A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms

Paul B. Janeczko

Candlewick Press, 2005 - Juvenile Nonfiction - 61 pages

Grade 3-9-Following on the heels of their delightful introduction to concrete poetry, A Poke in the I (Candlewick, 2001), Janeczko and Raschka now join forces to explore poetic forms. An introduction presents an easy-to-swallow rationale for the many rules to follow, likening the restrictions to those found in sports: in both cases, rules challenge the players to excel in spite of limits. The repertoire then unfolds to showcase 29 forms, one to two poems per spread, building from a couplet, tercet, and quatrain to the less familiar and more complex persona poem, ballad, and pantoum. The selections are accessible without being simplistic; they span an emotional range from the tongue-in-cheek humor of J. Patrick Lewis's "Epitaph for Pinocchio" to Rebecca Kai Dotlich's moving "Whispers to the [Vietnam] Wall." Each page is a tour de force of design, the pace and placement of art and text perfectly synchronized. Raschka's characters and abstractions emerge from torn layers of fuzzy rice paper, intricately patterned Japanese designs, and solids, decorated and defined by quirky ink-and-watercolor lines. The expansive white background provides continuity and contrast to the colorful parade. The name of each form resides in the upper corner of the page, accompanied by a wry visual. A definition (in an unobtrusive smaller font) borders the bottom; more detail on each form is provided in endnotes. Readers will have the good fortune to experience poetry as art, game, joke, list, song, story, statement, question, memory. A primer like no other.-Wendy Lukehart, Washington DC Public Library.

About the author

Paul Bryan Janeczko was born in Passaic, New Jersey on July 27, 1945. He received a bachelor's degree in English from St. Francis College in 1967 and a master's degree in English from John Carroll University in 1970. While teaching public high school, he created his own poetry anthology to use in his classes. He retired from teaching in 1990 after 22 years. He became a poet and anthologist best known for his poetry anthologies for children. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, he was the compiler for several anthologies including Pocket Poems: Selected for a Journey, I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You: A Book of Her Poems and His Poems Collected in Pairs, and A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms. He wrote several poetry collections including The Crystal Image, Requiem, Worlds Afire, and The Proper Way to Meet a Hedgehog and Other How-to Poems. His novel, Bridges to Cross, was published 1986. He died on February 19, 2019 at the age of 73. Chris Raschka was born in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania on March 6, 1959. He received a B.A. from St. Olaf College in 1981. Before becoming a full-time author, he was an art teacher in St. Croix, Virgin Islands and a freelance artist, cartoonist, and editorial illustrator. He is an author and illustrator of children's books including Yo! Yes?, Charlie Parker Played Be Bop, and Mysterious Thelonious. Hello, Goodbye Window won the Caldecott Medal in 2006 and A Ball for Daisy won the Caldecott Medal in 2012.

Bibliographic information

• Title: A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms
• Editor: Paul B. Janeczko
• Compiled by: Paul B. Janeczko
• Illustrated by: Christopher Raschka
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Candlewick Press, 2005
• ISBN: 0763606626, 9780763606626
• Length: 61 pages
• Subjects: Juvenile Nonfiction / Poetry / General