Poet Marilyn Nelson talks a lot about the young adult publishing world, what it might mean for poets, for their work, for their wallets. She suggests that poetry can make you money, but still more compelling, young adult poetry finds an audience. I keep thinking back to the books I loved as a child and teenager, how fiercely loyal I was and remain to those stories and their authors—Roald Dahl, Carolyn Kizer, Judy Blume, L. M. Montgomery, even Shel Silverstein. I pursued the authors, from childhood books to adult novels. When I found an author, I read and read until what supply there was had been exhausted. Even then, I laid in wait at bookstores, hoping against hope that a new volume would appear and I would get a chance to submerge myself again. When my nieces and nephew learned to read, I inundated them with books whose spines might be slightly cracked. Even when wrapping a gift, I found it hard to resist a glimpse of my beloved characters, then a chapter flew by and suddenly the story was back in my mind and with it, all the associations from my many readings. In some ways, it gave me an opportunity to relive who I was at every reading, from child to teen to adult. I trust that Nelson’s many young adult books will offer her readers the same experience. Books, like music and photographs, return us so completely to a moment, that we cannot forsake them, throw them out, clear our parents’ attics.
Sometimes, in the right workshop, I find myself feeling the same kind of anticipation I feel for a favorite author. Some fellow writers introduce poems and characters that pique my interest, and I begin to wonder what might happen next. Marilyn Nelson’s workshop introduced me to Lester Graves Lennon’s series of poems, wherein he writes about a young poet who discovers after the death of his blind father that his father left behind a series of writings, all in Braille. The poet takes the work and has it translated. His father’s secret? Poetry. The mystery between them deepens while the distance seems to lessen. What will he do with this revelation? What other secrets might be revealed; what secrets have died with the father? How must the man reconsider who he is in light of who his father was? By the end of our discussion about word choice, syntax and scene, I am eager to read the rest of the story. It whets the appetite for a taste I have cultivated since childhood. These moments articulate what seems fleeting in the daily lives of writers—our afternoons of work, or mornings or late nights, that work has the potential to become real books with real readers who wait to see what we will do next.
No comments:
Post a Comment