Quite a few readers notice that the majority of my picture
books read like poems. Even if they don’t rhyme. They use all the
trappings of poetry: lyricism, metaphor, simile, rhythm, internal rhymes, alliteration,
etc.
This is not happenstance nor mere chance. I wrote my first
poem (rhymed though not particularly well rhymed) in first grade. (I was kindergarten age but as I had been reading
since three years old, my parents and teachers decided I should be skipped
ahead.
Was that first-grade poem any good? Let’s just say I have
improved quite a bit since then but never lost my enthusiasm for writing verse.
A number of my picture books began as a poem. I write a lot of poems. Over 365 a year. I send out a poem a day (sometimes two) to my over 1,100 subscribers. Have been doing so for seven years. They range from the personal to the political, from birds and birding (my entire family are birders), to lives and deaths, and falling in love as a widow.
Here is one of my new Jewish poems to accompany MIRIAM:
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