Time You Let Me In

Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25
selected by Naomi Shihab Nye
236 pages
published by HarperCollins

Publisher's Description:

They are inspiring talented stunning remarkable wise

They are also fearless depressed hilarious impatient in love out of love pissed off

And they want you to let them in.

My Comments:

There are actually works by 26 poets included in this anthology. In the notes section at the end, Nye said that she is bad with numbers, and after notifying all 26 poets that they'd been accepted she couldn't omit any of them. From her introduction and notes, I get the impression that Nye invested a lot of time and love into putting this collection together; soliciting entries from potential contributors and choosing the final set to be included.

I don't know for sure if an anthology like this is eligible for the YALSA award, or even who would receive the award (all 26 authors plus Nye?) if it won. Judging anthologies of any kind is a challenge, because writing styles vary so much from one writer to another. There are bound to be some stronger and some weaker works in any collection. Poetry seems especially difficult to me, because judging good vs. great poetry seems to me largely a matter of personal taste. I've helped to judge a local poetry contest for the past four years, and there's never been unanimous agreement on first place versus second.

I felt that many of the strongest poets were featured toward the middle of the book. Works by Lauren Stacks, Jonah Ogles, and Lauren Eriks stood out for me, partially because I could connect with the experiences they were writing about. I'm sure that there are other readers who would connect with other poems. There are a lot of emotions gathered here, many of them so raw that I have to believe that they are recordings of the poets personal experiences.

I think that, overall, this collection is successful in that the poems all seem to belong together. There are different viewpoints expressed throughout the collection, but similar themes and topics run throughout. Things like bittersweet childhood memories, failed romance, deaths of loved ones, coming of age and general angst crop up consistently.

It seems that there are a lot of book covers featuring keys out there (Incarceron and Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life are the ones that jump immediately to mind) and I wonder whether that was a factor in choosing the cover image. The key does work with the title, which comes from one of the poems. Even before I discovered the title's origin, I thought that it fit - young poets wanting to be heard.

The notes at the end include photographs and playful biographical blurbs about each poet. The photographs never fail to surprise me; the faces in the photos never match up with the faces I imagined would go with the names

Your comments?

Borrowed Names

Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madame C.J. Walker, Marie Curie and their Daughters
by Jeannine Atkins
Published by Henry Holt and Co.
224 pages


Publisher's Description:

As a child, Laura Ingalls Wilder traveled across the prairie in a covered wagon. Her daughter, Rose, thought those stories might make a good book, and the two created the beloved Little House series. Sara Breedlove, the daughter of former slaves, wanted everything to be different for her own daughter, A’Lelia. Together they built a million-dollar beauty empire for women of color. Marie Curie became the first person in history to win two Nobel prizes in science. Inspired by her mother, Irène too became a scientist and Nobel prize winner. Borrowed Names is the story of these extraordinary mothers and daughters.

My Comments:

Who knew that Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker and Marie Curie were all born in the same year (1867) and all had daughters who helped them gain a place in history? I wasn't aware of this connection before picking up the book, and so I thought the premise behind it (free verse biographies of all six women) a little odd until reading about the common birth year in the introduction. Then, as I got into the book and discovered how closely the three daughters worked with their mothers I thought, "A-ha!" and the book made perfect sense to me.

The stories of all three mother-daughter pairs were fascinating in their own right, and their lives also overlapped in interesting ways. For instance, Ingalls and her daughter Rose may have walked right past Walker and her daughter A'Lelia at the International Exhibition in San Francisco, and Rose and the Walkers later lived in New York during the Great War. (I love that it is referred to as The Great War and not World War I; it's easy to forget, now, that there was a time between the world wars). A'Lelia and Irene both attend to wounded soldiers during the war. Rose and Irene Curie may have also walked on common ground in Europe after the war. I also love how feminist each of the women are in their own ways. Laura Ingalls insisted on finding a preacher who would remove the word "obey" from her wedding vows, Madam C.J. Walker used her savings to build her own company from the ground up, and Marie Curie won a nobel prize for physics before women were even allowed to speak at the awards ceremony.

I learned a lot about each of the women, and also think that the poems work well as poetry. Although written in free verse (which doesn't conform to conventional rhyme or meter) the poems didn't read like regular sentences that have just been broken up by an editor. The verses gave me just enough detail to leave me with an impression of what was going on; leaving me room to interpret what was happening with the women's lives. This, to me, is how poetry should read.

The design is charmingly old-fashioned. I wasn't enamored with the cover when I first saw pictures of it online, but it looks more appealing in-person. Black and white photographs of each of the women appear at the beginning of their section. Atkins doesn't refer to exact years in her verse, but instead speaks in generalities like the beginning of the Great War, second summer of the war, etc. I liked this, because I could focus on the stories without feeling that I would need to remember any dates for later. "Legacies" sections at the end of each mother-daughter biography and a time line at the very end are helpful in tying everything together. Atkins also includes a selected bibliography at the end. Some of the selected titles have been written for younger readers, and are marked as such. I was disappointed to see only three books listed for the Walkers.

Your Comments?

What is Poetry?

I didn't get my hands on a copy of Spies of Mississippi in time to read and write about it this week, so instead I've thrown together a post discussing poetry. My comments on Spies of Mississippi will appear next week. Also, since the copy I'm reading is an uncorrected proof that doesn't include illustrations or back end matter, I would love it if anyone who has read the final version could provide some comments!

What is poetry; and if it is going to be judged against other books for a nonfiction award, then how do you judge it?

The New Oxford American Dictionary that we keep behind the reference desk at my library has the following definitions:

poem: a piece of writing that partakes of the nature of both speech and song ...

poetry: literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive styles and rhythm

Hmm. After looking in the dictionary, I turned next to my near-constant companion, the Internet.

From Wikipedia I found this tidbit:

Poetry (from the Greek "ποίησις", poiesis, a "making") is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning.

Okay, none of these definitions is very helpful at defining what poetry is, but it does tell me that the way a poem sounds and how/what it makes the reader feel are both important to whether it is successful, or not.

That seems simple enough. When reading a poem, does it have rhythm? Does it evoke strong ideas or feelings?

The following suggestions about poetry come from poetrymagic.co.uk:

1. Poetry may well be the art of the unsayable.
2. Poems are an act of discovery, and require immense effort — to write and to be understood.
3. A poem is something unique to its author, but is also created in the common currency of its period: style, preoccupations, shared beliefs.
4. Poems are not created by recipe, or by pouring content into a currently acceptable mould.

This would suggest that poetry should seem fresh and current, and should avoid cliches. I'm not so sure about the "immense effort" part, although I know from my school days that writing good peotry is hard. Should it be hard to read, though? Perhaps poetry should say something that may be difficult to express through conventional prose.

How do these questions correspond to the criteria for the YALSA nonfiction award? The eligibility criteria for the YALSA nonfiction award include, "excellent writing, research, presentation and readability for young adults."

Presentation and readability seem pretty straightforward. Is the book attractive? Will young adults get the poetry? The part about "excellent writing" seems fairly easy, as well. Perhaps when judging "excellent writing" in poetry one should look at its rhythm, the feelings and ideas that it evokes, and it's originality. But what about research? How much research goes into writing poetry?

Biographies written in verse, like Margarita Engle's Poet Slave of Cuba and Stephanie Hemphill's Your Own, Sylvia would definitely require research. So would poetry collections like Engle's Surrender Tree, which is about real events in the history of Cuba's struggle for independence. But what about works like Francesca Lia Block's collection of love poems, How to (Un) Cage a Girl? Shouldn't works like this be exempt from the "research" requirement?

While I believe that poetry in general should be eligible for the YALSA award, I also believe that there are some exceptions. Novels written in verse, such as works by Ellen Hopkins (Crank, Glass, Indentical) and Sonya Sones (Stop Pretending, What My Mother Doesn't Know), are cataloged with fiction. These are fictional narratives that just happen to be written in verse. It makes sense for these to be eligible for fiction awards, but not a nonfiction award.

A final word on poetry: On About.com, I found this neat statement by freelance writer Mark Flanagan, "Poetry is a lot of things to a lot of people ... defining poetry is like grasping at the wind - once you catch it, it's no longer wind."

Your comments on poetry?