Joshua Seigal, Children's Poet and Performer getting the audience involved!

Once again we're delighted to guest a post for #ReadItMD13 Children's Poetry Week, this time by children's poet and performer Joshua Seigal. He's out and about this week visiting schools and the poem below was written for a year 2 class he'll be visiting. He's also just written a poem featured in one of our favourite magazines, Springboard Stories! Find out more about Joshua on his website.


Bradley by Joshua Seigal

In Year 2 we have a pet –

Bradley is his name.

Bradley is a stick insect

And Bradley has a game:

He often likes to leave his box

And crawl across the floor,

He’ll rest upon the windowsill

Or linger by the door.



He likes to lurk among the books

And wallow in the sink,

He sometimes nibbles at our lunch

And drinks our teacher’s drink!

He lolls across the radiator

Basking in the heat,

And when we’re sitting at our desks

He’ll flit across our feet.



In Year 2 we have a pet –

Bradley is his name.

Bradley is a stick insect

And Bradley has a game:

He hides in teacher’s handbag

And he gives her such a fright

That she leaps up high into the air

And screams with all her might!



She says that Bradley’s escapades

Are making her feel sick

So she went into the playground

And she came back with a stick.

She put the stick in Bradley’s box

And told him “This is Brian.

He is your new insect pal –

Now you play Sleeping Lions!”

(C) Joshua Seigal 2013 - Used with permission

Colin West, Author of "The Big Book of Nonsense (Vol 1-3)" with two awesome poetry books

We've giggled at his brilliant "Big Book of Nonsense" in its shiny new electronic form on iPad, and we've been entertained by his tweets. Ladies and gentlemen, for Children's Poetry Week we're very fortunate to have Colin West pop in to share with us a poetry-themed guest post. Over to you, Colin!

My Early Inspirations

Like most families in post war Britain, we didn't have many books in the house. Yet it hardly mattered to a boy fond of funny rhymes. I couldn't listen to the radio without hearing poetry in some form or other. Whether it was Lonnie Donegan enquiring about the properties of your chewing gum on the bedpost, or Alma Cogan speculating where the baby's dimple might be, novelty songs were everywhere.

Nor could I escape humorous rhymes at school. Playground chants educated me as to Popeye's toilet habits. Apparently he lived in a caravan and there was a hole in the middle where he did his piddle. And half past nine was the best time to hang your knickers on the line, I also learned.

In the classroom we were made to sing along to crackly broadcasts of folk songs twice weekly. Songs from all areas were covered, from Scotland to Somerset, Wales to the Wash, by way of Australia and the Deep South of America. Some were plaintively romantic, others plain nonsensical. One of my favourites bizarrely mixed "Rule Britannia" with a ditty about a mermaid at the bottom of the deep blue sea.

Meanwhile, TV was coming along apace. There was Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen. (Hardly high art, but the perfect theme for the programme's enthusiastic young audience.) Cy Grant sang topical calypsos almost nightly, Professor Stanley Unwin regularly popped up with his inspired gobbledygook and Spike Milligan read his silly verse on the Royal Variety Show.

Over on the newly formed commercial channel, advertising jingles rang in our ears: Murray mints, Murray mints, too good to hurry mints etc. In the streets, on the sides of Double Deckers, the slogan Drinkapintamilkaday shone out in multi-coloured lettering.

All this stuff was food for thought to a young boy acquiring an appetite for words.

As the 1960s dawned, a pre-Oliver Lionel Bart was writing witty words for the British rock'n'rollers. (Remember Tommy Steele's "Little White Bull"?) And even Frank Sinatra deigned to warble a daft ditty about some ant having trouble with a rubber tree plant.

Tom Lehrer - "Don't let the pigeon play the piano!"

Best rhyme ever!

When Rhyme is a Crime

"Shut that book! I’ve not got time

To read your bloody awful rhyme"


There are too many picture books written in rhyme. There, I’ve said it. A strange thing to say, you might think, coming from someone who writes almost exclusively in verse. But

that doesn’t mean that every book

that’s set in verse is worth a...second glance.
‘What?’ you might cry. ‘But, but, but…’ And you think of Dr Seuss, of Julia Donaldson – authors who have become famous for their rhyming styles. The problem is that for every Seuss or Donaldson there are several authors who can’t write in verse at all.

Partly this is down to metre. Lots of children’s books are, inexplicably, written in tetrameter (don’t worry, I had to Google that too), and

There is nothing that will bore me more

Than words all set in groups of four.

Fine for a while, and fine if done well, but so often done badly. And so the book simply plods. And plods. And plods. And…Sorry, nodded off there. Where was I? Plodding.

What a book needs isn’t rhyme, but rhythm. This can be done within a metre, or by varying a metre. Someone like Julia Donaldson is brilliant at it. ‘A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood. A fox saw the mouse and the mouse looked good’. Sheer genius. Julia Donaldson’s books work (on the whole) because of their bounce. The rhythm lifts them to a whole new level.

And then...

Lots of books go down the pan

Because they really really don’t scan

To be fair, some of the worst examples of this are those books produced in-house, often exploiting a particular character (think Thomas the Tank Engine or Angelina Ballerina). Editors, who are often rather wary of verse for all the reasons I am mentioning, know a cash cow when it’s mooing loudly in their faces. But some writers who really should know better manage to publish books that don’t scan properly. And the problem with bad scansion is that it’s difficult to read – a bit like going down a path and constantly having to stumble over stones.

The most important question for an author to ask is why a book should be written in rhyme. There is absolutely no point in writing in verse just for the sake of it. Yes, children love rhyme, and verse done well is sure to become a favourite. But bad rhyme is worse than no rhyme at all.

Of course that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be poetry in children’s books. But conflating ‘verse’ with ‘poetry’ is a huge mistake. Take a book like Helen Cooper’s ‘Pumpkin Soup’ (and if you don’t know it, go out and borrow or buy it now – even steal it if you have to – and devour it). Although it’s written in prose, it’s pure poetry: ‘Made by the duck who scoops up a pipkin of salt and tips in just enough’. And of course books in verse by the likes of Donaldson, Caryl Hart and Peter Bentley are, generally, brilliant.

But there really isn’t much that’s worse

Than a book written in crap verse

Someone please take note.

C from Edward Lear's "The Letters of the Alphabet" (1880)

This week we're diving headlong into a fairly tricky subject. Children's Poetry is often (quite wrongly) overlooked because parents often assume that just because a book rhymes, it's poetry.