40 Poems for 40 Weeks

I invited David to join me at the Children’s Book Corner specifically in April, National Poetry month, after having read his interview about 40 Poems for 40 Weeks on Kathy Temean’s Writing and Illustrating blog. We have since enjoyed getting to know each other and our mutual interests. We even discovered that we share the same publisher—this book and my Empowering Families are published by Routledge Eye on Education. I’m pleased to introduce David and his wide array of books and deep knowledge about children’s poetry with you this month on Children’s Book Corner.

Judy Bradbury: Tell us about this project: What seeded its creation? How did you land on the structure or format?

David L. Harrison: I’m blessed to have a school named in my honor. The librarian at David Harrison Elementary in Springfield, Missouri — Dr. Angela Knight — is outstanding. One day Angela told me that she reads one of my poems every week to the whole student body. She multiplies each poem by the school’s enrollment and adds that number of weekly poetry exposures to the growing total. In that way she was not only making sure that every child heard at least one poem per week during the 40-week school year but was also providing a prompt for teachers to find other uses for poetry in their classrooms. First thought in my head was to make a book inspired by Angela’s practice.

JB: What a task to determine which poets to include in this resource! How did you decide?

DH: If there are 40 weeks in a typical school year, I would want an anthology with 40 poems by 40 poets. I know that many poets, good ones who understand how to write for young people. I also know Dr. Timothy Rasinski, professor emeritus from Kent State University. We’ve been friends for twenty-five years and have written half a dozen books together. In two Stanford University studies (2021, 2023), Rasinski was named among the top 2% of the world’s scientists for his extensive body of research and publishing about early literacy. Teachers everywhere love his word ladders, a great tool for developing fluency skills.

JB: What is your favorite aspect of the book? Why?

DH: Not many books are created with librarians in mind. This idea came from a librarian, and I wanted it to be developed with librarians in mind. Of course it would be for teachers, too, and families, and anyone else who reads to children, but this was going to be a resource not only for libraries but for librarians themselves. I wanted to make it easy for them to do as Angela Knight was doing, read a poem a week to the kids in their schools.

JB: I am also a co-author of a Routledge, Eye on Education Book, Empowering Families: Practical Ways to Involve Parents in Boosting Literacy, and I know that the process of collaborating on writing a book is much different from writing solo. 40 Poems for 40 Weeks is co-authored by the esteemed educator and academician Timothy V. Rasinski. How did you and Tim decide to team up? Tell us about your collaboration in creating this book.

DH: Tim is a professor and I am a poet. For certain kinds of books, we make a good team. We got our heads together and mapped out a strategy for this new anthology. My vision was to dedicate four pages for each poet in the book. The idea was to introduce poets to children in ways that would extend beyond the words of their poems on a page. We would feature a picture, a kid-friendly bio, and a poem, and Tim would create a word ladder for every poem. Furthermore, we would invite each poet to suggest up to five other books of poetry that young readers would like. That list alone would make our book a unique, valuable resource for librarians. I sent out my invitation to the poets I wanted. All but two or three agreed and I quickly filled in with enough others to make the 40. We were in business.

JB: Tell us about a challenge you faced in the creation of 40 Poems for 40 Weeks, or provide a memorable (or humorous!) anecdote related to the writing of the book.

DH: Tim and I agreed to invite Sylvia Vardell, professor emeritus from Texas Woman’s University, to write the introduction and ask Angela Knight to write a forward. Keeping all the correspondence straight with 39 poets (I was the 40^th) plus Tim, Sylvia, and Angela was a challenge. I set up a file for each one and spent a lot of time answering questions and trying to keep those growing files straight.

JB: What is one unexpected joy that came from the creation of 40 Poems for 40 Weeks?

DH: There were many joys. I loved reading each poem as it came in. Former United States Poet Laureate Ted Kooser contributed a poem. So did some state poets laureates. So did dozens of really gifted children’s poets; Jane Yolen, Nikki Grimes, Joyce Sidman, Kenn Nesbitt, Marilyn Singer, Joseph Bruchac, Charles Ghigna…the list goes on. And I loved reading their one-page bios and learning more about them. Kids are going to fall in love with these people!

JB: What would surprise readers to learn about you or about the creation of 40 Poems for 40 Weeks?

DH: My background surprises many people. I have two degrees in biology, including a master’s degree from Emory University in parasitology (yup, the study of parasites). I became a scientist called a pharmacologist in a laboratory for a pharmaceutical company. Later, I became a greeting card editor and still later owned and managed a concrete block manufacturing company for 36 years.

JB: Who do you perceive your target audience to be and why?

DH: Good poems often appeal to a wide range of ages and that’s true of the majority of poems in 40 Poems for 40 Weeks. However, many of the poets I invited to participate are best known for their poems for elementary students in the general grade range of 3-5. That’s the time when many children fall in love with poetry and maintain that love over a lifetime. Our publisher and we agreed to target the book for Grades 3-5 but it’s highly likely that younger kids will get most of the poems and adults are going to enjoy them all.

JB: What do you hope educators will take away from 40 Poems for 40 Weeks?

DH: Thanks to all the research into early literacy by Tim Rasinski and numerous others, we know that poetry is a wonderful tool – many say the best – for helping children develop reading skills by expanding vocabulary, learning how to understand and manipulate the sounds of words, getting the cadence of our spoken/written language, and overall ready fluency. But getting poetry into classrooms can be difficult and is not universally accepted by busy teachers who haven’t developed the habit of finding poems that serve their needs and making poetry part of their daily routines. That’s why I was so taken by Angela Knight’s habit as a librarian to make sure kids in her school heard at least one poem every week. That’s why I wanted to do this book.

JB: How do you see 40 Poems for 40 Weeks connecting to curriculum or being used in learning settings?

DH: The way we put the book together makes it easy to adapt into normal daily routines. The poems themselves are ideal for group reading, echo reading, choral reading, performing, recording, and so on. The bios offer opportunities to discuss individual poets and perform compare/contrast discussions, and Tim’s word ladders are teacher-favorite tools in classrooms across America and beyond.

JB: What need(s) does this book satisfy?

DH: There are many excellent collections of poems in school libraries, nearly all on specific themes. No, or little, information is provided about the poets as people, like the kids listening might grow up to be. One of the major contributions of this anthology is that it is written specifically with the idea of introducing students to the people who are writing the poems they are enjoying, making the idea of writing their own poems a reasonable, natural next step.

JB: If you could ask your readers (of this professional resource) a question, what would it be?

DH: Richard Allington, professor of education emeritus at University of Tennessee, served as president of International Reading Association (IRA), as president of the National Reading Conference, and as a member of the International Reading Association board of directors. He told elementary classroom teachers that they should have in their rooms a library of at least 100 books that their students loved. He told them that reading should be an integral part of every subject they teach. I would ask our readers to add to Allington’s advice by making sure that poetry is well represented in classroom collections as well as in the school library.

JB: And, as an author and poet of several shelves of books for young readers, if you could ask those readers a question, what would it be?

DH: I would say to students that learning to read is a gift we give ourselves. It’s a key that opens doors leading to all sorts of adventures. When we walk into a room full of books, we are introduced to smart, creative people from all over the world and from the present backward in time before anyone alive today was born. The more of those books we read over our lifetime, the more we learn about what it means to be human, the better we understand the world we live in, and the more pure pleasure we will add to our lives. And don’t forget the poetry!

JB: What do you remember about the first book that made an impact on you?

DH: The first book I ever read all by myself. It was a moment of immense pride. I could read! I could pick up anything – a cereal box, a magazine, newspaper, a book – and I could read it! It meant freedom. I didn’t have a word for it then, but it was power. It made me part of the great world around me. Decades later I wrote a poem about that moment called “My Book!” Today the poem is sandblasted into the sidewalk into The Children’s Garden at the Burton Barr Library in Phoenix, Arizona and painted around a bookmobile in Pueblo, Colorado.

 

JB: What project(s) are you currently working on?

DH: I am teaming on two books with other poets and one of my own. Much of my time is taken with a project to record 100 issues of my weekly newspaper column, Poetry from Daily Life. More than sixty guest poets from across the United State and three other countries are being recorded reading their work. The goal is to create a free video library that will be available worldwide wherever internet service is available. The first 50 recordings are set to be introduced on YouTube this month (April).

 

Also written by David L. Harrison (To view all of David’s many books, visit his website.)