John Himmelman, Reginald Dwayne Betts take a populist approach to poetry in new books
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Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Today, we've got two poetry books for you, and they both take a sort of populist approach to poetry. In a bit, the writer Reginald Dwayne Betts talks about his collection titled Dog Roll, a term he defines as mediocre poetry, but it's a term he wears with pride.

But first, John Himmelman's poetry collection, The Boy Who Lived in a Shell, Snippets for Wandering Minds, is technically written for kids, but I think anybody can enjoy them. They're all from the perspective of, well, you know, a boy who lives in a shell. And in this interview with NPR's Scott Simon, Himmelman talks about his techniques for connecting with kids, which is just writing to make himself laugh. That's ahead.

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His name is Evo, and he lived in an empty moon snail shell on a beach of sand until a wave carried him away. He now lives in an empty moon snail shell on the sea. He was scared at first, but he grew to love it so as the stories he wrote will show. Evo's adventures are the work of John Himmelman,

The author and illustrator now joins us from the studios of WNPR in Hartford, Connecticut. His book, The Boy Who Lived in a Shell, Snippets for Wandering Minds. Thank you so much for being with us. Oh, thank you for having me. I guess children are the intended audience, but I sure liked it. How did Evo come to you?

I wanted to tell some stories in as few words as possible for people with wandering minds. And I needed a way to connect them. And Ivo was the way to do that. He's the one who was telling the stories. And throughout the book, you're also learning a little bit about Ivo as he's getting older and older out in the sea, in this shell. Could I ask you to read one, The Rumpel Twins? Oh, sure. That's the first one in the story.

The Rumpel twins lived in a tree. They ate there. They read there. They wept there. They slept there. They never, ever left that tree until one day. Nope. They're still up there. You don't need a lot of words for a surprise ending. The illustrations of a giant tree, a couple of tiny twins seem to be happily situated on a branch high above the ground.

The stories come first to you or the scene? Both. It was mostly the mood, the feel of it. I mean, some of them are wry, as I've been told, and some are a little sad because I think there's nothing wrong with a sad story here and there, and some of them are just silly. A lot of these, because they're so short, they're ideas I've had for longer books that just wouldn't work, and I got to plug in these characters that I

might have come up with 20, 30 years ago, and I got to actually bring them to life in this book. Let's continue with Evo's stories. Would you let me have the pleasure of reading Penguin? Oh, please do. Penguin sat on a chunk of ice. He bobbed up and down in the southern sea. "'Room for me?' asked Walrus. "'Um, okay,' said Penguin. Walrus climbed on, but he was too big. The ice sunk beneath them. Penguin stood on Walrus."

They bobbed up and down in the Southern Sea. And then the illustration is just one of the happiest you can ever imagine of a walrus, his hands tucked over his stomach as he floats, and the penguin seemingly quite happy on top of him. I should have you read all my stories for me. Well, it would be an honor. I love them so. I've read that you...

You worked in the library stacks, and that had an important contribution to literature, we'll put it that way. Oh, yeah. I was in my last year at School of Visual Arts trying to figure out, all right, what am I going to do with four years of art school? And at the time, I was working in the Comac Library in Long Island, New York, and I was working in the children's book section, putting away all these classics like

Mercer Mayer's books and Maurice Sendak, of course. And my favorite was Arnold Lobel and his Frog and Toad series. That just inspired me. Here's a way to combine words and pictures, both of which I was interested in. And I took a course in writing and illustrating children's books in my last year in college. And I've been doing it since. Could I get you to read Dolphin's story? So Dolphin is a recurring character.

Dolphin was the nicest creature in all the sea. He shared everything he had. Once he found a crayon. He balanced it on his nose. He gave the crayon to a boy. That boy wrote a story about dolphin. He liked his first sentence so much, he made it his last too. He wanted everyone to know one thing about dolphin. What did the boy want them to know? Dolphin was the nicest creature in all the sea.

I love that story. And on the one hand, you think, well, you know, that's all that needs to be said. But when somebody is the nicest creature in the sea, we should say it a lot, shouldn't we? We should. And of course, it's a dolphin. Subtitle of your book, Snippets for Wandering Minds. Why wandering? I think there's attention span challenges these days with longer pieces.

And I was speaking to that. You could pick it up and put it down at any time. If your mind's wandering, there's no pressure. And especially for kids that feel somewhat challenged by reading longer things, this gives it to them in smaller bites or snippets. In all of your work, have you uncovered or developed something that's just really essential to reaching into a child's mind and heart?

What I do is I write to make myself laugh. I write to make myself sad. And I just hope that translates to other people, other children, and

And I think what I have is I have strong memories of how things affected me when I was a child, different emotions. I remember happiness. I remember sadness. I remember excitement. And I don't think those change over the years. If I could touch that in my own stories and my own work, that...

hopefully that will relate to others. And I don't mind adults enjoying it as well. That's how I start. You know, I'm an adult, so I start writing from me. Can I ask you to read or sing even from Everything Stinks? Oh boy, I am not going to sing it. That's Crabby's story. So what happened was when Ebo sleeps, the stories don't come out and it's the stories that keep his shell afloat. So

Crab decided to come in and write some stories, and being a crab, his stories are somewhat crabby.

So one of the stories he wrote is, everything stinks. Sing along time, sang the crab who sang. Nothing goes right. Everything's wrong. Nothing is nice. Blah, blah, blah. Everything stinks. Nothing's worth doing. You're all too smelly. Blah, blah, blah. And you're all too loud. Everything's boring. Sun's in my eyes. Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know how I would sing that. Um...

Where's Evo now? I don't want to give away the ending. He's still telling stories, cranging away in a little moonsnail shell on the sea. John Himmelman, who has written The Boy Who Lived in a Shell, Snippets for Wandering Minds. Thank you so much for having your mind wander a little bit with ours. Thank you. It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

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The writer Reginald Dwayne Betts says something interesting in this next interview about poetry serving a purpose and how we often don't let poetry serve its purpose because we think about it as this elevated thing as opposed to a way to express feeling and emotion, to connect with other people. And apparently, another way to connect with other people? Get a dog. Here's NPR's Michelle Martin.

Reginald Dwayne Betts has authored four collections of poetry and a memoir. He's also a lawyer and an educator. So his is a life in words. But his route to that life was a circuitous one. He spent more than eight years in prison for an armed carjacking committed when he was 16. He started writing in prison, including some of the poetry in this latest collection. It's called Doggerl, and he's with us now to tell us more about it. Dwayne, good to talk with you again. Thanks so much for talking to us. It's my complete and absolute honor.

So remind us again of what the classic definition of doggerel is. And then, of course, you know, I'm going to ask you, what's yours? Yeah, so doggerel classically just means mediocre poetry. And I chose the name of doggerel because doggerel isn't really just mediocre poetry. Poetry is meant to serve a purpose. And sometimes we don't let poetry serve its purpose because we think that it has to be on some certain kind of level. And we define our audience first.

I wanted to write poems that said, "This is for everybody." So if you're looking for some laughter, there's something here for you. If you're looking for love, there's something here for you. But I also wanted to cleverly sneak the word dog into the title because so many of these poems came out of my experience getting a dog during the pandemic and walking a dog and really seeing the world as a man who just had a new friend that was showing me things and revealing things to me that I just didn't pay attention to, including joy.

Just right up front, you say, it's not just a black man writing poems about his dog and all the dogs he encounters on the street and how having an extra four feet changed his world. And then he falls in love. Yo, it's funny, man. It's not even just that I have a dog now. I have a dog now. And honestly, I think about dogs and I think about the relationship that they've allowed me to build with people.

I mean, I've had the wildest things happen. I've had like white guys pull over on the side of the road. It's like, hey, I got two Jack Russell Terriers. You have a Jack Russell Terrier? Yeah. That is like TV dog. It literally is. And it's a dog that is obsessed with believing, truly believing that it's smarter than you. Probably is smarter than you. Well, how did he come into your life? It was the pandemic and we were starving for life.

And the idea to get a dog came from my ex. And I think she was right. We needed an animal to give us a different sense of ourselves. And it did for the four of us. And me in particular, though, I think what it did was make me notice the relationships and inactions that I had with other people because of Taylor. I get up early in the morning at 3, 4, 5, and I'm taking a walk and I'm riding my bicycle. I've

I began to see that this was the dog owner's hour. And the people around me, because I began to notice them more for their dogs, they would like notice me. And I would read them poems, people in my community, people in my neighborhood, people in the elevator. If you had a dog, it was an invitation to have a conversation. You would read them poems from Dog Girl that were about dogs? Yeah. Let me tell you what I did to somebody. It was so aggressively rude.

I had just met the person and we did not know each other. And then they picked up the phone and they were on the phone call. A friend of theirs' dog had died. I said, oh, put me on speaker. He looked at me like, why do you think I'm going to do that? I don't even know you. I just met you, Dwayne, five minutes ago. I said, I know. Put me on speaker. Why? I'm going to read y'all a poem. What are you talking about, sir? He puts me on speaker. I read him grief. They both gasp when I get to the end. And they're like, thank you for that.

But the thing is, I would have never done that if it was two people talking about the loss of a loved one. The one that you read, would you read the one? Is it Grief? Yeah, that was Grief. Grief. The story of Easy, a small dog who I imagine is named after Mosley's detective, crawls into the space left by Xenia, burrowing into corners against door frames beneath a house in search of

of a phantom smell. State fairs, Sahara, Thumbelina, Dreamland, Envy, Orange Star, Creepin', Xenias that bloom until first frost. My God, the ways we grieve again and again because the only rule of life is to forget means to abandon. When I forget to feed Tay, she never barks but waits wherever I am as if she trusts my memory more than I do. I imagine this is grief's lesson.

It is the engine of making what happened before matter. And it's true that I've only ever remembered a few joys as much as I've recounted all my reasons to grieve. But nothing grows without weeping, not even joy. Beautiful. I love it. Thank you so much.

I've got to ask you about a piece that you recently published in the New York Times, an opinion piece about having the police called on you at a bike shop that you had patronized for years. And you just talked about just the, I don't even know how to describe it. I mean, the rage, the emotion that welled up on you and that even the police officer could see that you were getting emotional. Is that true? Well, my initial impulse was,

was I was incredulous. I could not believe that I wasn't being allowed to complete a single sentence that would have alleviated the chaos. I got a Harvard identification on me. I got a Yale identification on me. And I got a bar card on me.

The bar card signals that you're a member of the bar, the state bar, meaning that you're a lawyer. Right. And I knew that none of that was going to solve the day, but I also knew that the burden was on me to prove that I deserved to be treated with some dignity. What I took from the piece is that you were so deeply hurt and that you went back to the store, and just to tie a bow on it,

You actually did go back and buy a bike at the store. Right. I felt like that's what I needed to do because I was going to suffer if I didn't. I don't know what happened to him this morning. I am not just going to assert a motivation for him because I'm so tired of people asserting motivations for me. When I bought the bike, it was his daughter. I didn't know it was her daughter. She was the most lovely human being I had met. And he had already coded in a discount for me because I told him I was going to come back. And so...

I don't need to name what motivated what happened on the day I almost got arrested. I would like to name what motivated what happened every subsequent day after. And I like to believe one of the things that motivated his behavior was his recognition. Like, he kind of failed me as a human being. And I went back to be like, I am not going to double down on this notion that I need to treat you in a certain way because that's how you treated me. Wow.

That's Reginald Dwayne Betts. His latest collection of poems is called Doggerall. Thanks so much. Thank you. That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter at npr.org slash newsletter slash books. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer.

The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Adam Beer and Adriana Gallardo, Danny Hensel, Eddie McNulty, Samantha Balaban, Ryan Bank, Emiko Tamagawa, Todd Muntz, Elena Torek, Shannon Rhodes, and Barry Gordimer. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.

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