Poetry and Claiming Voice

In Vermont this January, when author-illustrator Don Tate signed a copy of his beautiful picture book for me, he wrote, "Love words." I always have. For many of us it was words and their power that drew us to the uncertain and often unpredictable vocation of a writer. And no form distills words better than poetry.In times of crisis, poetry gives us a way to claim voice, assert ourselves, protest injustice; it enables us to "live in the along," as Gwendolyn Brooks put it. It helps us maintain a kind of necessary conviction that we will, in the end, be right, even if that juster, kinder end seems deeply endangered at the moment.Don talked to us in workshop about how he went about the work of creating this glorious picture book about poet George Moses Horton. What a story this is! Here's an excerpt from the entry on Horton on the University of North Carolina's web site, Documenting the American South:

By the time he was twenty, George Moses Horton had begun visiting the campus of The University of North Carolina....There he sold students acrostics on the names of their sweethearts at twenty-five, fifty, and seventy-five cents. For several decades he "bought his time" from his masters through the sale of his poems and through the wages collected as a campus laborer.

Horton loved words. That's where it all began.I was especially fascinated by how Don has integrated the poet's experience of words into the design of his book.Here is the preacher's soaring rhetoric.     Here are the alphabets floating into the boy's understanding, as he's drawn irresistibly to the empowering skill of reading, a skill forbidden to his people.There are lessons in this book that arise organically from its story and fall gently upon the mind. They arise from love and family and community, and from a boy's deep, abiding desire to know the written word. A compelling story, brought to the page with a loving hand.Thank you, Don Tate and Peachtree Publishers.