April is Poetry Month. In honor of this, I interviewed Betsy Franco, author of over 80 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction for children and young adults. Her new book coming out today, A CURIOUS COLLECTION OF CATS, is a book of concrete poems and looks truly delightful! You can find the entire
interview with Betsy Franco at Young Adult (& Kids!) Books Central, but here is a brief taste:
Question: This new book is a collection of concrete poems. What is a concrete poem?
Betsy Franco: Generally, concrete poems, or visual poems, are poems that look like what is being said in the text. There is a subtle difference, and concrete poems are a subset of visual poems. Visual poetry came naturally because I was a painting major at Stanford University and everything is visual to me. Cats lend themselves to this type of poem because they're always doing comical and beautiful things with their bodies. I'd never seen a whole book of visual poems on the same subject. But here it is.
I wanted to show all kinds of visual poems, concrete and otherwise. I tried to mix it up. Some are shapes filled with words. Some of the text is written in a way that reflects the subject, such as the bumpy line of "cat under a blanket." Sometimes the way the poem is read is the visual aspect, such as "Princess," (on my website,
http://www.betsyfranco.com/) in which the reader reads up and down, up and down, the way a cat travels back and forth through my legs when it wants to be fed. The text can be upside down if the cat is upside down. The back and forward slashes were perfect for a cat door in the last poem.
There are other forms of poetry in the book, within the visual poems--limericks, haiku, and free verse.
When revising the book, my new kitten Frida would sit in front of the computer and track the cursor. If my email icon bounced up and down, her head would bounce up and down, too. She's a nightmare on a desk, has no idea of desk etiquette. She would run off with important post-its in her mouth and bat my pencils off the desk.
My cats always make me laugh. This book was a lot of fun!
Question: Because the illustrations are so essential to a visual or concrete poem, did you work with an illustrator as you wrote the poems or did you make sketches of each poem for him?
Betsy Franco: When I wrote the poems, I formatted them in visual ways, which I described to Michael Wertz, the illustrator. Michael sometimes used my ideas and sometimes used his own ideas, but once he started, he dived in 110% and enriched the book with his bright color palette, his imagination, his passion, and his wit. He made each illustration a complete work of art that could be framed. He had his own take on many poems that I would have never dreamed of. One review said I have "good illustrator karma."
