Matthew Burgess and Doug Salati met on a blind date.
"We share the same agent," explains Burgess. "She said, 'You need to meet this client of mine.'" Over coffee in Brooklyn, they discovered that they both love poetry. They clicked.
Burgess is an award-winning author and poetry teacher and Salati is a Caledecott Medalist. They now have an illustrated book of poetry called Words with Wings and Magic Things.
"One of the ways I describe this book is Shel Silverstein meets Rumi for kids," says Burgess, who remembers discovering Silverstein's poetry when he was a child. "It really blew my mind in the best way because of the wordplay and the sense of fun. And then when I say Rumi for kids, there's also this thread throughout the book that's a little more mystical, a little quieter."
The poems run the gamut. There's a dragon piñata, a hungry yeti, primordial slime, a terrible, horrible idea, serious questions, dancing, and some magic tricks.
"The biggest challenge," says Salati, "was, OK, we have so many worlds, we have so many characters … how do we bring it all together?" But it was a fun challenge, he says. "It was also, as an illustrator, a completely different form to experiment with and to play with — separate, short, tight little moments."
A lot of the illustrations in the book are small, to allow more space for the poems. But, at the beginning of each chapter, the poems are small: Burgess wrote couplets — two-line poems. That gave Salati space to play. He created die-cut illustrations — basically an image with a hole in the page. And then when you turn the page, an image from the first drawing is carried over to the illustration on the next page.
For Burgess's poem Wild, Salati illustrated a summer backyard evening. There's a metal slide, a swing set, an owl and a girl peering up at the moon. The moon is the die-cut, and when you turn the page, the owl is carried over and becomes part of a new scene — a whirling, rushing stampede of all these animals in space, with stardust and galaxies behind them.
Burgess says he wanted this book to be fun. "I teach at Brooklyn College… and college students often arrive with these ideas about poetry," he says. Like: "Poetry is hard. Poetry is about rules. Poetry is stressful because when you read a poem in school, you're supposed to solve a riddle or say the most intelligent thing."
But, he wants everyone to know, this is not true! Poetry can be fun.
"When you write poems with kids, you see how immediately they get this," Matthew Burgess says. "If you read a poem aloud to kids, they start to dance in their seats."
"What I love about this project was that it really reminded me of that time," says Doug Salati, adding that when you're a kid and you're drawing on the living room floor, or writing in your diary, you're not self-conscious. "You're not worried so much about the product or the outcome or the finished thing. It's the making."
And, he and Burgess agree, making something for fun is the best kind of making there is.
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