Prelutsky - Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry

I ve been writing poetry for children for more than forty years and have had a wonderful time doing it. Over all those years Ive learned quite a few things about writing poetry. Nobody ever told me about them, and I had to teach them to myself. Its also possible that Ive invented some of them. I wish that I had known some of these techniques earlier. It would have made writing my poems a lot easier.

Ive talked to thousands and thousands of kids about writing poetry, and many of them have asked me questions about it. The most asked question has been Where do you get your ideas? Ive explained that I get ideas by keeping my eyes and ears open and by paying attention to whats going on around me. Ive also explained that everyone gets ideasthe trick is to know what to do with them.

One of most important things I do is to write down my ideas immediately in my notebook or at least on a scrap of paper. Otherwise, Im certain to forget those ideas, and so therell be poems that never happen. I talk about writing down your ideas and carrying a notebook several times in this book.

I use many techniques for writing poems and thought that it would be helpful to share the creative process with you. Thats what this book is all about. Dont ask me about dactyls, quatrains, or iambic pentameter. There are many fine books that describe poetic forms, meters, and structures. In this book Im letting you peek into my mind and see how I use my imagination to turn ideas into poems.

I hope that you enjoy reading Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry and that it inspires you to write your own poems.

Your friend,

Jack Prelutsky

I m going to admit something to you. When I was a little boy, a looooooong time ago, I was not the best-behaved little boy in the history of the United States of America. Its true! Every once in a whileactually pretty oftenokay, every day, I did something that made my father mad at me.

My father was a wonderful man, but he was only human and did have his limits, so he got mad at me, and Im sure I deserved it. When my father got mad at me, he did not run around and jump up and down and get all bent out of shape and yell and scream and cry and tear out his hair (he couldnt do that anyhow, because he was bald) and get hysterical and throw a tantrum. Nothat was my mothers job.

My father was just the opposite. He suddenly got very quiet. His eyes narrowed, and his face grew serious, with the Western gunfighter look that says, You got till sundown to ride on out of town or Im a-comin for you. His voice got very soft and very deep, and he simply gestured to me with his index finger and said, Come here, son. Uh-oh! I knew that when my father said Come here, son in that certain special way, I was in big trouble.

You may wonder what I did in that situation. I did exactly the same thing that most of you would do. I denied everything. No, no, Daddy! I said. I didnt do it. Im innocent. Ive been behaving. Ive been a good boybut I know who did it. My brother. Hes right over there. Get him! Amazingly, sometimes that worked. Sometimes it was even true. But of course my brother did the same thing to me, so it kind of evened out. Sometimes I got punished for things he did, sometimes he got punished for things I did, sometimes we both got punished even though we didnt do anything, and sometimes we didnt get punished at all when we deserved it. It all evened out.

One of the things that I did to make my father so mad at me was to pin his underwear up on the wall. Before I did that, though, I decorated it. You see, my father wore really boring white underwear, and I wanted to make it pretty, so I painted it with finger paint. Then I pinned it to the wall. My father didnt like that at all.

Once I put a bug in his coffee cup, and another time I put breadcrumbs in his bed. I did lots of other stuff too. I made a list of all the things like that I could remember, then picked some of them to put in a poem called I Wonder Why Dad Is So Thoroughly Mad.