June 29, 2012
Fairbanks, Alaska poet and teacher Nicole Stellon O’Donnell has written a charming blog entry for the Alaska author blog 49 Writers. The post is an analysis of the illustration on the title page of Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, which was published in 1968 for pre-schoolers. She writes:
I love the book because I don’t feel left out. Among the salesmen, street cleaners, electricians, laundresses, delivery boys, models, detectives, and watch repairmen, there is a poet. She’s there on the title page. In the attic of the creative. In the garret of course, the very highest part of the attic, above the violin player, the story writer, and the painter.
She’s staring out the leaded-glass window poetically, holding the quill to her fuzzy cat chin, thinking. That’s what poets do all day. They think. They think about images and sound and line breaks and form.
It’s a hard job.
You can buy the Scarry book from Gulliver’s Books in Fairbanks here; where you can also buy O’Donnell’s latest book, Steam Laundry, a novel-in-poems that NWBL featured here in May.
— posted by
Thom