I've had a long-time link with the poet John Ciardi because I used his poetry book How Does A Poem Mean in a poetry class long long ago in college, and have read it since then, although not for a while. At the time, I thought it wasn't terrible interesting, but I loved more the teacher I had, a former poet laureate of Missouri, John Neihardt. I thought he told better stories about poetry than the book did.
Yet since then, I've come to enjoy different texts about poetry, and all kinds of poetry. I had the good luck to go antiquing when I visited my son and family in Texas. I don't buy many things any more, have too much already, but this time I had the extreme pleasure of finding what appears to be a first edition of Doodle Soup, a book of Ciardi's children's poems. It seems untouched, although now it is! I've discovered some of the poems are akin to Shel Silverstein and I will try them out with young students this year to see if I'm right. Yet the humor is sometimes a bit strange, too. More than one of the poems talk about disappearing, somehow making a mistake and "poof", one is gone. They can be wry in humor, yet still others offer a big laugh at the "new" look he imagines.