When Things and Words Meld into Poetry

Brown, Monica. Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2011.

When an author writes a biography, an assortment of political implications arises. Obviously, and in the first place, there is some kind of motivation for writing about the biographical subject at hand. As Julia Watson notes in remarks about autobiography which are equally appropriate for thinking about biography, the writing and publication of biographies “giv[es] cultural status to particular lives” (61). Upon undertaking a book project on a given individual, an author has decided—and concomitantly signals to readers—that this individual’s life is worthy, at the very least, of attention.

When reading a biography, it befalls the reader to deduce why this individual is indeed worthy of attention. The reasons can include the individual and his/her story being admirable, inspirational, and/or cautionary. There might also be an intended educational component to a biography as a biographer might seek to redress a popular ignorance or misconception about a certain person or issue or aspect of history. Of course, all the while there is the matter of what is included in the biography, what is not included, and what kinds of opinions and perspectives the reader is positioned to adopt.

If a given biography is crafted (or marketed) for children, the abovementioned stakes are heightened. One can wonder why exactly a young reader is being introduced to this specific biographical subject and what he/she is calculated to take away from the text and the introduction to this individual.

More than anything, Monica Brown crafts Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People to inspire readers to read and write, which to be sure is something direly needed nowadays as growing numbers of kids spend their time glued to video games and television screens. Granted, such an assessment of the text might raise alarms about biographical objectivity and the integrity and purpose of nonfiction. But in actuality, any text, including, if not especially, a biography, has its own slant and objective(s), not only because in a biography—especially a short picture book biography—choices have to be made and material has to be organized and directed, but because any and every text is biased. This is the point, for example, of George Szanto in Theater and Propaganda when he asserts that any and every text is propagandistic. With such a premise established, Szanto argues that the job of the critic is to evaluate the ideology that a given text propagates and its subsequent effects.

Brown’s picture book begins with Pablo as Neftalí, a child who “loved wild things wildly and quiet things quietly.” Brown then launches the dominant theme of this text when she explains that words “whirled and swirled [around the boy], just like the river that ran near his home in Chile.” Preferring reading over soccer, Neftalí decides as a child that he wants to become a writer.

Notably, a big jump occurs between a teacher giving the young boy books to read and the statement that “when he was a teenager, Neftalí changed his name to Pablo Neruda and began publishing his poems.” At this spot in the text, I actually thought some pages had stuck together, causing me to miss the bridge between his teacher’s gift and the dramatic change that occurs when the boy becomes a teenager. But, no, the narrative really does take this jump. As much as this book is about a writer and implies the magic of writing, I was disappointed that the texts doesn’t go into more depth as to why the boy wanted to become a writer and how the books impacted or otherwise affected him. Such additional commentary might have inspired reluctant readers/writers or resonated refreshingly with others.

I was able to move beyond this disappointment a few pages later when Brown provides a lush, almost excited inventory of the writing that Neruda began to do. She relates,

Pablo wrote poems about the things he loved—things made by his artist friends, things found at the marketplace, and things he saw in nature.

He wrote about scissors and thimbles and chairs and rings.

He wrote about buttons and feathers and shoes and hats.

He wrote about velvet cloths the color of the sea.

So nice about this passage is its emphasis on the fact that writing can be about anything, including our familiar surroundings (which is something Francisco Alarcón does splendidly in his poetry for children, by the way). In effect, writing—and poetry in particular—is demystified and celebrated for younger readers. The accompanying 2-page illustration by Julie Paschkis features streams of images and words. Among other things, this works brilliantly to suggest the endless fluidity of words and things and implies the poet’s ability to bend and otherwise play with them.¹

Indeed, the complentarity between pictures and text in this work is one of the best that I have seen in a picture book for children.² Brown clearly wants to convey that the world can be seen in words, and Paschkis does a fine job of visually demonstrating and enacting this. The result is nothing less than an enticing invitation to the reader to turn empirical sense into poetic sensibility.³

Over the final section of the book, Brown tries to segue into Neruda’s social and political activism. While the move from “Pablo loved mothers and fathers, poets and artists, children and neighbors, and his many friends around the world” to “When Pablo saw the coal miners working dangerous jobs for little money, he was angry” feels a bit clunky, Paschkis’s illustrations hold things together with a sustained portrayal of the omnipresence of words and their polymorphousness. By the time Brown mentions that “[Pablo’s] poems made leaders angry” and that he therefore had to flee the “soldiers [who] came to get him,” she provides important information, but it all makes a line like “Pablo loved opposites, so he wrote about fire and rain and spring and fall” seem like it comes from another book read long ago. But then, perhaps this again just shows the ways that words and poetry are available for all occassions as we grow up.

All of this gets back to the inherently difficult task that a biographer for children faces. Biography carries a host of responsibilities, including completeness. Yet a picture book for children is a very tight space. This particular picture book is at its strongest when it carries on about the wonders of writing. The material about Neruda’s activism seems somewhat included out of Brown’s sense of her obligation as a biographer, but this is fully understandable. To be sure, I might seem to be on the cusp—if I am not doing so already—of complaining about the inclusion of this material, but I don’t mean to do so, really. (If it had not been included, it goes without saying that I would probably be complaining about that.) If anything, I am being sensitive to what strikes me as some difficulties with this book with cohesion. At bottom, I think the difficulties I am seeing stem from an imbalance between the different components or strands of the narrative. That said, what perhaps becomes necessary in the final analysis is a recognition of and respect for the challenges intrinsic to the genre of the biographical picture book. Overall, this is a beautiful and effective picture book that gives readers a lot to think—and hopefully write—about. 

--phillip serrato, san diego state university

Notes

¹ I cannot help but point out that for a moment I personally found this 2-page illustration to teeter on being overwhelming. Words and images are different types of signifiers and require different modes of processing. As they spill across the two page spread, the viewer’s eyes toggle frenetically trying to take everything in and the mind just about convulses trying to process the disparate material. Incidentally, such a moment brings to mind a comment by Fredric Jameson on schizophrenia:

[T]he breakdown of temporality suddenly releases [the] present of time from all the activities and intentionalities that might focus it and make it a space of praxis; thereby isolated, [the] present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the power of the material—or better still, the literal—signifier in isolation. This present of the world or material signifier comes before the subject with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, [possibly] described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity. (27-28)

I find fascinating the resonance between this passage and the cognitive dynamics precipitated by the encounter of the reader with Paschkis’s illustration (plus Brown’s accompanying rush of text). It strikes me that the reader is put in a schizophrenic position from which he/she will, ideally, emerge with the euphoria that Jameson describes (rather than, or perhaps after overcoming, any initial anxiety and loss of reality). It becomes especially interesting that this is taking place in a book for children. The child is a subject coming to terms with the real world, and it might be said that there is something fundamentally schizophrenic about the child’s negotiation of the real and the not-real. (This is probably where I ought to be consulting the work of D.W. Winnicott, Anna Freud, and Melanie Klein.) Incidentally, if we follow the lead of Jacques Lacan, we could read into the growth of the child his/her entry into the symbolic order. In effect, we might read the illustration in Brown’s picture book as one that captures or recreates or compels a schizophrenic drama in which the child negotiates the material world, the symbolic order, and the infinite horizons engendered by both.

² For an instructive discussion of picture book dynamics, including relationships between text and illustrations, see Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, How Picture Books Work.

³ Richard Flynn offers an illuminating discussion of children, poetry, and children’s poetry in his article, “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?”

Works Cited

Flynn, Richard. “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?” The Lion and the Unicorn 17.1 (June 1993): 37-44.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.

Nikolajeva, Maria and Carole Scott. How Picture Books Work. New York: Garland, 2001.

Szanto, George. Theater and Propaganda. Austin: U of Texas P, 1978.

Watson, Julia. “Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography.” The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation. Ed. Robert Folkenflik, 57–79. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.

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