Bingo

There was a man who had a dog,
and Bingo was his name, oh.
B-I-N-G-O
B-I-N-G-O
B-I-N-G-O
and Bingo was his name, oh.

There was a man who had a dog,
and Bingo was his name, oh.
[clap]-I-N-G-O
[clap]-I-N-G-O
[clap]-I-N-G-O
and Bingo was his name, oh.

etc.

Kids love poetry. At least little kids love poetry. It takes awhile, but, somehow, we seem to manage to strip that love of poetry away from most of them.

In the nursery we read children Mother Goose Rhymes, and they love them.

Ring around the roses,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes, ashes,
We all fall DOWN!

And we don't ask that they "get it." Very young children will most likely not understand even the simple vocabulary of "Ring Around the Roses"; they certainly won't understand the historical significance of the poem; then again, most adults probably aren't aware of the poem's background. It is, after all, about the Black Plague which devastated most of Europe. The flowers (kept in handkerchiefs in pockets) were actually potpourri that were taken out and put over the face when one passed the stinking corpses of the dead piled everywhere. The ashes are the ashes from the mass funeral pyres--the only expedient way to deal with so many bodies. And the alternative third line ("Atchoo! Atchoo!") shows the symptom that preceded almost certain death.

Children will not know or even intuit the grisly origins. What children hear is music. "B-I-N-G-O" is music. Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks is wonderfully tongue-twisting music, just as Paul Fleischman's Newbery Award winning Joyful Noise is music with harmony (and it's about bugs, which is likely to make parents a bit edgy, but which children do not yet have a problem with).

So when does the music die?

Part of the answer is explored in Lois Lowry's Anastasia Krupnik.

Standing in front of a classroom having to recite drippy poetry (often the poems teachers force children to memorize and recite are more about American history than poetry) is DOOMED to cause everybody (teacher included) to hate poetry. Heavy, narrow-minded judgement about what is and what is not poetry is not only wrong, it can make children feel stupid. At the very least, ham-fisted readings of "Paul Revere" and "Daffodils" will eventually take the joy out of poetry for children.

And it doesn't have to be that way. Look at the range of poems in The Online Children's Literature Anthology. Even the earlier works are filled with music and delightful nonsense.

The poetry in Robert L. Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses is formal, but it shows an understanding of childhood that Isaac Watts and other 18th-19th century children's poets would have called wicked. "The Whole Duty of Children" seems as though it will be another preachy piece drilling rules and admonitions into the child reader, and the beginning of the poem reads like the more conservative poetry of the time. But the twist in the final line, "At least as well as he is able" acknowledges that children will fidget; their minds will wander; it's normal. Adults will see normal projection in "My Shadow." The child scolds the naughty, mischievous shadow the way parents scold children. It's very much like Mom or Dad giving a child a "time out" for bullying a sibling; the put-out child then tells the family dog or a Barbie doll, "You're gonna have a 'time out' for pushing Malibu Stacy in the kitchen!"

Contemporary poetry often invites singing or chanting or writing. A collection such as Hailstones and Halibut Bones by Mary O'Neill and John Wallner can spark an exercise in writing examples, thoughts, images, feelings that relate to a particular color. May Swenson's Poems to Solve encourage children to think about concrete "clues" associated with people, places and things. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault (illustrated by Lois Ehlert) and anything in the Dr. Seuss category nearly compel children to explore rhythm and meter and rhyme and whimsy.

Poetry for children (and adults) doesn't have to be dreary; unfortunately, it often is.

:(