Each year I splurge on the Newbery Medal Award-winning and Caldecott Medal Award-winning books.  If you follow the children’s book awards given out by the American Library Association, you’ll know that these awards (in addition to many others) are decided in January, and this past Monday was this year’s announcement day.  [My interest lies in collecting good books for Liliana, and I intend to publish a children’s book someday, if I’m able to pare my words down appropriately!]

This morning I was studying the Caldecott Honor books (I’ve not yet received Susan Marie Swanson’s The House in the Night, which won the gold medal).  Of definite interest was Jen Bryant’s and Melissa Sweet’s book A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams.  The book is astoundingly engaging, and you have to be paying attention throughout, to the progress Williams is making on certain poems that the book centers on–one of which is “The Red Wheelbarrow.”  You know the one that begins, “so much depends/upon/a red wheel/barrow…”?

The book is way over Liliana’s head, but still, she paged through to study the pictures.  The River of Words works on multiple levels, similar to a Pixar film.  Parents and children alike are happily entertained.

I got to thinking that the juxtaposition of words is everything in a poem, but you must “see” something first.  Like looking out a back or front window (see aspen picture above), just to observe what’s going on in that bright, sunshiny world.  Only then can you begin to write down what you’ve experienced.  You have to know what it’s like to see or feel something.

Below, is one of Williams’s poems that always makes me smile.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Look around today and pick something very everydayish, like an apple or a shovel or a flower.  Try to think of how you could best describe that object without using its own familiar name.  Example: your word might be cornfield.  You might describe it as a “billowing sheet of gold.”  Obviously, that’s not perfect, but you get the point.  Kids are especially good at this.

If you think of some fun ones, share, share, share, by posting!