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    Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry: How to Write a Poem
    Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry: How to Write a Poem
    Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry: How to Write a Poem
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry: How to Write a Poem

    By Jack Prelutsky

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    About this ebook

    Have you ever tried to write a poem about a pizza? How about a pig? How about a pigeon, penguin, potato, Ping-Pong, parrot, puppy, pelican, porcupine, pie, pachyderm, or your parents?

    Jack Prelutsky has written more than one thousand poems about all of these things—and many others. In this book he gives you the inside scoop on writing poetry and shows you how you can turn your own experiences and stories about your family, your pets, and your friends into poems. He offers tips, advice, and secrets about writing and provides some fun exercises to help you get started (or unstuck). You'll also get a behind-the-scenes look at the ingredients of some of his most popular poems. If you are a poet, want to be a poet, or if you have to write a poem for homework and you just need some help, then this is the book for you!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061975257
    Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry: How to Write a Poem
    Author

    Jack Prelutsky

    Jack Prelutsky is the best-selling author of more than fifty books of poetry, including The New Kid on the Block, illustrated by James Stevenson, and Stardines Swim High Across the Sky, illustrated by Carin Berger. Jack Prelutsky lives in Washington State.

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    Reviews for Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry

    4/5

    23 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book is written for kids, but I really enjoyed it too. Jack Prelutsky shares funny stories from his own childhood, where he gets ideas for his poems, basics of rhyme and meter, and ties them all into poems he has written.. Great for kids who want to write poetry, and adults who are interested in writing for kids or who work with young people.
    • 4/5
      Noteable LA, Use this book as a guest teacher. Pair with other prelutsky books already in my library.
    • 4/5
      Superstar children's poet Jack Prelutsky gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of some of his favorite poems. He explains where his ideas come from and how he brainstorms and revises to create the humorous poems that have delighted thousands of kids over the years. Along with humorous stories about his boyhood and family, Prelutsky includes writing tips and poetry prompts to inspire young writers. This is Gail Carson Levine's Writing Magic meets Jon Scieszka's Knucklehead and highly recommended for young authors.

    Book preview

    Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry - Jack Prelutsky

    Hello!

    I’ve been writing poetry for children for more than forty years and have had a wonderful time doing it. Over all those years I’ve learned quite a few things about writing poetry. Nobody ever told me about them, and I had to teach them to myself. It’s also possible that I’ve 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.

    I’ve 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? I’ve explained that I get ideas by keeping my eyes and ears open and by paying attention to what’s going on around me. I’ve also explained that everyone gets ideas—the 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, I’m certain to forget those ideas, and so there’ll 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. That’s what this book is all about. Don’t ask me about dactyls, quatrains, or iambic pentameter. There are many fine books that describe poetic forms, meters, and structures. In this book I’m 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

    My Father’s Underwear

    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. It’s true! Every once in a while…actually pretty often…okay, 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 I’m 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 couldn’t do that anyhow, because he was bald) and get hysterical and throw a tantrum. No…that was my mother’s 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 I’m 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 didn’t do it. I’m innocent. I’ve been behaving. I’ve been a good boy…but I know who did it. My brother. He’s 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 didn’t do anything, and sometimes we didn’t 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 didn’t 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.

    I Wonder Why Dad Is So Thoroughly Mad

    I wonder why Dad is so thoroughly mad,

    I can’t understand it at all,

    unless it’s the bee still afloat in his tea,

    or his underwear, pinned to the wall.

    Perhaps it’s the dye on his favorite tie,

    or the mousetrap that snapped in his shoe,

    or the pipeful of gum that he found with his thumb,

    or the toilet, sealed tightly with glue.

    It can’t be the bread crumbled up in his bed,

    or the slugs someone left in the hall,

    I wonder why Dad is so thoroughly mad,

    I can’t understand it at all.

    WRITING TIP #1

    Unless you’re a perfect child, and I doubt that you are—for I’ve met tens of thousands of children, and I’ve never met a perfect child yet—I suspect that you misbehave from time to time. Perhaps you’re the way I was when I was a kid and like to play practical jokes on your parents or on your brothers and sisters. I pulled lots of practical jokes on my brother. The advantage of playing practical jokes on my brother rather than my parents was that he couldn’t punish me for them.

    Think about something

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