrator takes the sensibilities of small children and their parents into consideration.

Look at the selection of rhymes included in the collection. Which rhymes have been included? Is it a fairly comprehensive collection, or is it selective? Are most of the rhymes familiar ones, such as “Little Miss Muffet” and “Little Boy Blue”? Adults who are looking for collections of nursery rhymes to share with their children generally want to find the ones they remember from their childhoods. Less familiar rhymes may be included, but they shouldn’t outnumber the common rhymes, unless that is the point of the book, as it is in the Opies’
Tail Feathers from Mother Goose
, a collection of previously unpublished nursery rhymes from various sources housed in the Opie archive. How does the author provide access to the rhymes? Is there an index of titles or of first lines (generally one and the same in nursery rhymes)? If someone were looking for the complete version of “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” for example, could it be easily found in the collection?