National Poetry Month: Guest Post from Lorna Crozier: Coming Around to Rhyme

I’ve been publishing poetry books for over forty years, but LOTS OF KISSES is my first book for kids. I’d never thought of writing one, and I wouldn’t have attempted to do so if Andrew, the publisher of Orca Books, hadn’t approached me after one of my readings and suggested that I’d be good at it. My usual response to a new challenge is to feel inadequate. I told him, “No, I don’t think so,” then went home and a few days later couldn’t get rid of the rhymes that started to roll off my tongue.

Orca Books.

Like most contemporary poets, I’ve avoided rhymes at the end of lines all of my writing life. I value music in poems more anything else, but I’ve worked hard to thread through the sound repetitions in more subtle ways. After Andrew’s prompt, when I allowed myself to roll around in words like nose and toes and elbows, I felt as if I were breaking some kind of taboo. Yet I haven’t had so much fun since my days as a high school cheerleader (yes, I admit it) when I lay awake in bed composing yells for the squad and couldn’t wait to get to practice to show my friends.

All that grade-ten fall, I was cruising along, happy with my new creative role until one evening during half-time at a basketball game. The captain, whom we all had a crush on, walked across they gym floor and said he’d kill us if we did that cheer again. He and the team wanted the old traditional yells; the novelty of the new ones—my rhyme-rich creations set to contemporary music like the Beatles’—embarrassed them. Maybe that response is what dampened my enthusiasm for the mouth-watering, childlike pleasure of searching for word twins that are frisky and lighthearted and full of beans.

Now I’m thrilled to be rhyming again. Whenever I feel hesitant, I think of my grandchildren and their delight in waiting for what will follow and match a word like cat in one of the many page-worn books that are part of their library. For them and for me, the vowels that snap together like magnets are a form of delicious play. In LOTS OF KISSES, my first board book, I hope kids will feel each rhyming pair as a big smack on the cheek that makes them feel loved by words and that makes them eager to come back for more.

Lorna Crozier. (Photo by Photographic Services, University of Victoria.)

Lorna Crozier has authored fifteen books of poetry and received many awards and nominations, including a 1992 Governor General’s Award, the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award, the National Magazine Award (Gold Medal) and first prize in the National CBC Literary Competition. She has read her poetry on every continent except Antarctica, and in 2005 Crozier recited a poem for Queen Elizabeth II as part of Saskatchewan’s centennial celebration. For more information, visit www.lornacrozier.ca.