(words) 

Today is family literacy day.

A cause for celebration, a time for awareness. Around the world. In our own neighbourhoods.

(numbers)

A day to pause and reflect a bit, too.

The links beteen illiteracy and poverty, illteracy and violence, illiteracy and crime are indisputable.

Here are some sobering statistics from Corrections Services Canada on federally incarcerated prisoners...

• 77 percent did not complete high school
• 60 percent have no trade or skill
• 80 percent have unstable work history

Ten years ago The Nova Scotia Read To Me program was officially born. The vision for the progam had been in the minds and hearts of many for years. It took a team of visionary, hard working, committed people : professionals and volunteers to bring this initiative to fruition. The work is never-ending. The program's birthday means the first babies Read TO Me served are now ten years old.

(community) 

The link to  the Read to me website is here.

The links to community, the links to the health and well-being , to the literacy education and heart education of the children and families of Nova Scotia are endless and priceless.

The program is about so much more than giving away bags of books and CD's and literacy inforrmation for every baby born in Nova Scotia- although this is no small thing ---and to date 78,500 bags of such treasure have been distributed. 78,500 babies reached!

The Read to Me program is about how we nurture our children in the world and the world of words and numbers, how we cradle our children in the rhythmns of life and language. How we help them find their voices. How reading aloud can create a safe place for imagining and asking, for thinking and dreaming and problem solving.

It's about turning the hope for a more literate culture and healthier society into action and reality.

I'm starting to sound like I'm running for some sort of office.

So, let me tell you a story.

I'm in grocery store. I'm wearing my Read to Me vest. A  young mother, child in tow, approaches. The mother is somewhat embarassed but the child is excited. "She spotted the logo. We have a Read to Me Bag." says the mother proudly.

Her child is fourteen months old she tells me.

"Your child is reading!" I almost shriek.

"I know", she says, "I know. We read every day."

I've been both humbled and proud to have been The Honorary Spokesperson for the program since its birth. That's meant I've held more babies and read to even more children than I might have. I've also been blessed to work with special people -Dr. Richard Goldbloom, Shanda LaRamee to name but two. Above all I worked with one of my best freinds as a collegue.

On Read to Me's tenth birthday I want to sing Happy Brithday to writer, children's literature consultant, speaker and teacher, and Executive Director of Read To Me: Carol Mcdougall.

Carol: your vision, your professionalism, your kindness, your endless hours of work, your love and many gifts have made a HUGE difference. Yes, it takes many to make a program run, but your passion for this program and vision of family literacy is inclusive, open-hearted, authentic.

As a mother, a grandmother, a writer, a literacy educator, and your friend, thank you for allowing me to be part of a most wonderful wonderful story. You've taught me much.

So blow out the candles, dear friend !  Dance !   Babies are tapping toes ! Families are reading !

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10

http://youtu.be/wIoFqtH9DSs

Children teach me all the time.

Yesterday, after an hour of tongue-twisty wordplay, stories and poems of the "unrhymed kind" too, a teacher took me aside so a girl named Aubrey could privately hand me her "hand-made" card.

ZAP! ZAP! That's the sound of waking up. My heart when I looked at the flower. Kind of electric. Her sun my spark. Now the flower blooms in my kitchen.

"Were there no God, we would be in this glorious world with grateful hearts and no one to thank.

I like Christina Rossetti BUT

Let me rephrase:

Were there no children, I'm not sure my heart could be glad or have space for gratitude.

Yes, I adore Christina Rossetti even with all her cloyin' old smarmy old maple syrupy sticky old quaintness. A woman who wrote way back in the day. She wrote for God and she wrote for children. She has her own feast day (April 27th.). Also, she wrote my favourite Christmas song : In the Bleak Mid-Winter. 

Yesterday, the sun came out and a flower bloomed in bleak mid-winter as if never before.

But see the arrow that says open?

Lesson of the week :  Open says-a-me !

What I read inside the card-- stays inside the card. That's between Aubrey and me.

After all, some things are sacred : eternity in a blue tulip, too.

PS.  Before Christmas, I had the chance to hear Meaghan Smith http://www.meaghansmith.com/ sing Christina Rosetti's lyrics. I felt as if I'd never heard the song before.

ZAP!

A swish of skirt, a whiff of lily-of- the-valley talcum perfume as Teacher walked by the girl's desk, closed the door to the classroom-- closed the door to the hallway clatter, to the ammonia smells from Mr. Doak's mop, closed the door to the phantom-like principal who roamed around looking for more of the bully old runny-nosed boys to yell at and strap making a sound that would echo around the school and long after, too, when she was home, tucked in her bed and the sound returned to seep into her dreams and wake her up, afraid.

Teacher closed the door on that trembling and on all the schoolwork yet to do and the many other undone things like the cleaning up of desks or the search for lost mittens or erasing the blackboard which was really a green board or emptying the trash can that smelled of apple cores. Today, Teacher would wait until later to take a ruler to the brushes and fill the air with clouds of chalk dust because now was the time the Teacher closed the door on Time, on all the static and dust and scratch of Busy, the always all day long noise that made the girl's head hurt behind her eyes, pain like an earache hurting so much sometimes that the girl just wanted to cry. Or find a cool dark place to hide.

The girl would know, forever and ever the rest of her life that when people talked about the opening of doors that she had a secret : that the closing of doors was a necessary magical and wondrous thing because now---now with the door closed this girl who was seven knew the day's name was Friday and the bell would soon ring the night would come with fish for supper and funny tv the rolling of dice the games of snakes and ladders and the next day would be a sizzle: of bacon and eggs and comic book colours of freedom from sitting in rows and rows but for now the girl could sit, she would sit, yes, she'd sit and sit and sit forever because Teacher, perched on the edge of her desk at the front of the room, now swinging her legs like she must be happy as a hummingbird too, well, now the Teacher opened THE BOOK.

"Now where were we?" said Teacher with eyes like kindness, eyes like the eyes of  Bambi's mother. "Does anybody know where we left off?" She asked, as she asked every time. And the girl, along with others shouted out:  Chapter Four! Chapter Five! or wherever they were because the girl had been waiting all week to return again to the world inside that book. She had closed her eyes every night and imagined what could ever possibly happen next when the page was turned. Now, the girl gulped and her breath came all wheezy, little hiccups of breath, until finally, she stopped wiggling and settled, resting her head on the cool hard surface of desk. She smelled lemons and sighed. Listened. She listened to words and the words made a song like the kind she wanted to know by heart. She listened to Teacher's voice go all in and out and around in circles and zig zags in spirals and G clef signs up and down high and low full of blue and purple and deep emerald velvet and sparkle and sadness and those words and the voice of the Teacher made everything impossible possible in the whole everlasting wide world of forever and ever. And the girl was safe and the girl was loved and the girl was blessed with wings of fancy.

The book I remember the Teacher reading was Toby Tyler. It was a tale about a monkey. (Kind of.)

The teacher who read the book to the girl and her class was Bea Goodwin.

(Moncton, 1992.)

Bea Goodwin travelled with me into every school and library reading I've given over the past twenty-five years because whenever I'm asked 'when did you start writing' --- I tell a story. It's a true story. It begins like this:

"When I was in a Grade Two, I had a teacher named Mrs. Goodwin.( How could you ever lose if your teacher's name was Mrs. GoodWIN? How could anything be bad if her name was GOODwin?) One day she said, 'class today, we are going to write poems.'  (This was long before a time like now, before most teachers believed that children could write poems and stories of their own.) Write our own! What an idea. We knew what poems were because Mrs. Goodwin read one every day--we knew an elfman could talk down where lilies blew and fog could move on little cat feet.  We knew that some poems rhymed and some did not.  She said we could write about anything we wanted. The sun, a shoe, our names.... "

I won't tell the whole story but Mrs. Goodwin is largely responsible for why I grew up to be a writer. It's a story best told in person. Outloud. After moving away from Moncton as a child we were reunited in 1987 when I was thirty and Toes in My nose was published. Bea Goodwin was still vibrant and eager to show me poems... three of mine she'd kept all those years.

(Moncton 1987)

When I returned home after a trip to Quebec early in this New Year, I had an email from Mrs. Goodwin's grandson.

You don't know me but you've been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My grandmother was Mrs. Beatrice Goodwin, your former teacher whom you dedicated your book to. My Aunt recently spoke with you at a book signing and you signed your newest book for Bea. She was so overjoyed to open it and read it on Christmas Day. I'm writing you to regrettably inform you that on Friday, December 30th at approximately 6pm, Beatrice Goodwin passed away.

I know you won't get this message in time to attend any services in Moncton as they're Tuesday the 3rd, however I simply wanted you to know that you were as important a part of her life as she was to you and the mere mention of your name brought a smile to her face even at the darkest of times.

Thank you for your love and support and please continue to do what you do because it touches more lives than you can ever possibly imagine.

With love,

      Trevor

December, 2011

It was a story about monkeys.

I was only one of her many students. Bea Goodwin once said in a radio inteview on CBC--- "all my students were special."

I was able to attend the service and hear her grandson's eloquent tribute.

And I thought about how many were with us, about the reach of teachers and how they often never know what lives they've touched or how. I'm glad she knew what she meant to me. I'm glad her family let me know.

Does anybody know where we leave off and another begins ?

To me, it's all as beautiful and sad and mysterious as poetry that speaks to a heart.

Vietnam, 2010

For the first post of the New Year I decided to confess my faith: in kindness, in the words of others and to use this space to share in a slightly different way this year.

I'm going to share what/who sparks my fire.

I'm going to write this year about teachers and teachings of different kinds. That's my intention. Things change.

Thich Nhat Hanh is a Zen teacher, poet and founder of The Engaged Buddhist movement. Anti-war activist in his Native Vietnam, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. He's a poet and author and even though he's unaware of this, he has been my teacher and therapist for about fifteen years. He taught me to breathe.

http://www.plumvillage.org/

Peace is Every Step is the book by my bedside. The one that changed my life is Living Buddha, Living Christ. I have an old dog-eared copy and a new, shiny one, given to me by a friend who didn't know I'd been trying to learn how to breathe for a very long time.

I hoped to see "Thay" in person one day. If and when it's meant to be I guess but in the meantime, this is why I love technology:

You can meet him here if you make time , make tea, sit down and listen.

Vietnam, 2010

We, ( my DDFM and moi ) travelled to Vietnam two years ago. I'd been invited as a writer to do school visits in both Vietnam and Thailand. The trip was, in my mind, my secret pilgrimage to the home of Thich Nhat Hanh. I was twirling like a dervish in anticipation. Okay, that's more like a Sufi than a Buddhist. Rumi 's a good teacher, too.

Anyhow, I imagined myself meditating in temples in Thich Nhat Hahn's homeland. I saw myself offering flowers. Burning my incense. I would feel very cleansed. Or pure or something. My DDFM would take pictures. We would be--- if not enlightened---positively ENERGIZED. We were only there 24 hours when I received word my father, back home on the east coast of Canada had been rushed to the hospital, was in a coma and wasn't going to live.

I was, literally, a world away. On the long two day journey home I practiced being in the moment like I'd never practiced before. It wasn't difficult. I was calm. ( perhaps, I admit, that might have been shock not me Buddha on my boulder not shaken.) My sons met me when we landed and informed me my father had just come out of his coma. "He was waiting for you," they said. I had two days by my father's bedside before he died. Everyone in our family heard his voice once more and said our goodbyes. I spent most of that time breathing as my teacher had taught me, praying that we all could let go. That was difficult.

I went to see the Dalai Lama in Washington about eight years ago. The first thing he said to the thousands of us gathered  there was "Go back to your own faith tradition and go deeper." A lightening stike to the heart. He said "faith tradition", not church or religion. He said : "Go deeper."

At the time, I lived about a block away from the Washington National Cathedral. I'd gone to sit in Bishop's Gardens in the days following nine eleven but had been circling around the building as if it were some gynormous Venus fly trap made of stone. Zap. Got ya! Got ya again. Then one morning, I attended a service in Bethlehem Chapel where a Rev. Eugene Sutton was presiding. His homily was like a poem and a prayer. After the service he invited us for twenty minutes of Centering Prayer in the Centre for Prayer and Pilgrimage. Centering Prayer? I'd never heard of it before. Meditation in the Christian tradition. Only you open up to letting "God" in.

Here is Father Thomas Keating explaining.

Of all the places in the world, I'd found a way to come home to myself. Rev. Eugene Sutton was my shepherd. Sutton's now the Bishop of Maryland. When I first heard him say the Lord's Prayer he said, "Our Father, loving Mother, who art in heaven. Cracked my heart back open. Christ was invited back in. Not so surprising. After all, Jesus had been my imaginary playmate when I was a kid. Now he played in the sandbox and held hands with Buddha.

Living Buddha, Living Christ.

But then I moved. Energy shifted. Life erupted. Community fractured. Challenges landed with a thud.

Too many. All at once.

I all but stopped breathing at times.

I forgot the words of my teacher.

So I reach for wise words again. Turn to my friends. Of all faiths and non-faiths.

To teachers.

What I know is I still need teachers and teachings.

Centering prayer, meditation is Divine therapy.

As I greet the New Year, two people I love very VERY much are suffering. Then again, aren't we all ?

"You are every body and every one you meet, that's what everybody knows down on Everybody Street."

http://shereefitch.squarespace.com/everybodys-different/

So can peace be every breath? And what can I do ?

Breathe. Begin again and again and again.

In the words of Thich Nhat Hahn :

“The source of love is deep in us and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring that person joy.”

Spark Crackle Fire ! Happy RE-New YEAR!

My brother, my brother, my beautiful brother.  

The recovery from throat cancer is long. And hard. 

This is how his TRUE spirit bursts forth in the midst of the pain.  

Hear how he sings towards the light. 

  This is just to say that there can be a universe in a verse.  

  In the beginnings of "children's poetry"  there was overt didacticism--- 

 Yes, we've  moved from "instruction to delight"  

Of course, there 's a whole history and a diversity of poems in between Watts and Silverstein, exciting new poets and what means excellence is an ever-evolving discussion. 

But I heard myself saying the other day "I take my nonsense seriously." And I do. I did. I will.

What does this mean? Not much except to confess I’ve spent thousands of hours asking questions about nonsense and verse, a subject which has preoccupied, enchanted, fascinated me most of my life.  Poetry, especially that which comes to us as children is a kind of magic and for those of us who take up the writing of it, I've often thought it offers a way out of the darker world of experience into a world of "higher" innocence—not childhood as innocence but innocence as in a William Blake in-the- garden- with- angels- kind of way.  An entry into a divine landscape. A bard negotiating some way to marry heaven with hell. Or maybe the topsyturvydom of slithy toves. Wordplay, incantation, zap!     

In 1992, in the introduction to Literature for Children : Contemporary Criticism of Children’s Literature, Peter Hunt wrote : "I have been unable to find a single essay that adequately explores the problems of discussing -or even defining -verse and poetry for children. "

 So here’s my attempt at definition loosely based on the game of 20 questions. ( It was included in my thesis on Dennis Lee's work.)

So let the games begin.

Q:  What is children's poetry?

A:  A specific kind of poetry.

Q:  What do you mean by specific?

A:  Specific in the sense that it is distinguished in terms of the audience it is intended for.

Q:  Children's poetry is poetry written for children?

A:  Yes.

Q:  That’s it?

A:  Well –

Q:  Because if it is, then for example, Robert Frost’s poem, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy evening is not a children's poem, right?

A: That's right.

Q:  So you don't think the child can enjoy this poem?

A:  Well – no – I think a child might.

Q:  Well, then it would be a children's poem too.

A:  I guess it would be.

Q:  So your first definition is not correct.

A:  Well, maybe I should add to it, children's poetry is poetry written for children or enjoyed by them.

Q:  Then what is the difference between poetry and children's poetry?

A:   A good question. I guess I would say the children's poetry is most often characterized by spirit of play.

Q:   Spirit of play? Do you mean it is all silly stuff and nonsense?

A:   No, not at all. Some children's poetry expresses serious ideas. I mean play in the sense of playing with language, and yes a lot of children's poetry is nonsense first.

 But ballads and sonnets and ..

Q:   Yes.Yes.  Back up. Can you define nonsense verse?

A:  Well, nonsense verse is a kind of poetry. It is based on incongruity, “not by ignoring the general laws of good poetry, but by upsetting them purposefully and by making them, so to speak, stand on their head."  (Cammaerts)

Q:    I’m impressed. Headstand with words.  Oopsie. Topsy turvy. But again, a kind of playing with language.

A:  Yes. 

Q:   But adult poetry can also be said to be playing with words and language.  Also all children's poetry isn’t nonsense verse but it’s still nonsense.

 A:  NO! I didn't say that. My head is …

 Q:  Full of nonsense! So you still haven’t answered what is children's poetry or even how it is different from adult poetry.

A:  Oookay. Maybe the biggest difference between adult poetry and children's poetry is the context in which it is received.

Q:  Hmm. Could you elaborate on this?

A:  Most adult poetry nowadays and it wasn't always like this- (except for slam poetry or spoken word poetry) is read in silence and solitude. The transaction goes from  writer to page to reader. With children's poetry most often, the experience is still rooted in the oral tradition. The transaction is one like this: from writer to page to reciter to listener or group of listeners. It is received by and is dependent upon community. It invites participation. You could call it a kind of folk art.

Q:  Can you explain what you mean by that term?

A:  Yes in the sense: “folk poetry emphasizes the audience or perhaps we can say the users of poetry. Folk verse  is shared and often memorized by members of the community and often accompanies community ritual.  Folk poetry in this sense, can range from  Psalm 23  to John McCrea's in Flanders Field. ( Ricou)

Q:  Or children's poetry?

A:  Exactly.

Q:  All of it? Because if you're saying that that means a child never read the poem in silence and solitude the way say adults do .We know and established that's not true.  So could you say the poetry of early childhood is chanted and rocked to, tapped to and bounced to but the poetry that comes later after child can read, that doesn't always fit under your concept of folk verse.

A:  That's right. This is the kind of children's poetry that's received by reader as opposed to listener.

Q:  I notice you keep switching and forth between the terms verse and poetry. Can you clarify those terms?

A:  No.

Q:  What? Are you giving up?

A:  No. It's just that, well, it's an old old question.  Verse versus poetry, poetry versus  verse . Higher. Lower. Better. Best. Once upon a time the word poetry was used to suggest a certain kind of verse , came under the umbrella of Verse. Now vice versa, verse is considered a form of poetry, often a lower form. You don't agree?

A:  No I don't.

Q:  Why?

A:   A.A. Milne said it best:

       Light verse observes the most exact laws of rhythm and meter as if by happy accident, and in the sort of nonchalant spirit  of mockery at the real poets who do it on purpose. But to describe it solely leaves something unsaid: one must also say what it is not. Light verse then is not a relaxation of a major poet in the intervals of writing an epic; it is not the kindly contribution of a minor poet to a little girl’s album. It is a precise art which is only been taken seriously and thus qualified as an art in the 19th and 20th century. They needs neither genealogical backing nor distinguished patronage to make it respectable.  ( Milne )

Q:    He sounds a tad ..defensive. Still saying verse is not a lesser form of poetry still does not define children's poetry.

A:    Perhaps this will make it clear. Let's divide literature into two major categories: Utterature: literature in the air: for the ear and voice and body – all poetry and stories rooted in the oral tradition. Spoken out loud to an audience and received by community. Literature: or letterature ---  literature from the page for the eye and mind read silently, reflected upon by a “reader” of the poem story or novel.

Q:   Don’t you think this is rather awkward? Didn’t you cross a Latin word with a German  root?  Who do you think you are to invent a word –a poet?  And it seems you've moved even farther away from defining children's poetry?

A: I know. I give up.  Children's poetry is poetry.

Q:  But what is poetry?

A:  What can be explained is not poetry ( Sandburg )

GAME OVER!

Adding up the score

When you reach the point of answering with no answer, you have won.

My love of poetry started early. "Dad-tell us a story with your mouth talking," we'd beg. My father would begin by howling like the wind and then :"O wild west wind, thou breath of autumn's being...."  

He knew Shelley and Keats and Coleridge by heart because he'd gone to school when you had to memorize poetry. Often, for punishment. I'm glad, when we asked him for stories, he included poems and I'm especially glad he never stopped and thought this is not "for children."    

Read Read read. Verse , nonsense, poetry. Read Eve Merriam and David McCord and Ted Hughes and Lee Bennett Hopkins. Read Shakespeare. Emily Dickinson. 

It was my son, when he was nine, who gave me the best "definition"----

"Mum, did you know I can do three things at once? I can talk in a singing voice. And when I do that, I'm playing. So, I can talk, play and sing all at the same time. Neat ,eh? It's like a poem isn't it, Mum ?"  

I'm still obsessed.  But I know longer ask what a poem is---I let the poem ask me who I am.

"Sometimes my mind is crazy

 Sometimes my mind is dumb

Sometimes it sings like angel wings

And beeps like kingdom come."

   -from Goofus  by Dennis Lee  

    I know a cure for sadness:

 Let your eyes touch something that

     makes your eyes smile.

  I bet there are a hundred objects close by

      that can do that

  Look at Beauty's gift to us---

her power is so great she enlivens

   the earth, the sky, our soul. 

  

  -Mirabai 1498-1550