I wasn't expecting this to turn into a controversy, frankly. I'm not sure people are understanding the very limited measure I was suggesting. I do not intend to post a call for submissions on Facebook, nor am I opening our borders to waves of downtrodden immigrants who will usurp our limited bakeoff resources. I only contemplated inviting at most a handful of people to submit poems that may or may not make it past my screening and end up in the hands of our Distinguished Guest. My purpose was to ensure a lively event with lots and lots of poems for us all to sink our teeth into, not to edge out members who participate.
Frankly, if it were up to me, I might very well wish to post an open invitation on Facebook and otherwise reach out to as wide a swath of children's writers as possible. I have enough confidence in our members to think that Sphericals would still dominate, but I see no reason to let matters of birthright or citizenship interfere with matters of poetry. But that is not how it's going to be. There will still be at least the usual 10-12 poems from members, unless I don't receive that many submissions, and so, if I add two or three poems by non-members, it will not be at the expense of members. Since there isn't a fixed number of slots to fill, it's not a zero-sum game.
John, I'd say that twelve is probably a good age to think of as a cut-off. Defining what a children's poem is seems to be one of those "I know it when I see it" judgments. It's not enough that a given child can enjoy it and understand it. I suspect that some of our members here were reading Swinburne when they were nine years old, but that doesn't mean Swinburne was a children's poet. There's a difference between an adult poem children can enjoy and a children's poem adults can enjoy, and it's the latter than we're going for here (while paradoxically disapproving of the very idea that there's such a thing as a "children's poem" or an "adult poem").
I completely agree with what you said that many of our members may have poems that they do not think of as children's poems, but which are in fact children's poems. I suspect this is particularly true for our members who have written light verse. A lot of what you find in Light Quarterly would be perfectly suitable for children. Back to the Auden quote. The main defining quality of children's verse is that it ought not to presuppose adult experience in its readers. It's sort of like cooking for children. Just cook for adults, but leave out the wine and the cayenne pepper.
|