Cleary, Brian
Brian Cleary’s Verbalicious Nuggets
It’s been said that the perfect second grade boy is a second grade girl. Brian Cleary was “surrounded by patient and nurturing teachers his whole life.” Yet, the fact that he didn’t love school had nothing to do with school but everything to do with liking to stand up, pace back and forth, and not having to sit down, be quiet, and stay indoors. “Most of the time, I felt as though the class must have gathered in my absence –maybe the night before while I was watching TV with my parents, because all of the lessons seemed like review for the other students, I could see their heads nodding in agreement, and it all seemed brand new to me. I was not a quick study.”
And then poetry came along. The future author was eight years old when his class read a poem by Ogden Nash. He recalls one Ogden Nash verse with special fondness and you should definitely read “The Panther” for yourself. The moment that mesmerized the young Cleary was when Nash rhymed “panther” with a made-up word as in “if called by a panther/don’t anther.”
“I discovered that our language doesn’t come to us completely whole like some fine crystal vase that is handed to me and all I can do is break it,” he remembers. Brian learned that “Our language is a lot more like clay or silly putty or bubblegum, something that can be stretched, or manipulated, or somehow changed.” He likens wordplay to sports: “Just as a kid going to a basketball game is more likely to want to play it, I learned that language is not a spectator sport–that I could participate in language.”
“There are only 26 letters,” he points out. The difference between Billy Joel and Shakespeare is how you arrange those 26 letters.” And Ogden Nash could change the spelling of a word to make a point.
Would teachers today bring Ogden Nash and e.e. cummings into a fourth grade classroom? “We didn’t have standardized tests back then,” notes Brian. “As a result, teachers could open up their treasure chests full of verbalicious nuggets.” Add to this freedom in the classroom, that the music that was playing on the hifi was the Beach Boys and the Beatles, and the most famous athlete of the day was a master at creating couplets (“I learned about similes and metaphors from Muhammad Ali”), the young Brian Cleary was surrounded by meter and rhyme and never had a sense that poetry wasn’t for boys.
“Poetry forces you to build empathy,” explains Brian, “even if you don’t know it at the time.” “I got the confidence to understand that just as there were people sitting around me struggling with how many beats per line there should be and why their meter was way off, that’s how I felt about science and math.”
Brian first came to publishing as the author of a series of rhyming, pun-filled books about classical music, food, geography, and the like. Sales were modest and lead times were very long and “I started to think more about children’s books. As an older brother, he had a second exposure to children’s books when his youngest siblings were into Shel Silverstein and he got a third exposure when his own children were young. That’s when he started looking into doing something curriculum-based that would speak to not only people who wanted to splash around in a verbal pond but also those who don’t love school or learning or language. “So that’s when I came up with the idea of A Mink, A Fink, A Skating Rink: What is a Noun,” recalls the author. That “What Is a . . . ” formula worked for him and while he knew you can’t really judge a book by its cover, you certainly can tell what a book is about when you give it the right title.
The Words are CATegorical books have now branched into other things and Brian recently launched the Poetry Adventure Series with If it Rains Pancakes and Ode to a Commode. Each book in the series focuses on a particular kind of poetry. Pancakes covers haiku and lantern poems while Ode speaks to concrete poems.
“I wanted to show examples of how poetry is done but I also wanted kids to use them as a template for their own creations,” explains the veteran of more than 500 school visits. “Writing and poetry and life are not spectator sports, and you are not competing with the kid next to you,” he tells his young listeners. “You need to make your own truth and your own story.” And make it verbalicious in your own way.
Interviewed by Ellen Myrick, December 2014
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