Listening to Tchaikovsky…

Theodor Seuss Geisel was born 106 years ago today in Springfield, Mass.

In 1963, at a small ivy-covered three-storied brick building in upstate New York, I learned to read. As a first grader, we had Dick and Jane books. Forty-five years later, I remember turning the pages and thinking that this was pure twaddle. I was 6 and knew twaddle when I saw it. The pictures were simplistic, unsophisticated, and unengaging; there was no character development, no plot, and no conflict. They were stagnant and boring. There was no action: oh, yes, “See Spot run, run Spot run.” But that one verb (and not an adjective in sight) addressed the whole page or even the two page spread.

I did learn to read using the “look – say” method with a healthy dose of phonics.

But at home, I learned to love to read. I had books about Bartholomew Cubbins and Thidwick, the big hearted moose. These stories had danger and risk. King Derwin wanted Bartholomew to remove his hat but he couldn’t. [You’ll have to read the book.] And Thidwick’s antlers were increasingly over populated.

I loved Dr. Seuss – the drawings were wonderful: colorful, bold, and complex. You looked and looked and saw more and more: 500 hats, green eggs, and teetering fish bowls. I haven’t looked at a Dr. Seuss book in 45 years but I remember those outlandish characters.

And now I can appreciate what he accomplished.

In May 1954, Life magazine published a report on illiteracy among school children, which concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. Accordingly, William Ellsworth Spaulding, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, compiled a list of 348 words he felt were important for first-graders to recognize and asked Geisel to cut the list to 250 words and write a book using only those words. Spaulding challenged Geisel to “bring back a book children can’t put down.” Nine months later, Geisel, using 236 of the words given to him, completed The Cat in the Hat. ~ Wikipedia

Nine Months!

These are the books I remember:

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street   1937

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins  1938

Horton Hatches the Egg  1940

Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose  1948

If I Ran the Zoo  1950

Horton Hears a Who!  1954

How the Grinch Stole Christmas!  1957

The Cat in the Hat  1957

The Cat in the Hat Comes Back  1958

Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories  1958

One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish  1960

Green Eggs and Ham  1960

The Sneetches and Other Stories  1961

Hop on Pop  1963

Also the stories weren’t poetry until the aforementioned The Cat in the Hat. He started using a verse form called anapaest.

An anapaest is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. In classical quantitative meters it consists of two short syllables followed by a long one (as in a-na-paest); in accentual stress meters it consists of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. ~Wikipedia

For example:

 Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house

Byron, TS Elliot and Yeats also wrote poetry using this form. I’m working on my poetry vocabulary and Theodor Geisel is a part of it.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” ~Dr. Seuss