1989: JOYFUL NOISE: POEMS FOR TWO VOICES by Paul Fleischman with illustrations by Eric Beddows
Sap's rising/Ground's warming
One of the absolute coolest music groups I've ever seen perform is the percussion ensemble of Alma College in Michigan. Look at them being cool:
As you can see, they take up the entire stage with all of their instruments - bass drums, steel drums, multiple marimbas and mallet percussion, there's a piano in there and a full drum kit as well. There are a lot of musicians to coordinate across the full width of the stage, and you can see that they're very disciplined while they play, all bobbing and swaying in perfect unison to the beat that's in their head, a beat that happens to be at exactly the same tempo across all of these musicians who aren't looking at each other and honestly can't see everyone else in their group around all of their big bulky percussion equipment.
The only way that they could have gotten to that level of discipline, of course, is rehearsing incessantly, of setting up a tent and camping within each piece of music for hours, for days, with their fellow percussionists, of all living in that piece of music together, sharing it out loud with them over and over until they're all humming it in their sleep.
Watching them perform, I couldn't help but wonder if they "got" the idea of playing music, or even the idea of what music was in general, better than I did.
About a year and a half ago, a young woman named Amanda Gorman read a poem that she had written for Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. She got a lot of buzz and media attention and eventually a children’s book deal and a guest spot on Sesame Street for doing this, and that’s probably because she was young - twenty-two years old at the time - and her poem was engaging, and she delivered her poem very passionately, and she delivered it shortly after a national tragedy at the Capitol, and having a young black woman speak at a presidential inauguration is unfortunately a pretty novel idea, and the poem referenced the musical Hamilton, which you’re allowed to like if you’re still in your early twenties, I suppose.
As it turned out, absolutely everybody had to have a take on this poem and this poet in January 2021. As The Guardian wrote, she was an inspiration to us all. As Michelle Obama wrote, she was #blackgirlmagic. As Ebony wrote, she had masterful delivery and was kind of like Maya Angelou. As The Boston Globe wrote, she was kind of like Maya Angelou and also kind of like Langston Hughes. Or, as The Spectator wrote, Amanda Gorman was cool but her actual poem was terrible. Or, as The New Crtierion wrote, the poem was very bad and hacky and Amanda Gorman sucked. Or, as CNN wrote, the jewelry Gorman wore at the inauguration was even more important than the poem. Or, as publishers believed, Gorman's poem needed to be translated into other languages and shared worldwide, or, as other publishers believed, white translators shouldn't be allowed to work on the poem. Or, as the right-wing site Catholic News Agency wrote, Amanda Gorman was a bad person because she wasn't an anti-abortion psychopath (not every take, I would say, necessarily needed to be written).
I think part of the reason Gorman and her piece got so much attention is that she delivered a poem, and I’m pretty sure the large majority of Americans don’t ever read or hear poems at all, so whenever a poem ends up in the national spotlight, it’s a pretty big deal and everyone has to try and figure it out like it’s some kind of brainteaser. I consider myself a very voracious reader, but 0% of what I read is poetry. I don’t know what a good poem is supposed to look or sound like. I know that most of Emily Dickinson’s poems have the same meter (i HEARD a FLY buzz WHEN i DIED, daDUH daDUH daDUH), but that’s about it. The only book of poems I can name is the fictional one Will Ferrell's character wrote in the movie Blades of Glory:
Inauguration Day, as it turns out, is the only time most of us hear a poem, ever. Maya Angelou read one at Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993, which started the regular tradition of inaugural poems, and that poem was also seen as very novel and unusual, it also got a ton of attention and criticism and thinkpieces at the time, it’s probably the Angelou work that has reached the largest number of people, and it even has its own Wikipedia page. 2013 was the first presidential inauguration after journalists had started regularly using Twitter, and all of them had opinions on the inaugural poem then, too, mostly confusion that the poem didn’t rhyme, and, in the case of Chris Cilizza (who at the time worked for the Washington Post), the blanket pronouncement that “Poetry: I don’t get it. Never have.” Cilizza is a very stupid man, but his view on poetry is probably representative of most American adults, and unfortunately, representative of mine.
So how am I supposed to learn what poetry is and how it works and how to appreciate it, as an adult? Am I supposed to go to a poetry reading? Do people even do that anymore? It’s too late for me to go back to school and take a class on this. I’ve tried reading poetry collections to sample the “best of” various periods, but I also seem to vaguely recall learning in high school that poems are really meant to be read out loud, meant to be shared, and I don’t know how to turn something I read into an experience like that, in order to properly encounter capital-P Poetry the way I am supposed to encounter it.
1989 medalist Joyful Noise has a pretty neat idea about how to tackle this problem.
Paul Fleischman’s Joyful Noise: Poems For Two Voices, one of very few not-prose medalists in the Newbery's history, is a collection of fourteen poems about insects, and as the subtitle suggests, it opens with this note:
NOTE: The following poems were written to be read aloud by two readers at once, one taking the left-hand part, one taking the right-hand part. The poems should be read from top to bottom, the two parts meshing as in a musical duet. When both readers have lines at the same horizontal level, those lines are to be spoken simultaneously.
Each page of Joyful Noise is split into two columns. The only way to properly read this book as the author intended is to find another person, have them sit next to you, and read the same page with you, out loud. You have to decide, before you start reading, who is responsible for which side of the page. You have to decide together when to start ("aaaand…now") and how quickly to read. You will probably mess up and giggle and have to start over at some point. Here are Fleischman and his wife reading "The Moth's Serenade" together:
As you can see, these poems are very short and wouldn't exactly require extensive rehearsal, you wouldn't have to bob your bodies in unison to get these things off of the ground. But they're still things you have to share with another person, to live in with another person, however briefly, out loud, and you do need to focus while you're doing it. And the act of reading these poems, or watching some other pair of people do it, is the closest I've gotten to "getting" what poetry, an art form meant to be shared, an art form meant to be read aloud, an art form meant to connect people, can do.
While the conceit of Joyful Noise is brilliant, the reality is that there are only like four things you can do with this format, and Fleischman does all of them and then quickly ends the book before page 50. “Grasshoppers”, the first poem, alternates quickly between unison and solo lines, sending the sound leaping back and forth between the two readers. The rapid-fire nature of the poem, which is only 29 lines long, would likely require multiple fits and starts to master, especially for young readers. You have to sent up a tent and camp out in here for a minute before you really “get” it. “Water Boatmen” and “House Crickets” also alternate rapidly between unison and solo lines, but the unison lines are the same every time - either “stroke!” or “crick-et” - giving these poems a more manageable chant-like rhythm.
“Whirligig Beetles” shows off one of Fleischman’s favorite techniques, one that he throws into most of the Joyful Noise poems but makes the focus here. The lines in “Whirligig Beetles” are identical, but staggered: one reader starts reading through a passage and the other reader follows one line behind him, like a spoken-word “Row Row Row Your Boat”, and then the positions switch for the next passage as the two readers spin back the other way.
As you can probably tell from these descriptions, these poems are mainly lighthearted, fun explorations of what these insects must be thinking as they act out their insect quirks. “Honeybees” is the most directly comedic poem, with one reader playing the role of a queen bee who gets pampered all day, and the other a disgruntled drone fed up with his job repairing the hive and caring for the grubs. Both readers start in unison “Being a bee” and then immediately break into “is a joy” followed by “is a pain”, “I’m a queen”, “I’m a worker”, and then back in unison for “I’ll gladly explain”. The worker bee also gets the best passage in the book with:
“Then I build some new cells,
slaving away at
enlarging this Hell,
dreading the sight
of another sunrise,
wondering why we don’t
all unionize.”
One of the more somber poems, “Requiem”, briefly mourns the insects lost in the years first frost, with the unison lines dedicated to repeating "rest eternal" or "light undying". The title and structure of the poem deliberately recalls a religious ritual, which, of course, is one of the first ways that many of us learn to speak and act in unison with others.
The final poem, "Chrysalis Diary", is barely for two voices at all, as if Fleischman wrote it while concluding that it was about time to wrap up the book. He's done about everything you can do with "poems for two voices". But if you're going to write a book of poems about insects, you have to end it with a poem about a butterfly entering the world for the first time. And for forty-some pages, you can cocoon yourself and another person inside an art form that we barely understand, live there for a minute, and hopefully emerge different.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1997 medalist, The View From Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg.