Outside the Inside of the Box: The 2013 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American...

Outside the Inside of the Box: The 2013 Lion and the UnicornAward for Excellence in North American Poetry

Michael Joseph, Donelle Ruwe, Craig Svonkin

The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 37, Number 3, September 2013,pp. 327-345 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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The Lion and the Unicorn 37 (2013) 327–345 © 2014 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Outside the Inside of the Box: The 2013 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

Michael Joseph, Donelle Ruwe, and Craig Svonkin

Winner:

JonArno Lawson. Down in the Bottom of the Bottom of the Box. Illus. Alec Dempster. Ontario: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2012.

The jury found themselves distracted this year by of all things blurbs: how they credential a text, or close down critical judgment, possibly even betray a sense of doubt.1 We found ourselves reflecting on the purpose and util-ity of the blurb. Does the presence of (name of beloved poet) on the back cover give a certain cachet to the text, even if his or her comment seems lukewarm? Do comments covering a back jacket from top to bottom like credits on a movie screen signal rapt enthusiasm or desperation on the part of the publisher? Does a stamp of approval by a charitable foundation mean that readers can pat themselves on the back for contributing to society and connecting with the greater good? And what do any of these things have to do with the quality of the verse or with the possibilities of engaging imagi-natively with a book of poetry? Whether we were swayed by the blurbs or not, we found that the books, themselves, defied the conventional markers of literary power and authenticity. Books that demanded to be admired for the gravity of their subject or the bold originality of their treatment, and thus confronted us like the mirror in Snow White with the demand that we declare our whole and unprecedented regard, struck us as less interesting than books that asked more modestly to be enjoyed for their poetry.

Perhaps no book epitomizes this problem better than Ron Koertge’s Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses, a collection of downbeat fairy tale retell-ings in free verse. A poet of some accomplishment, Koertge is generally

Michael Joseph, Donelle Ruwe, and Craig Svonkin328

praised for his compassion and irreverent humor. The design of the book is stunning, the cover adorned with artist Andrea Dezsö’s powerful papercut of a monstrous wolf, its gaping jaws closing in on a seductively dressed Red Riding Hood, racing as fast as a girl might in (alas!) heels. Blurbs from liter-ary stars such as Billy Collins and Gregory Maguire bedeck the back cover, as if to announce that the literary world has jumped to its feet in unanimous applause. Lucky the reader with a ticket to this smash hit, one thinks. Tellingly, while the blurbs praise the book’s originality, subversiveness, gruesomeness, etc., none of them says it’s good. One soon learns why: it’s not. The imagery in Koertge’s dark fairy tales is shocking in its bleakness, but the poetry is generally listless, festooned with sad details reminiscent of the ghostwritten accounts of abusive celebrity relationships or the portentous confessions of paid guests on reality shows.

Fairy tales are seldom a haven from care, but here nobody comes to any good. Cinderella is a cock-tease, her sisters finish blind and lame; Rapunzel despondently reflects on the brutalizing love-making of the prince; Hansel and Gretel, darling little sociopaths, dream of revenge upon their dad; the Frog Prince is a cliché in tights and his princess a brainless idiot; the Robber Bridegroom is brutally dismembered while the Miller’s daughter, refusing men, “prefers / to live alone and teach Feminist Theory & Practice / at the local community college” (54); Rumpelstiltskin literally tears himself in two (“Servants whisk the splayed body away” [57]); and The Little Match Girl, true to the original, drops dead on the street. This is grim stuff, kids. Grimmer than Grimm.

While one finds moments of humor, the dominant mood is anxiety, miti-gated chiefly by horror. Aside from the pleasure that may be had in watching old fairy tales being messed up, we imagine most readers will discover little to engage them beyond watching Koertge struggle to meet the challenge of making each retelling more repellant than the last. In their 1986 song “Don’t Let’s Start,” They Might Be Giants wrote “Everybody dies / Frustrated and sad / And that is beautiful.” The judges found the same sense of an im-minent morbid outcome here, only without the liberating sense of a shared existential reality.

We think of Francesca Lia Block’s 2000 collection, The Rose and the Beast, in which random, brutal acts and suffering are balanced against moments of intense sensuality, courage, and ephemeral bliss, and wonder why Koertge, who has shown a similar poetic vision in previous works, has resorted to balancing terror and loss with the kind of jokes that feel like a kick in the (name of a tender part of your anatomy). Perhaps it is the lure of the edge. We might applaud edginess, particularly if it is edginess for edginess’s sake; but in resolutely walking the edge, Koertge has somehow fallen into a rut of excessively violent, dehumanizing, predictable catastrophe.

The 2013 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry 329

Walking on Earth & Touching the Sky, an anthology of poetry and prose written by the students of Red Cloud Indian School, comes with similarly daunting blurbs insisting that this book is no ordinary collection of kids’ poems, but rather an object that carries “a tremendous legacy” that will—somehow—“carry destiny into the future.” Combined with its coffee-table-size, sleek black jacket, and dazzling cover painting by S. D. Nelson that evokes ancient rock art, these pronouncements make one feel critically superfluous. The solemnity of the endorsements, the earnest paratext, and the chapter prose introductions with profound titles such as “Misery,” “Silence,” “Spirit,” and “Natural World” tell us that this book is a sacred object; the lavish, full page, four-color-process artworks feel less like book illustrations than stained glass windows in a house of prayer. Clearly, the poems are testaments, in the sense of tributes or documents of faith, and turning the page one feels an obligation to approach them as one might the Holy Ark.

However, some of the poems are genuinely interesting, as are, indeed, a good number of lines. “Racism,” by Julian Bear Runner, appears to be a typical children’s writing assignment (i.e., write a poem defining a concept using similes), and yet it powerfully captures the pain that this young poet has clearly experienced:

Racism is like a bank with lots of unkind words.Racism is like a gun in a child’s handsloaded with all the words a devil would say. (31)

Dena Colhoff’s “Ugly Life on Dirty Rez” beautifully responds to the typical “write a poem using incremental repetition” assignment:

Life onLife on the reservationLife on the reservation is dirty (41)

The poem’s ultimate reveal—“Life on the reservation is dirty, filthy dogs” (41)—works as both vivid imagist observation and as metaphor, the poet commenting in a cribbed shorthand on the dog’s life people lead on the Rez.

And there are many surprising, keenly observed images. For example, from Walker Thompson’s “Despair”: “I’d like to be like my dad, who is unafraid. / He is sharper than a razor blade” (31); from Dallas Nelson’s “Snowy Night”: “I see the world through my window and it looks like a polar bear’s back” (24); from Dusty Black Elk’s prose poem “Relations Write”: “Me and my mom are like a tree, a tree that got cut down and made into paper with us glued down on it” (61); and from Blue Dawn Little’s “To Be a Kid”: “When you’re a kid, you gotta be like a kid or be the way you want” (63).

Come to think of it, being put on the defensive and made to feel superflu-ous, the reader fits right in and finds good company with the young poets in this volume.


Another book whose aura demands reverence from the reader, October Mourning, by Lesléa Newman, spurred more discussion among the judges this year than any other book. Like Walking on Earth & Touching the Sky, October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard possesses high production values, and Jonathan Bartlett’s wistful and elegant illustration on the cover deserves commendation. In a kind of gestalt attempt to portray the momen-tousness of Matthew’s slaying, Newman touches on many facets of this event that might be considered peripheral or trivial: but of course nothing is trivial, nothing. She takes the time to outline the defense attorney’s responsibilities toward the boys accused of Matthew’s murder (criminal defense seems to enrage her) and turns from the tragedy itself to guess at how a “bartender” and a “cop” and a “drag queen” might have felt about it. Furthermore, she writes from the perspective of a “doe” that might have passed wonderingly by his body, the clothesline by which Matthew was trussed, and, perhaps in a modern treatment of the eighth-century “Dream of the Rood,” “the fence” to which he was bound. (Allusions to the Crucifixion are scattered throughout the text, but posit no unusual allegorical claim, despite the epigraph on the dedication page from Matthew 5:14—“You are the light of the world.”) The poems are cocooned in paratext, with an introduction, a list of resources, photographs of Matthew (in the front of the book) and the author (in the back), an afterward, lengthy notes, and “an explanation of poetic forms.”

October Mourning also comes highly recommended, with a glowing blurb by the executive director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation, James Marsden, in which he proclaims, “October Mourning is testimony to a time that must never be forgotten.” It would be churlish in the extreme to quibble with Marsden’s sentiment, but apart from the sociocultural significance they are made to bear, the poems in October Mourning are quite forgettable. The judges discussed a number of them, at length, always with the same astonish-ment at the absence of literary or aesthetic value. “The Student,” to take one example, tries to use anaphora to achieve a heightened intensity of feeling but remains benumbed to the eye and ear:

When I heard what happenedI stoppedbreathing

When I heard what happenedI startedcrying

When I heard what happenedI stoppedeating (60)


Ok. We get it. But the repetitions seem transparently manipulative and hyper-bolic; and being unmoved, perspicacious young readers will ask embarrassing questions. Why should “started crying” follow “stopped breathing”? And, if “stopped eating” doesn’t occur until the third stanza, does that suggest the poet continued to eat after s/he stopped breathing?

Wait! It gets worse. The speaker starts “retching,” and then s/he stops “cruis-ing”! (Then s/he stops cruising? Then?) And then s/he tells family, friends and “the world,” “I’m gay and it could have been me” (61). “It could have been me”? There but for the grace of God? It seems a failure of imagination to construe the horrific suffering of Matthew Shepard or indeed any creature as a prompt to feel grateful in the face of one’s own good luck. The point of the poem, as Gerard Manley Hopkins might have told her, should have been, it was me.

But October Mourning is incapable of such a simple insight, instead heaping clichés on top of clichés, and getting almost every element of physical detail, sound, and tone wrong; the reader’s inevitable response is disengagement. We really don’t want to laugh, but the poems leave us no other choice, besides spiritual defeat. Like some alien plant, they seem to suck the oxygen out of the air and replace it with nitrous oxide.

How would you respond to these lines from the poem “Where is My Boy?” (in which Newman ventriloquizes Matthew’s cat). Typically cat-like, the kitty in question seems mostly irritated that her afternoon snack is slow in the coming (not dinner, mind you; not breakfast: her snack):

Where is the boy? Will he ever be back?I’m cold and I’m lonely and I need a snack. (22)

Ambitious to erect a monument of pure, unalloyed bathos, or so it would seem, Newman appends an epigraph—in perfect iambic tetrameter—quoting from a “friend of Matthew Shepard’s,” Tina LaBrie: “I knew how much he loved his cat.”

However, not all our observations are caustic or unsympathetic. October Mourning, as one of us suggested, is akin to collections of verse designed to give voice to the underprivileged and remind readers of individual struggles and triumphs. Read in this way, it is hoped October Mourning might teach kids empathy and moral and historical lessons. Tweens, preteens, and young adults learning about Shepard might tear up or become outraged. If not for the problematic nature of Newman’s style, this work might be placed within the category of consciousness-raising literature, a modern variant on eigh-teenth- and nineteenth-century literature of sensibility. On the other hand, the text might also be so deeply unappealing that it actually risks trivializing violence in the eyes of young readers by failing to connect with the moral canons by which aesthetic standards are informed.


A much better book, Cynthia Grady’s I Lay My Stitches Down: Poems of American Slavery adopts, its inside flap copy tells us, “the American folk tradition of quilting as a structural framework” to weave “together spiritual, musical, and quilting references . . . to express the pain, sorrow, and weari-ness as well as the joy and hope” of slaves. Notwithstanding the obvious care that went into its research, evident in the list of books for further reading, the thoughtfulness of the Author’s and Illustrator’s Notes, and the author’s interest in harmonizing with previous literary works that likewise use quilt-ing as a trope for African American artistic traditions and the slave’s desire for freedom, Grady, a white, educated, middle-class professional writing on behalf of and sometimes in the voices of African American slaves, seems to us curiously unattuned or indifferent to compelling issues in American cultural life, such as the discourse surrounding cultural hegemony and appropriation.

Donelle pointed out that I Lay My Stitches Down resembles Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” a similarly sincere effort that nonetheless co-opts the voice and experience of African Ameri-cans. Craig found the organization of the text exemplary as it moves from the perspective of a white archeologist to that of a black slave determined to make a quilt through which she can sew the “praise songs of my people.” The work thus privileges the interiority of the African American individuals over the white social construction of racial identity. He felt Grady’s imita-tion of slave dialect intermittently successful, but was more impressed by Michele Wood’s large, flat, colorful paintings, with their many references to quilts, which he found reminiscent of earlier artists such as Palmer Hayden, Lois Mailou Jones, and Romare Bearden.

Issues of empathy, authenticity, and poetic dexterity also arose in our discussions of Michael J. Rosen’s Running with Trains: A Novel in Poetry and Two Voices. Running with Trains likewise eschews authoritative blurbs for the more confidential tone of the inside flap:

Perry and Steve are strangers, bound to meet in an incident that will change them both. In alternating poems sprinkled with wry wit, Michael J. Rosen creates two memorable characters and a story about home, trains, and self-discovery.

The judges, however, found insufficient wit and character development in either the teenage Perry (whom circumstances compel to take a train back and forth between two homes) or the farm boy Steve. The judges also found the poetry inconsistent, although they admired Rosen’s ambitions in evoking the bildungsroman of American travelers such as Huckleberry Finn and Sal Paradise in Perry’s personal journey across the American expanse.

The poem “Between Stations” typifies both the strengths and weaknesses of Rosen’s writing. Perry describes his alienation from the landscape he ob-serves from the train. Gradually, his observations allow for the accretion of


memory to overlay the physical landscape until it becomes a Wordsworthian spot of time, something that we half perceive and half create. Perry describes two churches that he repeatedly passes by, contrasting the tacky, inspirational billboard puns of a “mammoth church” with the cheap glass case of the more modest Glad Tidings church, on which he finds but four plastic letters arranged, H-O-P-E. His feeling of being between stations—when “the train is stuck for what feels like forever”—becomes a symbol of his own life in limbo, shuttling between two destinations, waiting to hear about his MIA father, writing to a sister who doesn’t write back, waiting for his mother to finish her schooling, waiting to grow up (28).

However, the language and prosody of “Between Stations” is uneven, and seems to drift out of Rosen’s control, opening conversations that are never resolved:

This mammoth church we pass always posesquestions or lectures at the train: WANT FAST,FAST RELIEF? TAKE TWO TABLETS!—MOSES.Its marquee towers like the mast (26)

The perhaps satiric rhyme of “poses” and “Moses” sets up Perry—falsely it turns out—as someone about to engage in creative wordplay of the kind that might involve riffing on the names of the patriarchs. One prepares for, shall we say, some light raillery, but then the focus turns to the church’s grandiose architecture. More significantly, the comic rhyme raises the question of intent: Perry is a young poet, after all, so somewhere in this portrait, the reader might reasonably expect him to reflect on poetry. Since end rhyme is rare in this work, and “Between Stations,” self-consciously arranged in four-line stanzas rhyming ABCB, differs so distinctly from any previous poem (nota bene: the “poses/Moses” rhyme is only the fourth instance of end rhyme up to this point), it strikes us as the moment for Perry to muse upon his poetic gifts or to express at least some pastel interest in the strange direction his writing has taken. But the moment slips away, unremarked on, leaving one to wonder, What was Rosen thinking? We embrace unconventionality, but the effect of avoiding this convention is to signal that Perry is poetically dull, or that form is simply not of any particular interest.

Which isn’t to say Rosen is incapable of writing well. In “What’s Mine is Theirs” we find these exceptional verses:

as if seconds were measured in telephone polesor barns or cows that sail past the windows.Tick, tick—they zip by. Click, click,the wheels’ lub-dub beats on the rails. (12)


The dreamy, hallucinatory quality of the sailing cows, the rhythm of the rails sonorously suggesting the subliminal state of Perry’s consciousness, aptly evoke the soothing, infantilizing experience of being a boy on a journey. However, these moments tend to diminish for the reader as the narrative miles pile up, and the occasional imagistic misstep only adds to the diminishment, as in these lines that somehow mash together Dorothy’s rainbow and Oz’s yellow brick road:

As the train turns straight ahead, the beamblazes down the rail . . . like it’s spreading fireor like the rails are rainbows (but only yellow)that the train has stretched across Ohio. (33)

Yellow rainbows? Not much of a rainbow, then.The powerhouse J. Patrick Lewis, 2012’s U.S. children’s poet laureate,

wrote or edited no fewer than seven poetic works for children in 2012, includ-ing If You Were a Chocolate Mustache and Last Laughs: Animal Epitaphs (co-authored with the prolific Jane Yolen, whose yearly collaboration with photographer/son Jason Stemple, this year called Bug Off, we mention en passant). While we admire Lewis’s exhausting work ethic and his dedication to children’s poetry, we worry that our laureate might have been spreading himself a mite thin.

Some of the short poems (once called telegram poems, but perhaps now Twitter poems) in this volume are amusing because they’re caustic and not cute, like “Cooked Goose”:

He was Canada bornand Canada bred,and here he lies—Canada dead. (Lewis 18)

This kind of geezerly edginess feels more genuine and soulful than Koertge’s depiction of fairy tale princes having midlife crises, though it requires a greater awareness of Samuel Beckett or Stephen Sondheim than most young readers have. Perhaps some mischievous, gift-giving adults will chuckle at the Booklist blurb on the book’s back, which seems to rise like spirit com-munications from the dark, grainy headstones in the grey, miasmal cemetery of the jacket illustration, declaring “Gallows humor at its finest.” And one or two poems are affectingly melancholy: the exquisite “Blue Whale Blues” in particular, which Michael especially liked:

She sang a melody,two continents apart,so long and sad, the echobroke her heart. (Lewis 22)


Last Laughs is arguably the most unabashedly eccentric of the books of nature poetry that we received this year. Many are, as readers of this journal have come to expect, highly ephemeral and brutally didactic, inspired by the muse of parental uncertainty: “We don’t know what the future holds, but surely a book about the insect kingdom will always be useful!”

Akin to nature poetry, but far from the bonfires of instruction, Marilyn Nelson’s Ostrich and Lark is a lovely riff on African animal fables and pourquoi tales, each page gloriously illustrated by one of six San artists from the Kuru Art Project. In the following passage, the idea of slowly grazing across the veld over the course of a day is evoked by the stretching of lines across the page:

Every day they nibbled an ongoing meal:a few seeds here, a few seeds there; for Ostrich, the occasional lizard.

The internal rhymes of “day” and “they” and the alliterative “Ostrich” and “occasional” provide aural effects, and the offhand reference to the edible lizard brings the passage to a satisfying and sly close.

Among the great pleasures here are tonal shifts, the movement between contemplative moments, such as this one for Ostrich:

Sometimes he dreamed of singing the sky full of stars.Sometimes he dreamedof the green season, drinkingcaught water, and drinking, and drinking.

And more robust, comic bursts, like this one:

Ostrich found his voice,a voice part lion’s roar,part foghorn,part old man trumpeting into his handkerchief.

The juxtaposition of the lofty “lion’s roar” and the “old man trumpeting into his handkerchief,” a burlesque of the lion’s nobility, is evidence of Nelson’s mischievousness as well as her musicality. The poet also hears music in si-lence. Following the ostrich’s first roar are four words: “The veld fell silent.” Nelson’s restraint is complemented nicely by Thame Kaashe’s book design, whose eloquent beauty is undisturbed by a single crowing blurb.

Nonsense follows nature as the most popular genre in children’s poetry, and this year’s crop of nonsense reminds us that genuine poetry, as Friedrich Schlegel has it, “takes playfulness seriously” and is “informed by a truly transcendental buffoonery” (251; 148). Easily Nelson’s peer, the underap-


preciated JonArno Lawson provides a seminar in whimsical musicality in Old MacDonald Had Her Farm, in which one finds an opportunity to consider how nonsense sounds like gibberish while still managing to say something.

Unlike Ostrich and Lark, Old MacDonald hews more closely in design to the children’s picture book (and a conventional one at that). But setting the look of the book aside, we find on its pages a poetry that resonates with his adult work in productive ways. Those of us interested in the interface of children’s and adult poetry might like to compare Old MacDonald with this excerpt from Lawson’s “Mad Bad Mac!” a poem published for adults in There, Devil, Eat That:

Slap that awkward farmhand’s back— Attract that hand abaft a shackAttack and stab— drag ass-backwards (past vast dark marshlands— what a slab, man—call a cab? Pant, pant— catch a nap and grab a snack)A hack’s black drama— Mad bad Mac! (76)

“Mad Bad Mac!” is Lawson’s more sophisticated turn on the defamiliarizing stanzas of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”:

Old MacDonald had her farm,a e i o u.And when she came across an a,this is what she’d do:Saw barn planks, stack sacks.Sacks fall, stand backCrank cranks, slap backs.

Despite its didactic nonchalance, Lawson’s stanzas may lead readers to develop a taste for poetic effects like assonance, alliteration, and rhyme, or even inspire them try something similar themselves (something akin to “Mad Bad Mac!” perhaps?).

Newcomer Tiffany Stone also offers up some fine nonsense this year, and while not quite in the same league with Marilyn Nelson and JonArno Law-son, she manages quite well for herself in Rainbow Shoes, a book that fairly hums with infectious energy. We felt that the strong rhythms of the poems lent themselves to reading aloud, and that the overall integration of text, illustration by Stefan Czernecki, and book design by Elisa Gutiérrez makes Rainbow Shoes successful as a printed artifact. Stone’s poems are peppy; of this there can be no doubt. Consider, for instance, “Purple Pants Poem”:


My pants, my pants, my purple pants! Put one leg on— I do a dance. The other— see me strut and prance,so fancy in my purple pants.

Or this zinger, which strikes us as either an advertising jingle from an alternate universe or the crazed pitch of a door-to-door salesman too long on the road:

You—yes, YOU! Don’t you want to look hipper?Everybody needsan invisible zipper—an all-purpose four-seasontransparent gripper—

Here the nuttiness of the slogan seems just right, chiming perfectly with the carefree unpretentiousness of the rest of Rainbow Shoes, which shamelessly embraces the style of fashion magazines and the world of design and shoe obsession, becoming, in the words of one of the judges, a delicious, consum-able first fashion book.

Eric Ode’s boyishly nonsensical When You’re a Pirate Dog: And Other Pirate Poems is our penultimate book (the last is our winner), a collection of poems that involve various interchangeable pirate crews. You can guess who these loveable plunderers are: the captains are blustery; the cooks revolting; the men oddly sensitive, quirky, aesthetic, and occasionally given to wear-ing drag; the sea serpents are shy; and the lady pirate is the roughest and toughest, meanest and leanest customer on the deck. We’ve known versions of these characters all our lives, the luckiest of us ever since our parents or grandparents took us to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta (the less lucky since The Pirates of the Caribbean).

We know the genre up and down: it is the deprecated idiom of comic nar-rative verse. One small step (up?) from advertising jingles. But that’s not to say the book holds no surprises. There’s Pirate Captain Myrtle who wears turtle boots, so of course she moves very, very . . ., and there’s a trio of singing swashbucklers who can’t afford a boat and so must ply their piracy in a donkey cart, led by their captain, the ass. The virtuoso illustrator Jim Harris, who is known for the small, puckish details in his illustrations, comes through brilliantly here: these mugs accompany their sea shanty by playing, improbably, a bass fiddle and guitar, and the Jolly Roger that flies above their heads looks down at them in sheepish regret. Then there is the “vicious and


vile” Pirate Pat, who wears a long trailing pink feather. Some older readers may identify that feather with Frans Hals’s Young Man Holding a Skull.

And that’s not to say the poems aren’t good. Many are: perhaps the most pleasant surprise is Ode’s workmanlike craft. He shows a consistent ability to trace metrical and linguistic structures within vernacular English, which, in combination with a fine gift for narrative invention, challenges reductive assumptions about the limitations of the genre. Although the genre is unde-manding, Ode elects to impose strict phonological and syntactical constraints upon his stanzas, always with the appearance of great ease.

In “Pirate Pat’s Fancy Hat,” for example, by stretching a sentence over four lines and employing a regular—even somewhat monotonous—rhythm, the absurd length of Pat’s extravagant pink feather becomes the poem:

Follow Pat and you will findthat frilly feather floats behind,and as it bumps your nose and chin,you’ll smirk a bit. And then you’ll grin.

Another delicious surprise, the twenty-fifth and final poem of the volume (yes, twenty-five: there is nothing half-hearted here; Ode likes writing pirate poems) darkens the mood. “Off the Map” relates the tale of Captain Jasper Jones (no relation to the Printz Honor Award book of the same title by Craig Silvey) preparing to lead his crew into the unknown. One might have expected the premise to be treated as farce, but farce it is not:

“There’s something waiting just ahead. I feel it in me bones.Now what it be, I cannot say,” he told his fearless crew.“But this is why we’re pirates, men, and this is what we do.”

The narrator then tells us that nobody has ever heard from Jones or his crew again, but he doesn’t fault the good captain for his recklessness or lack of nautical prowess. Philosophically, he consoles himself with the understand-ing that:

someone has to set the course, and someone must be firstto find the place where secrets and adventures overlapand first to find what waits beyond the edges of the map.

Finishing with “Off the Map” is an easy, theatrical gesture, but not without a soupçon of daring, since the preceding poems are all similarly—and some might say too similarly—antic and absurd. However, Ode increases the risk, as well as the level of difficulty, by penning four stanzas of fourteeners, which underscores the feeling of transition and adventure. What is more unexpected, by building the final stanza out to seven lines, he makes a subtle and inge-nious reference to the preceding poem, “Seven Clever Pirates,” a poem of


three stanzas of seven lines each. One doesn’t often find this kind of energy expended on behalf of kids who just might like to hear some pirate poems, or this level of craft in what some might call a throwaway genre. But that’s not to say it isn’t appreciated. Yes, one hears numerous echoes (in addition to Sullivan, Barrie comes to mind and R. L. Stevenson and perhaps even Swift), but children’s literature is a recursive idiom and there is no harm in doing something very old if you can do it very well.

This year’s winner of the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry is JonArno Lawson’s Down in the Bottom of the Bottom of the Box. Its many virtues notwithstanding, Down in the Bottom of the Bottom of the Box seemed unlikely to win the award, due to extenu-ating circumstances. The Lion and Unicorn award committee had already recognized three of Lawson’s collections: one, The Man in the Moon-Fixer’s Mask, was named an honor book in 2005; and two, Black Stars in a White Night Sky (in 2007) and A Voweller’s Bestiary (in 2009), were both selected for the top prize. When Down in the Bottom was published early in 2012, it prompted a previous panel of judges to discuss whether the Lion and Unicorn ought to “retire” Lawson from competition for the sake of encouraging a broader pool of applicants and avoiding charges that the Lion and Unicorn was somehow “in synch” if not “in league” with JonArno Lawson, who had become a version of the home team and the beneficiary of unconscious (or conscious) favoritism. Indeed, after reading Down in the Bottom and im-mediately appreciating its accomplishment, a former judge advised that we declare Lawson sui generis, and honor him with a “lifetime achievement award.” Reminding us that Lawson is a bit young for a lifetime achievement award, Joseph Thomas, our poetry editor, pointed out that none of the current judges had served on the previous committees that had conferred awards on his work, and that it would be awkward to quarantine a poet simply because of the excellence of his or her writing. The Lion and the Unicorn award was created to praise excellence, not to bury it.

While Lawson made it hard on the judges, Down in the Bottom made it easy by being unquestionably the best book of children’s poetry published in 2012. But, before discussing it, let us note that its back cover includes two blurbs. One concerns the author, the other the illustrator, and both, in clear, rather unblurb-like language, speak simply and honestly to the poetry and images within. Well-meaning and articulate though they are, in contrast with the marmorealizing praises one finds elsewhere in the blurb milieu, they seem almost discouraging; in combination with the physical modesty of this paperback volume, one might infer there is nothing exciting here. No inference could be further from the truth. In its linguistic and intellectual


play, accompanied throughout by Alec Dempster’s bold, compelling paper cuts—black and white with judicious bursts of color—Down in the Bottom reminds us why we love poetry. And more, it reminds us just how lovely a book of poetry can be.

In contrast to what might be construed as a typical book of children’s poetry—selections of poems grouped around a particular subject, theme, poetic form, or didactic purpose—Down in the Bottom is a miscellany of Lawson’s unpublished poems for children. Without external structure to hold the individual pieces in place, every poem is a kind of tightrope performance, primarily reliant on its own strength and balance and the poet’s voice to hold the reader’s attention. One of Lawson’s greatest strengths as a poet for children is his ability to sustain conversations among unrelated poems while engaging the young reader at their center.

For example, take the personification of the day in the four-line “Seize the Day”:

The sensible daywill bite the hand that seizes it—and the sensible handwill find some briefer moment that pleases it. (47)

It’s a feisty character, this day—a character that possesses independence and delicacy, as indeed does the poem, an upstart complaint against the thick-skinned Roman assumptions of “seize” wrapped around an ingenious exhortation to enjoy the moment, not as something one must master to some pre-engineered purpose, but as an equal partner in life. In four lines, that kind of power and subtlety is not easy to achieve—and it is not regularly achieved for children.

It is a kind of minor miracle that readers learn to take for granted reading Lawson’s poems. Consider the simple wordplay in Mad Bad Mac’s blood brother of a poem, “Dadder Dan”:

There never was a badder manthan that nasty Dadder Dan—He’s digging back into your past he’sdigging up fantastic nasties. (49)

Yes, a brief, clever poem—a touch macabre, a bit Gorey, a bit Byron, with those comic, multisyllabic rhymes in the last couplet. We want to say more about what more there is here, but, first, we should direct your attention to the riddling, “I Played with Toys”:

I played with toys, and later,I learned to play inside them.


Inside them was the only way to keep them,because I couldn’t find a way to hide them.While inside them, I learned to play without themand within them (so without them)I no longer thought about them. (47)

The transmutation of toys into words and concepts and then into nonsense beguiles and teases readers, takes them on a ride along the seam of paradox. Especially rich is the polysemy of “without” in line five, which underlines the paradox: if toys become words then without in turn becomes a toy, the speaker playing both outside of his toys and, well, without them. That is, he plays toylessly with the toys of language, a toy he can never be without insofar as our consciousness is always boxed in or constituted by language. It’s a perfectly enigmatic mental amusement ride of a poem.

“Forgiving and Forgetting” achieves a similar kind of beguiling excitement:

I’ve found a way of livinghalf the time for givingbut when I start regrettinggiving, then I live for getting. (65)

Like a roller coaster, it is rigorously constructed; its success bound up in the loop, or rather, loops. The centrifugal effect of the forceful “getting” part of living offered at the end naturally opens up into the revelatory second line (giving). Coupled with the steady acceleration of those feminine rhymes (two perfect couplets or four slant rhymes, the penultimate rhyme “regretting” followed, ingeniously, by the enjambed repetition of “giving”), the poem’s inertia keeps you in your seat when you’re upside down.

Yet there is a loop within this loop. The more delicate, psychologically complex inner poem concerns healing. The poet has discovered that he will forgive what he can and trust to time (the piling on of days, the irresistible force) to help him forget what is unforgivable (the movable, after all, object). It’s a cunning poem, and it offers up its insight as playful pedagogy, but it’s also a difficult and a compassionate poem: Lawson is speaking to young readers about painful realities, for example the exhilaration and danger of existing with others, and he generously offers his own idiosyncratic solutions to imponderable problems.

The fascination with the self, or the opportunities it affords us for creative play, is an important motif in Lawson’s poetry, and sometimes, like a funhouse mirror that appears where we least expect it, Lawson’s poems reflect our own self-awareness back at us in surprising ways. “Our Imaginary Selves,” for example, imagines the griffin responding to Noah’s rejection by promising to “build another ark for our imaginary selves.” While the ingenuity of the line


makes us laugh, the conceit “imaginary selves” presses us to contemplate the odd twists and turns in identity—even perhaps the difficulties of having one—a contemplation inflected by other poems in this volume such as “Identity”:

Welsh fingers and Scottish toes—Irish eyes and an English nose:I’m a Brit—every bit of me’s a Brit from Britain—and the parts of me that aren’t have to fight to fit in. (39)

This creative engagement with interiority is firmly rooted in a compelling desire to connect, to empathize and teach, as we see in “Remember Where You Were”:

Remember where you were?Look where you are now:you got here half by guessing well,and half by asking how. (30)

The poem simplifies the doom of choice for young readers by acknowledg-ing the presence of inner conflict, like “Forgiving and Forgetting,” and by respecting them as intelligent and reflective thinkers.

Another poem that engages young readers as psychological problem solvers is “A Second Water Waltz,” which reimagines intimate conversation within a poem about forgiveness and disembodied poetic joy:

Look how your lovely face exalts,when you forget about my faults:suddenly, accepting me,your lovely face reflecting me—up you spring—your body vaults, and diving in with somersaultsyou find the surface of my skin,and join me in my water waltz. (43)

The poem asks the reader not to mind its elusiveness, to be content with temporariness—again, accept pleasure here and now. The luxurious shower of sound makes pleasure here and now a pretty tempting choice.

And now, it’s in the context of this private conversation that a poem like “Dadder Dan,” and the eponymous “The Bottom of the Box” reveal their deeper meanings:

Down in the bottom of the bottom of the boxdig a little deeper—those aren’t socks.Here come the teeth of a hungry foxjumping up your arm like electric shocks. (21)


Talking about that tingly aversion one has to reaching under a bed, under a log, into a hole (the dark, hidden parts of the self, and the dark, mysteri-ous world), the poem speaks about repressed fears, about a child’s alarming awareness of his or her physical vulnerability (what cannot be forgiven or entirely forgotten?). And it speaks soothingly to the delight one has in being shocked, or, at least, surprised. Things will be okay, the poem’s inventive metrics assure us. Lawson seems to simulate the danger by extending the run of weak syllables from two to three, following the strong syllable at the outset of the line: (“Here come the teeth” to “Jump-ing up your arm”). The weak syllables seem to represent the child’s lack of defenses before the indefinable threat down in the bottom.

Or, perhaps not. One might read the final line to place a stress on the word “up”—a sudden thunderclap where (in this position in previous lines) there had been silence. Thus, after three lines that wave their weak syllables before our eyes, come three hard trochees thumping after us only to twist eel-like into a pair of iambs, as the poem becomes the nerves and muscles of our body. On the other hand (or up the other arm), one might read “Here come” as a spondee, as in “here comes the bride,” with a very strong accent on “come” that anticipates a similarly strong accent on jump in the next line, and the loud bang of “come” and “jump” may make readers jump!

However we read these metrical, multistable lines, our analysis remains the same. Lawson grounds the live wire of fear in the pleasure of music—or bends the pleasure of music into the live wire of fear. The poetry is a delight, but it is more than that in the way it meditates upon and exemplifies itself; it becomes the source of the fear and the solution, paradoxically at the same time. The strategy of exemplifying poetry, making the reader aware he or she is engaging poetry as poetry, is foregrounded by Lawson’s title. Poetry—down in the bottom of the bottom of the box—is what is down in the bottom of the bottom of the bottom, and everywhere else along the way.

There is no getting outside it. Playing off the physics trope of the universe as a sealed box, we point out after Lawson that there is no “bottom”: that a bottom is merely a heuristic fiction, a figure of speech that provides us with what may be a quintessentially human way of making sense of things, or IMAGINING (writ large) that we are. With the title of our essay, “Outside the Inside of the Box,” we hope to point to a similar kind of fiction, the fiction of critics who cannot quite believe that all critical judgments are subjective and infused within the object they are critiquing.

Looking over our previous assessments of Lawson’s work—one honor book and now three award winners—we’re struck by just how much improbably great poetry Lawson has given his readers over the last decade, a giving we hope he hasn’t begun to regret. In addition to this year’s jury of three, the


past judges who have praised his work count among the most respected crit-ics of children’s poetry writing today: Richard Flynn, Kelly Hager, Michael Heyman, Angela Sorby, and Joseph Thomas. It is the considered opinion of the current three (and our poetry award editor) that it is high time to acknowl-edge that JonArno Lawson may be the foremost children’s poet in North America. To borrow a phrase from W. B. Yeats, he’s the King of the Cats. Cognizant that our pronouncement might appear to be a touch hubristic (if not downright self-congratulatory credit snatching), and of the potential irony in ending an essay that reflects on the vagaries of blurbs and blurbitude with a big fat blurb, we can only point to the record—indeed, point to the poems themselves—and say, in our defense: res ipsa loquitur: the thing speaks for itself. We are merely obligated to hear.

Meow.

Michael Joseph is a poet, writer, and rare books librarian. His most recent scholarly esssays are “Poetic Nonsense: Robert Graves, The White Goddess and Children’s Poetry” in Gravesiana: The Journal of Robert Graves Society (Winter 2013) and “Reiterative divergence: Reflections on Maurice Sendak’s Bumble-Ardy and Kenzaburô Ôe’s reimagining of Outside of There,” in Book 2.0 (2013). He has also recently co-authored a work of collaborative fiction with Sarah Stengle, Juvenile Fantasies and Innocent Dreams (2013), and re-written a seventeenth century fairy-tale La Nouvelle Chatte Blanch (Lucia Press, 2013), with illustrations by Henry Charles and serigraphs by MaryAnn L. Miller.

Donelle Ruwe is Full Professor of English at Northern Arizona University. She is the editor of Culturing the Child, 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers (Scarecrow 2005) and two awarding winning chapbooks of poetry, most recently Another Message You Miss the Point of (2005 Camber Press Poetry Chapbook Prize). Her book, British Children’s Poetry in the Romantic Era: Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme (Palgrave 2014), discusses the politics and aesthetics of children’s verse between 1780 and 1835.

Craig Svonkin is Assistant Professor of English at Metropolitan State Uni-versity of Denver and Executive Director of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association. His recent works include the co-edited symposium “Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books” (with Charles Hatfield), “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsbergs Spiritual Self-Othering,” “A Southern California Boyhood in the Simu-Southland Shadows of Walt Disneys Enchanted Tiki Room,” and “From Disneyland to Modesto: George Lucas and Walt Disney.”


Note1The judges and their editor would like to thank San Diego State Univer-

sity’s National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature and especially the capable assistance of graduate students Alya Hameed and Jill Coste for helping administrate this year’s award.

Works Cited

Block, Francesca Lia. The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold. New York: Harp-erCollins, 2000.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” British Women Poets of the 19th Century. Ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet. New York: Meridian, 1996. 244–51.

Grady, Cynthia. I Lay My Stitches Down: Poems of American Slavery. Illus. Michele Wood. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2012.

Koertge, Ron. Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses. Illus. Andrea Dezsö. Somerville, MA: Candlewick P, 2012.

Lawson, JonArno. Down in the Bottom of the Bottom of the Box. Illus. Alec Dempster. Erin, Ontario: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2012.

———. Old MacDonald Had Her Farm. Illus. Tina Holdcroft. Toronto: Annick P, 2012.

———. There, Devil, Eat That. St. Johns: Pedlar, 2011.

Lewis, J. Patrick, and Jane Yolen. Last Laughs: Animal Epitaphs. Illus. Jeffrey Stewart Timmins. Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge, 2012.

Nelson, Marilyn. Ostrich and Lark. Illus. San Artists of the Kuru Art Project of Botswana: Cgoma Simon, Gamnqoa Kukama, et al. Honesdale, PA: Boyds Mills P, 2012.

Newman, Lesléa. October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard. Somerville, MA: Candlewick P, 2012.

Ode, Eric. When You’re a Pirate Dog and Other Pirate Poems. Illus. Jim Harris. Gretna, LA: Pelican P, 2012.

Rosen, Michael J. Running with Trains: A Novel in Poetry and Two Voices. Honesdale, PA: Wordsong, 2012.

Schlegel, Friedrich. Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments. Transl. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971.

Stone, Tiffany. Rainbow Shoes. Illus. Stefan Czernecki. Vancouver: Tradewind Books, 2012.

They Might Be Giants. “Don’t Let’s Start.” They Might Be Giants. Bar/None, 1987. LP.

Walking on Earth and Touching the Sky: Poetry and Prose by Lakota Youth at Red Cloud Indian School. Ed. Timothy P. McLaughlin. Illus. S. D. Nelson. New York: Abrams, 2012.

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