A (Found) Ode to Signed Books

This week, I went to a reading by the esteemed poet Rita Dove.

1. It was free. Thanks, HoCoPoLitSo!
2. There was music by young composer and violinist Joshua Coyne.
3. RITA DOVE

Poetry Friday

Today's Poetry Friday round-up

is at Cathy's blog,

Merely Day by Day.

I'd been meaning to buy and read Dove's historical novel-in-verse Sonata Mulattica for several years. (Read the NY Times review here.) She spoke about the book and its subject, child prodigy George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780-1860), on the Diane Rehm Show when Sonata Mulattica was first released.

The selections she read at the event were beautiful. Some of the poems include multiple voices. They are funny, piercing in their portrayal of the society that celebrated Bridgetower, then erased him from history.

But what I really want to talk about is signed books. I did buy a copy of Sonata Mulattica last night and Rita Dove signed it.

Sonata Mulattica by Rita Dove

That got me wondering. Why do we love signed books? I have dozens of them. Some were already favorites when I sought out the author to have the book signed. Others I had never heard of, but fell in love with at a reading or writers' conference. They were bought and signed on the spot.

Are these books a little more special than their unsigned shelf-mates?

I think so. A signed book is similar to a photograph. Every time I open the book and read the personalized dedication, I remember meeting the author and sharing a word or two. I remember asking poet Mark Doty to sign a book and wanting to hide in a giant hole when he pointed out that I'd handed him someone else's book by accident. I remember meeting children's poet Heidi Mordhorst, now a dear friend, for the first time.

Today, I'm presenting a gallery of dedications for you to enjoy. Following the photographs is a little found ode that I wrote. It combines titles of these signed books with words and phrases borrowed from the dedications.

The Song Shoots Out of My Mouth: A Celebration of Music
by Jaime Adoff

Pumpkin Butterfly: Poems
from the Other Side of Nature
by Heidi Mordhorst

The East-West House: Noguchi's Childhood in Japan
by Christy Hale

I Am the Running Girl
by Arnold Adoff

She Had Some Horses
by Joy Harjo

And here is my found poem. Words I added are in bold. Everything else is strung together from the dedications and the book titles.

When You Sign My Book

by Laura Shovan

The song shoots out of my mouth

with great appreciation for everything:

Gr8 to meet you!!

Enjoy!! God bless!!

Looking forward to your next book!

(and thanks for the new horizons).

I am a pumpkin butterfly,

flying East-West in a celebration

of word music.

I am the running girl,

watching with joy,

listening for your sonata.

Poems journey like childhood ghosts

or horses

from the other side of nature.

And, following poet Brenda Hillman's example, here are some drippings -- phrases from the titles and dedications that I wasn't able to weave into the poem.

The House: Noguchi’s in Japan

at SCBWI 3/6/10 Poems

Keep for

She Had Some

Some horses for your

Enjoy

Mulattica

I'd love to hear your thoughts on signed books and book signings. If you have a treasured signed book, or a memory about a book signing, please share in the comments.

Poetry Friday: 5 Questions for Christy Hale

One of the best parts about working on an art and literary journal is stretching my limited knowledge of visual art. Little Patuxent Review, the journal I edit, is lucky to have a brilliant art critic, collector (and poet) as our art editor, Michael Salcman.

I often recommend fine-arts related picture books with Michael, knowing he'd like to share them with his  young grandchildren. My latest recommendation is Christy Hale's Dreaming Up. 

Go to Christy's website.

Hale deftly combines original concrete poetry with her illustrations of children engaged in building play. The book's WOW-factor is that each of these poem/illustration combos are paired with a photograph of a famous building.

Christy visited us in 2010 to talk about her picture book, The East West House. (Read the post here.)

Please welcome Christy Hale back to Author Amok!

AA: In your backflap bio for Dreaming Up, you mention being inspired by a visit to La Sagrada Familía, the unfinished cathedral in Spain. Tell us about that visit. How did you make the connection to children building sandcastles?

CH: In 1993 I joined others from the School of Visual Arts for a summer painting program in Barcelona. Each morning thirty students—adults of all ages from around the world—painted in the studios at Escola Massana. Afternoons and evenings we explored the capital of Catalonia. Our group toured many [Antoni] Gaudi buildings including La Sagrada Familia. I remember a sense of awe as I climbed the spiral staircases, surrounded by Gaudi's playful, joyous work. The fluid forms were the color of sand and unlike anything I'd seen, except well, maybe a sand castle.

Pages from Dreaming Up posted with permission.
Copyright Christy Hale. All rights reserved.

AA: What came first as you developed the concept for Dreaming Up:  the architectural structures, a list of child’s play that involves building, or the poems themselves?

CH: Often what I see reminds me of something else. I make lots of connections; I think in patterns. During the eighteen years I lived in New York City I frequented the museums on 5th Avenue. The Guggenheim's concentric circular forms had always looked like stacking rings to me. 

Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum houses modern art.

In a Modern Architecture art history class I took in grad school, I'd learned that Frank Lloyd Wright's mother had decided her son would be an architect before he was even born. She bought him wooden blocks and steered his course. Fallingwater seemed the perfect evolution of block play.

1) La Sagrada Familia/sand castles

2) NYC Guggenheim/stacking rings

3) Fallingwater/blocks

I had three ideas, and we all know that three's a charm. I was sure I could find other comparisons. There are many amazing structures around the world, but it was important to me in Dreaming Up that my choices could all be linked to children's building play. I made a list of ways children build and then looked for modern architecture with similar design and engineering. The concrete poems came last—another type of visual patterning. The first poem I wrote was the stacking cups one. I increased the syllable count with each line to mimic the graduating cups. Next I wrote the mud pie poem. I wanted to convey something about sustainable building, so I focused on the four elements.

AA:   The children in your illustrations are multi-ethnic, engaging in individual and cooperative play. The buildings featured are from all over the globe. Why was it important to you that the book have a global focus?

CH:  All children like to create spaces and places, yet traditionally white men have dominated the field of architecture. I wanted my readers to find themselves pictured in the diverse children engaged in building play and also to see architects of many races and both genders as a further inspiration. This book is an invitation for everyone to participate and celebrate building.

(Note from AA: In the back of Dreaming Up, you will find illustrated portraits and brief bios of each of the architects featured in the book.)

AA:      Let’s talk about concrete poetry. Kids are always excited when a poem has the extra dimension of a concrete shape, but it’s a challenge to make a concrete poem work both visually and lyrically. What did you like about working in concrete poems? What were some of the difficulties you faced?

The poems in Dreaming Up mirror both building play
and actual buildings like the Vitra Fire Station in Germany.

CH: My father was a mechanical engineer and an artist in countless ways. My mother read me poetry. I like the engineering of poetry. I'm interested in form. I like counting meter. I'm also a graphic designer and I enjoy playing with type. Concrete poetry seemed the perfect match for a building-themed book. My challenge was to make architectural concepts clear while keeping simple, fun language. I studied the buildings and architects in hopes of getting at the essence of what made each structure and person unique.

AA: One of my favorite spreads is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. The poem is beautifully written and visually pleasing.

You can visit Fallingwater, located in Western Pennsylvania.

These pages display the richness of Dreaming Up. The photograph of Fallingwater, your illustration of a child playing with blocks, the shape of the poem and the words themselves allow a child to experience Wright’s architecture on many levels. How were you able to create the layered quality of the book without overwhelming young readers?

CH: Thank you, Laura! Fallingwater is a stunning building. One look at those hanging terraces and it's easy to see how important Froebel blocks were in Wright's development. In Dreaming Up I hope to convey that children employ the same engineering and design thinking as architects. When they rig up a blanket fort, they demonstrate their grasp of suspension architecture. I wanted a strong visual link between the building play I illustrated and the architecture in the photos. I did all the photo research and acquired these images prior to beginning the art. I tried to echo the compositional lines, perspective, and colors of the photographs in my neighboring illustrations.

For each new illustration project I experiment to find my approach for the finished art. Dreaming Up was particularly challenging because I needed to balance three elements: illustrations, poems, and photographs. I didn't want my art to steal attention away from the photos. The concrete poems are really a second type of illustration. I wanted to offer variety in the typography, so there would be discovery in the forms of the poems, just like in the buildings. My editor suggested placing the illustrations and poems on light colored backgrounds that picked up on colors in the photographs. I had not originally imagined this approach, but this proved to be one way I could unify each spread.

In an earlier mock-up, I included building names and descriptions near the photos. My editor wisely suggested placing all the descriptions with the biographies in the end of the book. The main part of Dreaming Up invites readers to make connections. The back part of the book allows them to find out more about the buildings and the architects who created them. 

Thank you so much for your insights into the book, Christy!

Christy Hale is the author and illustrator of The East-West House: Noguchi’s Childhood in Japan, a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year selection. She illustrated The Forgiveness Garden by Lauren Thompson (Fiewel and Friends, 2012) and Our School Garden! by Rick Swann (Readers to Eaters, 2012), plus several award-winning picture books, including Elizabeti’s Doll and its two sequels. 

Hale has taught art to all ages and has written about artists for Instructor magazine’s Masterpiece of the Month feature and workshops. Hale lives with her family in Palo Alto, California. Visit her online at christyhale.com.

It's the last Poetry Friday before National Poetry Month! My 2013 project is "Welcome to the Technoverse." I have an exciting line up of guest bloggers stopping by in April. They will be talking about the ways in which poetry and technology intersect.

The super-talented Mary Lee Hahn is doing the blog-roll honors today. Stop by her blog, A Year of Reading, for links to more poetry posts.

5 Questions for Christy Hale -- Part II

Author/illustrator Christy Hale and I have been discussing the places where art and poetry meet. Read the first part of our conversation here.

Her children's biography, The East West House: Noguchi's Childhood in Japan, is about the early life of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, whose father was a Japanese poet. It came out in 2009.

She also illustrated an edition of poet May Swenson's The Complete Poems to Solve. (McMillan, 1993).

Christy, you illustrated a lovely collection of May Swenson's poetry. Why did you choose woodcuts as the medium for that book?

Again, thank you. By the time I was asked to illustrate The Complete Poems to Solve, I had published several chapbooks with poems (William Stafford, Eamonn Wall, Quitman Marshall and others). In several instances, I designed, illustrated printed and bound the books myself.

The Complete Poems to Solve was my first commercial project. I love the graphic quality of relief prints. Sometimes happy accidents occur when printing. The May Swenson book interior was printed in black, not full color, so linocuts seemed appropriate.

When you and I met at a regional SCBWI conference, we talked about the similarities between art and poetry -- how poetic line breaks function the way white space does in visual art. Would you like to expand on that idea?

White space gives visual room to breathe; poem line breaks are aural pauses when read aloud. The artist can guide the viewer's eye with compositional organization -- moving and directing the eye around a space, and also giving the eye rest, controlling visual tempo.

Visual tempo is an interesting idea. It's present when poets use a form with stanzas.

I'd love to bring this back around to Isamu Noguchi who said, "Sculpture becomes for me a preoccupation with impalpable voids and pressures, the punctuation of spaces. If sculpture is the rock, it is also the space between the rocks and between the rock and a man, and the communication and contemplation between."

Doesn't that convince you he was a visual poet?

Absolutely. Begin with, "A poem is the words, it is also the space between the words and between the words and a man..."  -- the quote fits both art and poetry.

Thanks so much for visiting, Christy. This conversation had my brain buzzing!

Christy tells me that she's been taking poetry classes, exploring different poetic forms like sonnet and pantoum. Look out for her next project -- a book of original concrete poetry called Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building. It comes out from Lee & Low, Spring 2012. I can't wait!

Poetry Friday: 5 Questions for Christy Hale

I'm so excited about Poetry Friday today.

Author/illustrator Christy Hale is visiting! I met Christy at a regional SCBWI conference this spring. As a poet who writes about art, I was fascinated with her book The East West House: Noguchi's Childhood in Japan, about the early life of sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Christy and I began a discussion about the similarities between poetry and art. I'm thrilled to be continuing that conversation and sharing it with the Poetry Friday gang.

Thanks for being here, Christy. Did you read poetry as a child? What were some favorites?

As a big sister, it was my job to read to my little brothers every night before bedtime. I memorized countless Mother Goose rhymes and poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Lear, Christina Rossetti and many other children's poets. I still know many of these poems by heart.

I love the phrase "by heart" which speaks both of the pulse of poetry as well as the place we receive those rhythms -- deep in the heart.

It's funny you mentioned that phrase. My 10-year-old just memorized the poem "Jabberwocky" and was asking why we say "I know that poem by heart."

Your book The East West House: Noguchi's Childhood in Japan (Lee & Low, 2009) has been called lyrical, even though it's not, strictly, poetry. Why was it important that the story of the artist's early life have a poetic feel?

Isamu Noguchi was the son of a Japanese poet. Yonejiro Noguchi met Leonie Gilmour, a Scotch-Irish American editor and teacher in New York. She helped Yone publish his poems in English.

The two worked well together and a romance developed. They never married, and Yone returned to Japan in the spring of 1904, even though Leonie was expecting their child.  They continued to correspond, and Leonie and baby journeyed to Japan to join Yone in March of 1907. This is where my story begins.

Isamu's early childhood was spent in Japan, exploring temples and gardens, encountering art everywhere, as part of his everyday environment. Isamu developed a love of natural materials, simplicity in form, tools and craftsmanship.

Those sound like qualities shared by many poets.

In his early twenties, after completing a traditional academic sculptural training in New York City, Isamu Noguchi visited a gallery and saw "Bird in Space" by Constantin Brancusi.

An elegant ellipse suggested a bird in flight. The elimination of details and the distillation of form to essence seemed like Japanese poetry to Noguchi. The encounter triggered his conversion to abstraction.

He then applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and stated his goal as interpreting the East to the West through sculpture, as his poet father had done with words.

Noguchi's sculpture is visual poetry inspired by his heritage, youth in Japan, and modernism.

I chose spare, lyrical language because I wanted to leave space for the reader to participate.

In high school and college I took all the art history classes available. My tastes evolved from a preference for realism (where more is presented and less is required from the viewer) to an appreciation of abstraction (where the viewer has to work harder and engage more fully to understand the work). Poetry seems like abstraction. The reader is active in a different way than when reading prose.

I've never heard abstract art explained in terms of what the viewer brings. That makes so much sense!

Christy, I love the page in East West House that reads, "Now father had another family. His home was not their harbor. Outside, a bamboo flute cried through barren trees and a chilly wind scattered leaves."

You don't explain the image of the flute, but trust young readers to sense Isamu's loneliness. Why?

Thank you. While researching, I discovered Yone Noguchi wrote an article for The Nation about Isamu's arrival in Japan. He described a bamboo flute playing on the street the first night. This lonely, shrill sound actually was part of young Isamu's experience.

 

Many years later, in his autobiography, Isamu wrote, "My earliest recollections are of a house in Tokyo where we arrived, myself aged two, from America, my mother a stranger. The house belonged to my father... In the garden were two large cherry trees, and surrounding it  was a high bamboo fence... The cherry blossoms came and then the wind that scattered them over the ground, so sadly."

Wafting notes and drifting leaves evoked transience for me, as I hoped they would for my young readers.

I think this is where I come closest to haiku (in content anyway). Leonie and Isamu's lives become those of wandering outsider, gaijin, when they realized that Yone had another new family. After their long sea voyage, they still could not harbor.

Those lines did remind me of haiku. The imagery itself evokes the emotion.

I'll post the rest of my conversation with Christy Hale later today. She'll tell us about illustrating a collection of May Swenson's poetry, and about her latest children's book. Meanwhile, check out her website: www.christyhale.com.

Poetry Friday is hosted by Kelly at the Cazzy Files today. She's sharing light-gathering poems -- perfect to welcome the summer months.