Shel Silverstein

“If you are a dreamer,come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer. If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire, for we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in!”

So here we are: passion blog, round 2.  This semester, I’ve decided to switch topics- I’ll be looking at some of my favorite poets and poems and trying to highlight their best features.  For week 1 of this new semester, I picked a writer that many of us are probably familiar with from our childhood: Shel Silverstein.  If you need to jolt your memory a bit, here’s a picture of him.

shel-silverstein

This picture is actually tiny bit terrifying.

What I really like about Silverstein’s poems is that most of them are short and simple.  They get their point across without too much excessive deliberation or detail.  Whether they’re silly (such as one called The Meehoo with an Exactlywatt, almost mimicking an Abbot and Costello routine) or more insightful (like Where the Sidewalk Ends, where Shel philosophically implores readers to “leave this place where the smoke blows black”), we find that the majority of his works are clean but concise in their form.

Shel successfully maintains a consistent rhyme scheme throughout his poems.  He is also gifted in his ability to articulate deep concepts in a way that is still entertaining for kids.  While many of the ideas that he expresses could easily go over the heads of his mostly-children audience, they are written in such a way that those same children can return to these poems when they are older and better understand what Shel is saying.

Another thing I love about Shel’s poetry is that many of his poems are accompanied by drawings that the author himself has illustrated.  These drawings sometimes even interact with the text!

Shel poem

She reminds me of “The Grudge.” Nevertheless, she’s interacting with the poetry.

He’s quirky, but Shel’s got this poetry thing down.

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