In 2014 I and many other writers received a lovely and unexpected invitation from prominent American children’s poet Kenn Nesbitt, asking if we would be interested in submitting poems for an anthology he was compiling, One Minute Till Bedtime, which would also include such contributors as Jack Prelutsky, Jon Scieszka, Jane Yolen, and Lemony Snicket. Talk about great company! And I was so thrilled when Kenn accepted my poem, Seagull Beach Party.
Two years later, and this week sees the publication of One Minute Till Bedtime. Containing the work of many poets from the US, UK, Australia and Canada, selected by Kenn, and beautifully illustrated by Christoph Niemann, the book is published by Little, Brown and is available around the world, including Australia. To celebrate its publication, I spoke to Kenn about the project, his own career, and children’s poetry in general.
First of all, congratulations on the publication of One Minute till Bedtime, Kenn! It’s lovely to see it out there. How did you come up with the idea for this unique poetry anthology?
Many years ago, the poet Bruce Lansky pointed out to me that most children’s poems can be read in an average of about one minute. Since then, I have tried to encourage teachers to take one minute of their school day to share a poem with their students.
When I was named Children’s Poet Laureate, I decided to create a website called PoetryMinute.org to give teachers a resource where they could easily find one-minute poems to share with their students for every day of the school year.
While I was in the process of creating this site, I was approached by Susan Rich at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers about creating a book around this idea of one-minute poems. She and I decided that bedtime might be the perfect time for a book of short poems, and One Minute till Bedtime was born.
The contributing poets come from around the world. How did you go about sourcing poems for the anthology?
Over the years that I have been writing children’s poems, I have developed relationships with many poets throughout the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. I called on many of these authors, and reached out to lots of other poets whose work I admire. Thank goodness for email and the Internet. A project like this would have been much more difficult 20 years ago!
With its wonderful poems, lively illustrations by Christoph Niemann, and attractive design, One Minute till Bedtime is a most appealing book for children and their parents. And obviously there’s a lot of work behind it. Can you tell us a bit about the process of putting together such a big project with the publisher, Little, Brown?
To begin, I wanted to create a collection that focused on the work of living, working children’s poets, rather than reprinting classic and public domain works. So I sent out a call for submissions to over 200 poets from around the world, looking for brand new poems that had never before appeared in print. I received submissions from roughly 170 different authors. I read them all, highlighting the ones that I thought might work. Once I knew which poems I wanted to include, I printed them all out and spread the papers around my dining room table, looking for natural pairings between poems and organizing them into sections.
Along the way, I tracked everything with spreadsheets, including submissions, selections, the order of the poems, and so on. While I was doing this, Little, Brown was on the hunt for just the right illustrator. Christoph Neimann was a truly inspired choice. His simple, yet incredibly clever illustrations compliment the poems perfectly.
Once the manuscript was completed, Little, Brown began working with Christoph on the illustrations and with me on the process of proofreading, editing, typesetting, and troubleshooting.
In the end, it all came together beautifully. I couldn’t be more proud of this book.
You are a popular and much-published poet. Can you tell us something about your own career, and how you started? What do you think has changed, if anything, over the time you’ve been published, in terms of attitudes to poetry for children?
I began writing poems as a hobby for my own amusement. I wrote for several years before I ever considered trying to get published. I also created a website, poetry4kids.com, in 1997 to share my work with readers online. I had my first poems published in 1998 in an anthology called Miles of Smiles. My first book, The Aliens Have Landed at Our School! was published in 2001. Since then, I have written many more books of children’s poetry, as well as a couple of picture books and a chapter book.
It seems that there are more poets writing for children today than ever before. At the same time, there are fewer individual poetry collections being published. Many children’s poets have instead turned their talents to writing picture books, novels in verse, etc. Large hardcover collections, such as those of Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky, are becoming rare as hens’ teeth. Recent books by Alan Katz and Calef Brown are notable exceptions.
It is my hope that One Minute till Bedtime will not only introduce a new generation of parents and children to the joy of poetry, and showcase the works of today’s best children’s poets, but will also show publishers that poetry is worth pursuing.
You are the US Children’s Poetry Laureate and a tireless advocate for poetry. Why do you think poetry is so important for children? And what more do you think could be done to enhance children’s access to poetry?
I was the Children’s Poet Laureate from 2013-2015. Although I’ve passed that torch to my successor, Jacqueline Woodson, I continue to promote poetry to children, parents, and teachers around the world.
I believe poetry is important for children because it is short, fun, and memorable. (Everyone remembers something by Mother Goose, Dr. Seuss, and probably several other poets of childhood.) This combination makes poetry an easy springboard to reading and writing. Introducing children to poetry can help make them lifelong lovers of the written word.
The best champions for poetry are the earliest ones; parents and teachers. I believe the best way to enhance children’s access to poetry is to encourage parents to read to their kids, and to ask teachers to share poetry in their classrooms. Once they do, they will find that kids can’t get enough.
Boots and the Bushranger is set in the early days of the Victorian Gold Rush in the booming town of Castlemaine, where every square foot was dug up and turned over, where people made and drank and lost fortunes or pennies, and where (as we now know, thanks to Clare Wright’s ‘Forgotten Rebels of Eureka’) women were a important part of the goldfields communities.
