"Je Me Vois Poète:"Children's Poetry in Contemporary Canada Dr. William Blackburn Choosing poetry for children is an invidious task at the best of times. Even if we don't personally encounter that ubiquitous child with the gumption to ask "WHY should I read this?", even if we manage to forget that the child of four is as different from the 'child' of eighteen as Los Angeles is from Atlantis, our choice still requires us to decide why poetry is important at all. Most of us would agree, I think—at least in theory—that we value poetry because it broadens our horizons, because it declares certain of our values, because it gives us pleasure and also because it raises wholesome doubts about our notions of who and what we are, because it is that rarest of modern commodities, a source of fruitful disturbance. But many people feel uneasy about "poems for children" which attempt to do these things, in the well-meaning but misguided belief that children ought to be protected from at least some of the anxieties of modern life. They cannot be so protected, of course—it's their world too—and they resent being lied or condescended to. If we attempt to raise them on a diet of "nice" poems, or on poems which reflect our notion of what children ought to be, all we can expect is that they won't develop a taste for poetry, and that we will have robbed them of a life-long source of solace, self-awareness, and community. If we expose them to poems we like, and to poems which speak honestly to us as adults, we are at least being straight with them. And we can hope they'll discover that poetry is for everyone, not merely for some bizarre academic sub-species of homo sapiens, and that poetry is ultimately valuable because it speaks for all of us, because, in the words of twelve-year-old Serge Guindon, "Je me vois poète." Canadians are particularly fortunate in that there are some good books of Canadian poetry for children now available. One I especially like is The Wind Has Wings: Poems from Canada, ed. Mary A. Downit and Barbara Robertson, with illustrations by Elizabeth Cleaver (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968). The table of contents suggests that dreariest of academic virtues—representativeness—but this is really a nice anthology, even thoug the index reads like a Who's Who of Canadian [End Page 6] poets. The book contains seventy-two poems by over fifty poets, from hoary stalwarts like Bliss Carman, Robert Service, and Archibald Lampman, to prominent moderns like A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Earle Birney. Its variety is not merely chronological, however; there are some translations from French, Yiddish and Eskimo, as well as a couple of folk songs. The book is recommended by the publishers for grades four to seven, and contains the usual animal poems, descriptive pieces, and fantasy—most of them of unusual quality. There are clever and funny word games like George Lanigan's "Threnody" on the death of the Ahkond of Swat, and James Mille's "Sweet Maiden of Passamaquoddy" (what would you rhyme with Skodawabskook?), as well as more substantial offerings for older children. Cleaver's bold, bright colour illustrations further enhance an intelligent and sensitive collection. One poet not represented in this anthology who has recently come to prominence in the field is Toronto's Dennis Lee, author of Alligator Pie (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975). Lee states that he "developed a twitch" when he started reading nursery rhymes to his children, because "the details of Mother Goose . . . had becomes exotic." Part of his motive in writing these poems was "not abolishing Mother Goose, but letting her take up residence among hockey sticks and high-rise too." Despite this dubious motive, Lee has produced some good things in these books. Some of these poems are embarrassingly derivative, poor mimicry of Belloc and Milne, Lear and Carroll ("If You Should Meet a Grundiboob"), but there is some delightful word=play which I'm told that children, innocent of our knowledge of sources and analogues, revel in. Certain of these...