[Katy Evans-Bush]

Maybe no one has had the effect on modern literacy that Dr Seuss has. His rhythms and rhymes are - as Alicia intimates on the adjacent Villon thread (sorry to bring the tone down!) ingrained in many of our heads. As it were. Is he a subtle influence, at some level, like the nursery rhymes, or is he simply someone we admire?

(And while we're reading him to the kids we could all even learn from his example of thrillingly suggestive brevity.)

I know he was not strictly a POET, as such, but then neither were the people who made up the nursery rhymes.

My actual favourite Seuss book is Ten Apples Up on Top, whose rhymes I found insanely evocative as a child, but who doesn't know the words to Green Eggs and Ham? I do not like them, Sam I am!

(Alas, in the quote department I'm a bit limited as weirdly I don't seem to have in the house, but isn't he almost reminiscent of Frank O'Hara, for example? (Don't get me wrong - I'm fond of Frank! A contemporary of Suess in his influential period.)

KEB



[This message has been edited by Katy Evans-Bush (edited April 05, 2005).]

[J.A. Crider]

Katy,

Marvelous idea. Not only rhythms and rhymes, but imagery and metaphor too. I heard the Grinch song on the radio this Christmas for the first time in 20 years, and I couldn't believe the invention and freshness of some of the figurative imagery. "Your smile is full of termites"; "You've got garlic in your soul"; "a bad banana with a greasy black peel!"; "arsenic sauce." Indeed.

"You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch"


You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch,
You really are a heel,
You're as cuddly as a cactus,
You're as charming as an eel, Mr. Grinch.
You're a bad banana with a greasy black peel!

You're a monster, Mr. Grinch,
Your heart's an empty hole,
Your brain is full of spiders,
You've got garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch.
I wouldn't touch you with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole!

You're a foul one, Mr. Grinch,
You have termites in your smile.
You have all the tender sweetness
Of a seasick crocodile, Mr. Grinch.
Given the choice between the two of you I'd take the
seasick crocodile!

You're a rotter, Mr. Grinch,
You're the king of sinful sots,
Your heart's a dead tomato splotched
With moldy purple spots, Mr. Grinch.
You're a three decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich
with arsenic sauce!

You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch,
With a nauseous super "naus",
You're a crooked dirty jockey
And you drive a crooked hoss, Mr. Grinch.
Your soul is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the
most disgraceful assortment of rubbish imaginable
mangled up in tangled up knots!

You're a foul one, Mr. Grinch,
You're a nasty wasty skunk,
Your heart is full of unwashed socks,
Your soul is full of gunk, Mr. Grinch.
The three words that best describe you are as follows, and
I quote, "Stink, stank, stunk!"




[This message has been edited by J.A. Crider (edited April 02, 2005).]

[A. E. Stallings]

I love Dr. Seuss and certainly consider him a poet. And an infuence--am sure the early exposure taught me a lot at some subconscious level about meter and rhyme.

I have even thought of doing an essay on him someday--am particularly interested in how he plays with grammar. He does really interesting things even with the simplest books. Just take the title, and opening, of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. Why is it so memorable? One Apple, Two Apples wouldn't do at all. What's interesting is he picks a noun that is the same in the singular and the plural and subverts expectations within the first four words. (In the How the Grinch Stole Christmas, he also rimes "houses" with "mouses.")

The songs of the animated tv shows are quite brilliant, and he wrote them specifically for the occasion and was very hands-on. My favorite--besides Mr. Grinch, or course--is the Wickersham Brothers from Horton Hears a Who.

But I refuse to see the Hollywood flicks!

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Ah, Horton Hears a Who... I just moved out of my place for the last 7 years, which was in Horton Road - I loved that. Horton Hears a Who really freaked me out as a kid, the fact that the whole universe might BE in a grain of sand! Certainb phrases stick out like "The Whos down in Whoville" - the sounds are great.

I should get some, it's still good; I gave three books to a friend;s boy recently. Hop on Pop, how cool is that?

Alicia, an essay would be really interesting. People talk about his work as an educator, and certainly he changed the way we think about learning to read, but his plasticity of language is another thing altogether. And not to be written off (as I'm sure it is) as "children love nonsense." My real lifelong hero, not unrelatedly, is the great Sendak, who believes in the dignity of childhood and the need for playfulness in adulthood.


KEB

[Terese Coe]

Of course Dr. Seuss is a poet! If not he, then who?

(Hmm. I am about to start a poem with that line. Right after this note.)

Indeed an essay is called for, Alicia!

Our own fave here (when my son was young especially) was "And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street," which I always read aloud as our street name (fortuitously another 3-syllable word beginning with "M"). That made it great fun, especially when adding some of the sights available hereabouts, like police horses looking for a nibble. I had a verse about feeding the horses apples; how they would look for us to come down the block with a snack and so on. Of course one had to become progressively more outre with the facts...not to mention rhymes.

To teach your child to love reading, personalize the story/poem. An old trick, of course, and surely known to most.

[Gregory Dowling]

I've always greatly enjoyed Seuss's verse, as have my children, and so was a little dismayed when I came across the rather less sympathetic portrait of him in Anthony Hecht's autobiographical interview with Phil Hoy:

“I ... naively announced to my parents that I planned to become a poet. This was greeted with uncharacteristic silence, which should have warned me. I expected at least some token resistance. It turned out that my parents were far more alarmed than I could have guessed, and decided to call in outside help. Among their friends at this period was the later much-celebrated Dr. Seuss, the cartoonist, whose name was Ted Geisel. Ted and his wife were guests at dinner the next time I came home. Initially I suspected nothing, but after dinner Ted put his hand on my shoulder in an avuncular way that made me cautious, and asked, 'Well, Tony, what do you want to do when you grow up?' ... I said I hoped to become a poet. Ted said, 'That's a fine ambition. And let me tell you what I think you should do first of all. I think you should read the life of Joseph Pulitzer.' I knew nothing about Pulitzer at that age, except that he was a newspaper man. What that had to do with poetry I couldn't guess, but I shrewdly suspected that something in that biography would be highly discouraging, so I instantly resolved never to read it, and never have.”

Interesting to note that Hecht calls him "the cartoonist".

Still, I would really like to see an essay by Alicia on him.

[A. E. Stallings]

Originally posted by Gregory Dowling:
Interesting to note that Hecht calls him "the cartoonist".

I am reminded of the fact that although T.S. Eliot and A.E. Housman were aware of one another, in their writings they were each careful only refer to the other as "Mr. _______, the Critic."

[Terese Coe]

LOLOL! Oh, thank you so much for that, Alicia. Perfection.

[Julie Steiner]

When I worked in Geisel Library on the UC San Diego campus, we had an exhibit of Ted Geisel's political cartoons from World War II. You should see his Hitlers. He also illustrated pamphlets to tell American soldiers how to avoid VD.

Julie Stoner

[A. E. Stallings]

See here:

Political Cartoons of Dr. Seuss