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Tell it slant: Talking with Jane Yolen about poetry
- Source: Book 2.0, Volume 13, Issue 2, Dec 2023, p. 209 - 226
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- 03 Aug 2023
- 17 Sep 2023
- 23 Feb 2024
Abstract
Among her more than 400 books, Jane Yolen (b. 1939) has written or edited around 50 collections of poetry. In this new interview, Yolen discusses how her poetry developed throughout her writing life. We talk about her early desire in childhood to write poetry and about poets whose work she has admired. Yolen talks about her process in writing works such as the verse novel Finding Baba Yaga (2018) or the agonizing Radiation Sonnets (2003) and explains the difference between writing poetry for children and grown-ups, using her How Do Dinosaurs…? (2000–ongoing) series and Yuck, You Suck! Poems about Animals that Sip, Slurp, Suck (2022) as examples. She gives advice to teachers and suggestions to the poetically perplexed, as well as telling stories about encountering W. B. Yeats and reciting poetry to a wombat. Yolen’s poetic oeuvre is by turns whimsical and heart-wrenching, lyrical and conversational. She writes with a demotic lyricism that balances the formal requirements of prosody against the musicality of everyday speech. Her poetry begins from keen observation of everyday life and translates it into the mythic and the elemental, her words creating images that haunt the readers’ imaginations. What emerges is a glimpse of poetic truth—or, perhaps, the glimpse of the way to catch a glimpse.