But if he was not “in the vein,” he could squeeze ’til he turned orange but nothing usable would come of it. Seuss, though, Chukovsky didn’t really have it “on tap.” He always said: When the internal weather was good, he could write a classic in one shot, and then another, the next day. The book took off, zillions of little Russian torturers memorized the whole thing-I think it’s like three hundred lines-and Chukovsky started to get fan mail, and the publishers were instantly up his ass for more, more, more. Here is a more-or-less contemporary photograph, taken by a poet you’ve all read, Vladimir Mayakovsky:īut you see where this is going. Chukovsky took that reconstruction, fixed it up, made it make sense, and voilà: ready for the printer. Next day, the two of ’em knew that what they’d made was too good to let go off, so they sat at a table and reconstructed what they could. He forgot all about his guts and helped Mozart compose his first symphony. To take the kid’s mind off the horribleness, Chukovsky got him engrossed in some kind of collaborative improvisation game, rhyming like crazy around a story of a crocodile who comes to Saint Petersburg and eats a dog and then a cop or something… there’s a war … the crocodile runs around … Chukovsky’s kid was just a teeny thing, but he knew inspiration when he saw it. Somehow, everyone thought the family doctor was the only one would could be consulted, so Chukovsky wound up on a train in the middle of the night with that poor kid, age like four or something, sick and moaning. It’s like cops planting weed in people’s cars.)Ĭhukovsky’s backstory is pleasant.
(Of course, like with everything else, you can carry whatever point you like into his books and then pretend you found it there. His stuff is a lot like Green Eggs and Ham: about that long rhymes bouncing around like popcorn no real point in sight.
Number of supremo-supremo classic children’s books to his credit: ten or twelve. Same deal as ours, except his hot decade wasn’t the fifties it was the twenties. Seuss? Does Thailand? ’Cuz if they do, I need to know about it. One wants to know: Does Botswana have a Dr. Consequently, if I’m in a used bookstore and I see a book called Thai Children’s Poetry or Setswana Children’s Poetry or Inuit Children’s Poetry, I pretty much buy it on contact. She doesn’t care whether what you’re doing “serves as a useful critique.” She wants it to be good. The minute you bring a six-year-old into the picture, though, everything changes. Or it can “bear witness.” Being good-actually good-is even considered a little passé. My teacher’s point was that art made in the modern world is under scarcely any obligation to be good.
I was taught this concept in connection to medieval lyric poetry. Let me tell you something about children’s poetry: people tend to create it for the right reasons.
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