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Writing Poetry about Children Is Not Overly Sentimental

I write many poems, some about children.  Important writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane Yolen have published excellent books of poetry for young people.  However, I find that poems about kids are now very hard to publish.  Why is this so difficult?

My theory is that many editors, especially men, believe that poems about children are overly sentimental and thus unworthy of publication. But we can easily refute this prejudice. Children are an important part of human society. They amuse us, they frustrate us, they comfort us, they exhaust us, they teach us, they love us, and they often inspire us to write.  Children are our future.

When they leave home, even people who do not have a child of their own interact with kids.  In the United States, we spend a lot of time discussing how to educate children and keep them healthy.

So why is it frivolous to write poetry about children?

 

Originally posted on June 13, 2010

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Janet Ruth Heller

I am the past president of the Michigan College English Association. I have a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. I have published four poetry books: Nature's Olympics (Wipf and Stock, 2021), Exodus (WordTech Communications, 2014), Folk Concert: Changing Times (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012) and Traffic Stop (Finishing Line Press, 2011). My scholarly book, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama, was published in 1990 by the University of Missouri Press. My fiction picture book about bullying for children, How the Moon Regained Her Shape (Arbordale, 2006; 7th edn. 2022), has won four national awards. My play The Cell Phone won fourth place in a national contest and was performed twice at the Fenton Village Players One-Act Play Festival on June 24-25, 2011 in Fenton, Michigan. Triton College produced another play, Pledging, as part of its Tritonysia Play Festival in May 2017. Choeofpleirn Press published Pledging in Rushing Through the Dark (2022).