 Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career. |
| I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's. |
| I'm mostly influenced by life, what's around me, and my own childhood. |
| I'm usually working on eight or 10 things at once. |
| My wife used to tell me one of my best qualities was that my feet don't smell, but I remember my brother's did when we were kids. |
| After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures. |
| Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect. |
| Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading. |
| I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it's fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter. |
| When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all. |
| My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I've been teaching myself computer graphics, so I'm reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts. |
| I accept challenges, I have always done that in writing. |
| There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do. |
| I would go to sketch groups and draw. I really enjoyed the subject matter, but I wasn't good at it. |
| Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves. |
| Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood. |
| I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor. |
| Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it. |
| We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine. |
| I'm never bored. Topics: Short |
