Poetry doesn’t get enough credit as a social activity, Caroline Kennedy says.
“More and more kids are memorizing poems together or participating in poetry slam teams,” she says. “For kids, if you do something with your friends, it makes it a lot more fun.”
Her own experience has run the gamut from reciting four-liners as a child living in the White House to receiving classic lines translated from “Metamorphoses” as a Christmas present from her Latin-loving daughter.
So does Kennedy even have special verses she can trot out at cocktail parties?
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Caroline Kennedy speaks to delegates at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Times Warner Cable Arena on Sept. 6, 2012, in Charlotte, North Carolina. (MCT) |
“Well, not if I wanted anyone to speak to me,” she says with a laugh. “We were having a debate, though, about whether poetry was a good way to, um, pick up members of the opposite sex.”
And is it?
“I don’t know. I haven’t used it, but I encourage others to try it.”
Kennedy is promoting her fourth anthology, “Poems To Learn by Heart.”
There are 100, from one-sentence bits of silliness (Ogden’s Nash’s “Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore, / And that’s what parents were created for.”) to decidedly modern humor (“Baby Ate a Microchip”) to traditional challenges (“Paul Revere’s Ride”). Every page includes watercolor paintings by children’s illustrator Jon J. Muth.
With this fourth anthology, Kennedy, 55, may be the country’s most prominent poetry ambassador who isn’t plugging her own verse. Her earlier books have appealed to readers because of their links to her famous parents. Surely almost every American knows she’s the daughter of President John F. Kennedy (who was assassinated 50 years ago this November).
But since “The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis” (2001) and “A Family of Poems,” (2005), Caroline Kennedy has had a broader reach (2011’s “She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems”). For her new book, she got help from members of DreamYard Art Center of the South Bronx.
Kennedy talked by phone last week from New York. The conversation has been edited for clarity and space.
Q: Would reading in bed be a natural place for this book?
A: Parents and kids, grandparents and kids. ... This book is actually more dynamic than my previous books, with some poems for older kids. A family can make it an activity, especially for kids who don’t like reading. The poems are short, intense, meant to be read aloud, performed.
Q: The national Poetry Out Loud competition shows the growing popularity of memorizing poetry.
A: Poetry Out Loud is fantastic. I work with an arts education organization here in New York that does a lot of spoken word, and kids are writing their own poems and doing poetry slams.
The poems in this book are largely more traditional, but I think they give kids sort of a foundation in the rhyme and rhythm of poetry. Then hopefully they will go on to write their own poems.
These old poems really condense some very fundamental lessons, values and emotions. I think they are really valuable. They encourage the imagination ― they are so visual.
Q: One is translated by your daughter Tatiana.
A: She did it in a Latin class. She annoyed her brother and sister ― let’s put it that way ― because she really liked Latin. She gave the poem to me for Christmas one year. ... I think it just shows that if you start young, you can progress to places you would never expect.
I got kids from the Bronx to help me choose poems for this book.
Q: Did they have favorites?
A: They liked poems about imaginary creatures, friendship and humor.
But I also wanted to include poems that would appeal to boys. I noticed with my other poetry books that people mostly said they were buying them for their daughter or granddaughter. I really wanted to include poems that would appeal to boys. There are sports in here ― not to stereotype anyone, there are also poems here about girls playing sports. But boys should not discount poetry.
Q: You included the Gettysburg Address. Is that a poem?
A: Well, yes. It’s much more than just a poem, but I think it would be worth memorizing.
Q: Do you remember things from when you were young?
A: I remember some poems I memorized when I was really little ― “First Fig” and “Second Fig” (by Edna St. Vincent Millay) ― and I remember memorizing “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (W.B. Yeats) for the eighth-grade poetry contest, and “Charge of the Light Brigade” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson) and bits and pieces of “Paul Revere’s Ride” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). People think they have to memorize the whole thing, and that’s not necessarily true.
Q: I had to memorize the first 18 lines of “The Canterbury Tales” in college.
A: Oh yeah, I did that too, the Prologue. That’s in here.
Q: Even though I don’t remember all of it, when I read it, it’s very familiar and I can understand it.
A: Right, you spent a lot of time with it and it became part of you.
Q: Did any poems overlap from previous books?
A: Well a couple, but I tried not to. This is my fourth anthology. The idea was not to just repeat.
Q: Does that make it difficult if you’ve already used your favorites?
A: There are so many great poems out there, right?
Q: I read in The New York Times about a game you and your brother played.
A: Our dining room had books in it, which other people thought was kind of strange. So if we were eating alone, my mother wasn’t eating with us, we had this game we invented, just a guessing game about all the books. So we learned a lot of book titles.
Q: Which poets do you read now?
A: I read lots of them. One of the enjoyable things about putting these anthologies together is that it gives me a chance to read both the poems that I know and love and also to read more contemporary poets. I’ve gotten to know some poets working on the anthologies, which has really been fun for me.
I had Naomi Shihab Nye visit the group in the Bronx. She is great. Sharon Olds is amazing.
When I was doing an anthology of poems for women, I was looking for poems about friendship so poets started sending suggestions. It’s a much more social process than many people often think ― they think of poetry as being very solitary, but in fact there is a real community of people out there who are eager to share and are interested in feelings and emotions and values and education.
Q: Are you worried that the Common Core (curriculum movement in schools) will mean kids read less literature?
A: Well, people are having that worry, and they are right to have it. I think kids are not reading enough literature now.
Poetry is a very good introduction. It’s short but conveys a lot. It is very much in line with the Common Core. If it’s done the way it is intended, they should be reading works of literature as well as nonfiction. You can use poetry to teach history and higher order critical thinking.
By Jane Henderson
(St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
