Dispatches from the 60s #3
Ellen Raskin's A Paper Zoo
A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him. He clings to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting—
Her baby hangs on underneath.
—Bats, by Randall Jarrell
I’m still exploring Ellen Raskin’s picture books, and wanted to drop you a quick note to share some of the illustrations from this one—1968’s A Paper Zoo: A Collection of Animal Poems by Modern American Poets, with poems selected by Renée Karol Weiss and illustrations by Ellen Raskin—because they’re so so different than the ones in Franklin Stein.
What I particularly love here is that most of the poems and their corresponding illustrations are not in the same two-page spread—in most cases, you read the poem and on that page, there’s a hint of Raskin’s illustration, but you have to turn the page to see the rest of it.
So her pictures take you by the hand and draw you forward through the book, while also allowing you to do your own imagining before you see her imaginings.
I love that.
Raskin talks a bit about her artistic choices and reasoning in the Afterword:
Much as I would like to say “Let my work speak for itself,” I won’t. And I can’t. The poems may speak for themselves; the illustrator may only interpret what he hears. In this book I consider literal interpretation unfair to the young reader who is learning to visualize abstract words. (At times it could be helpful to read a poem aloud to a child and have him verbalize the picture before he sees my illustration.) What I have attempted to do in my illustrations is to complement the poetry (from ear to eye) and decorate each page. There are sixteen different poets in this book and I have retained one style—free, loose drawings with tight textural decorations. A singular style provides consistency to an anthology; and this particular style, free and tight, to me is poetry.
Here are two of my faves from the book—but remember, the format here isn’t the same as in the book: In both cases, the poem is on the right-hand page, and you have to turn the page to see the illustration.
Emily Dickinson’s The Snake:
Randall Jarrell’s The Bat (I’ve seen it titled as A Bat is Born elsewhere):
Me: *reading Randall Jarrell’s Bats aloud to Josh this morning*
Me: *starts crying halfway through*
Josh: WAIT ARE YOU CRYING
Me: *pauses reading*
Me: I DON’T KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME
Josh: WHY ARE YOU CRYING IT’S A NICE POEM ABOUT A BAT
Me: I DON’T KNOOOOOOOW
Me: *continues crying and reading*
Josh: well i don’t know what this means for our day but i do also like bats
I hope you have a great weekend.
More soon,
Leila
I need this one too. Fantastic.
I've been in a poetry group for a couple of years now with Actual Children's Poets, and it still strikes me how poetry catches us so off-guard sometimes that the only response is tears. What is it about the in-the-moment innocence and purity of these little bat lives? Who knows. But I very much love it too, and am scouring Abe Books for a couple of copies, hopefully so the Bookniece can have her own.
I am SO amused that I read the beginning of the poem at the top of the blog post aloud to Tech Boy before I saw that you read it to Josh. It just wants to be shared.