Kids poet Prelutsky, author of ‘Scranimals,’ still humble despite success

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This article was published 31/12/2006 (7181 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND, Wash. (AP) – The birth of the bananaconda was an accident of insomnia, cable television and tropical produce.

“Books happen in odd ways,” said poet Jack Prelutsky, creator of the bananaconda, a constrictor with the skin of a fruit.

So it was one sleepless night several years ago that he descended the stairs in his home for a snack, a banana, and settled into an easy chair. He found a TV documentary on the giant snake from the Amazon, noticed the coincidence of syllables, and inspiration struck. His poem begins:

“Oh sleek bananaconda

You longest long long fellow,

How sinuous and sly you are,

How slippery, how yellow.”

Soon, he had invented “broccolions” and “potatoads,” and within weeks had written “Scranimals,” a compilation of logic-defying verse.

“He controls the language in such a brilliant way,” said Susan Hirschman, Prelutsky’s former longtime editor. “And he never repeats himself, he never takes the easy way out.”

Prelutsky was recently named the first-ever Children’s Poet Laureate by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation. It’s a title – complete with US$25,000 cash prize and an inscribed medallion – that he will hold for two years, a sort of blessed community service that compels him to give two major public readings and act as adviser, ambassador and pollinator of his art.

He’s done that unofficially for decades as the preferred poet of two generations of children. His more than 35 books, translated into several languages, have become mainstays of school libraries everywhere.

Prelutsky is lauded for many things, including his cleverly silly wordplay:

“It makes me sad when lettuce leaves,

I laugh when dinner rolls . . .”

Then there’s his surrealism:

“Imagine if your precious nose

were sandwiched in between your toes,

that clearly would not be a treat,

for you’d be forced to smell your feet . . .”

But ultimately, his poetry works because it is embraceable, because no matter how fun, how singable, it always empathizes.

Consider one of his most popular poems:

“Homework! Oh Homework!

I hate you! You stink!

I wish I could wash you

away in the sink,

if only a bomb

would explode you to bits.

Homework! Oh, Homework!

You’re giving me fits!”

Although his publisher had doubts, Prelutsky felt sure it would strike a universal chord among children. He was right.

Before he was the Poet Laureate, he likes to say, he was the “Poet Laminate.” So often, he found his poems laminated and hung on the walls of schools, where he has given countless readings, always studying his audience.

His books have sold more than a million copies (children’s poetry vastly outsells adult poetry), making him one of the bestselling living poets.

“In 99 per cent of my life, I’m the same as the next guy,” said Prelutsky, 66. What sets him apart, he said, is that “one little, bizarre part of my bean brain.”

It is a most curious one per cent that muses about little girls who eat car parts and imaginary creatures like the solitary spatuloon who resides in a blue lagoon and flips pancakes with its tail amid plaintive cries of “syrup!”

Given his audience, it surprises some that he has no children himself. He was 39 when he married, his wife 34. “I always thought I would have children,” he said. “One day it was just too late.”

Because he has never been a parent, perhaps Prelutsky never stopped being a kid. “I write what I would have liked to have heard when I was 10 years old.”

Monsters and dinosaurs were favourites of Prelutsky’s childhood. In his poetry, underwear, flatulence, boogers, the kid that gets picked on, can all be funny.

“He’s never winking at the parents over the heads of children,” Hirschman said.

Prelutsky was born in Brooklyn, lived first in a tenement supposedly owned by a gangster, and might have perished there had his uncle Charlie, a Borscht Belt comic who would become a big influence, not retrieved the baby Jack from a fire.

He grew up in the Bronx, the older of two boys in a poor, working-class family. His father hid their Buick from the welfare officer, lest they lose benefits.

On the strength of his talents as a singer, he was admitted to the High School of Music & Art. He began writing poetry in his mid-20s, but struggled. To make ends meet, he drove cabs, picked fruit, built loft beds, taught guitar and performed in coffee houses and clubs.

He was nearly a pauper about 40 years ago when he arrived in an editor’s office with 24 ink drawings he’d done of imaginary creatures. As an afterthought, he wrote poems to accompany them. The editor he showed them to was Hirschman.

She hated the drawings he spent six months on, but liked the poems that had taken him two hours to write. She took him out to lunch at a fancy midtown restaurant. He had to borrow a busboy’s jacket and tie.

It was quite a contrast for someone who’d just been given 48 hours to vacate his apartment.

That night, he wrote six more poems and then, lacking money for train or bus fare, walked them to Hirschman’s office. She agreed to take five.

“Can you pay me?” he asked.

She laughed. “It doesn’t really work that way.”

“Susan, you don’t understand. Your young poet is going to be on the street tomorrow if I don’t come up with some money.”

A rudimentary contract gave him an advance of $500. Within three days, he was flat broke again – but he had a career.

He always spent his advances quickly, giving much of it to friends who were worse off. So Hirschman insisted they open a joint chequing account and put him on an allowance, $130 a week. She also promised him lunch out every week if he gave her a poem.

“I thought of it as bullying, but I guess caring is a nicer word,” said Hirschman, who would remain his editor for the next 37 years until she retired.

The poet moved to Seattle in’76 and a few years later met the woman who would become his wife. The breakthrough of his career came in’84 with the publication of “New Kid on the Block,” which has now seen 50 printings.

Prelutsky demurs when talk turns to money, but it is clear his poetry has made him millions. Today, his advances are befitting of a bestselling author, and yet his attitude towards money seems no different from 40 years ago when he spent his small advances on friends. It seems as if, not having had much of it growing up, he never got too attached to it. Very little of his life today seems fancy, not his car (a Camry), nor his clothes.

He and Carolynn, his wife of 27 years, recently moved to a loft studio apartment near downtown Seattle, though he continues to do most of his work in a rented two-bedroom apartment above a detached garage on Bainbridge Island, a short ferry ride away.

As “tickled” as he is with the title of Children’s Poet Laureate, he says he carefully avoids attention, routinely turning down interviews.

Prelutsky’s humility is encouraged by reviews like one from his maternal grandmother: he was reading to her from one of his books when in the middle of a poem, she got up and went to the bathroom.

Puzzled and a little hurt, Prelutsky reminded her this was his book he was reading.

“For the kids it’s fine,” she said, “but I don’t care much for it.”