Visit the children’s section of any bookstore or take a look, at any catalogue produced by any mainstream children’s publisher and look for the poetry. If it’s there at all, it’ll be represented by a surprising small number of books Compared to the massive number of works of fiction and of what we call nonfiction, the amount of poetry published for children in the last hundred years or so has been comparatively small.
Choose any mainstream publisher’s offering at any given time and you will see what I mean. For instance, here are the books that appear when I open the main web page for Putnam Young Readers books on May 22, 2024:
Lots of fiction. Some non-fiction. Some novels. Some picture books. BUT: No poetry.
Not any.
None.
And indeed, Putnam, one of the imprint of the gigantic multinational conglomerate Penguin Random House appears not to publish any poetry at all.
While some of the other imprints of that conglomerate do publish a bit of poetry, there don’t publish much of it. No mainstream children’s publisher does anymore. There are, sometimes, pictures books with texts that rhyme, from perennial best-sellers like Dr. Seuss to non-fiction cardboard books for babies about art.
And there have certainly been and continue to be children’s poets who have been able to establish reputations large enough to allow them to publish collections of their own poetry, from Dennis Lee to Jack Prelutsky and Michael Rosen.
But successful children’s poets are a tiny community among the large mass of fiction and non-fiction writers.
When poetry for children does get published, it is far more likely to appear in an anthology, and most often than not in an anthology with no specific topic or focus. There are way more children’s anthologies that offer a variety of kinds of poems than there are ones of just, say, poetry about witches or baseball, or just poems by Australians or women, or just sonnets or ballads.
That surprisingly tight focus on offering very similar selection of poetry for children in similar volume after similar volume has interesting implications. It suggests and so surely communicates the idea that poetry is inherently and most significantly anthogizable—that poems suit or even require the context of a group of other poems in order to be understood as, and therefore read and responded to as, poetry. If most of the poems you read and all of the poems you encounter that are specially identified as being poetry are in anthologies, then poems come to be significantly understood as a kind of writing you always experience in the context of other pieces of writing you find them in the midst of. It’s like a selection of chocolates in a box: they’re all chocolates, but much of the pleasure in eating them is becoming aware of their differences from each other and choosing the ones you like best. It’s almost impossible to choose and eat a chocolate from as box without making judgements about it that compare and contrast it to the other chocolates and do so on terms of the absolute significance of your own personal taste.
But before thinking further about that, I need first to think about why it should be the case. Why is so little poetry for children being published, and why does it most often appear in the form of an anthology? I’ll write about that in my next post.