Third post!

          I thoroughly enjoyed reading Joyful Noise. It was fun, lyrical, and presented an auditory excursion into YA poetry. It made a joyful noise (please forgive this digression, as you’ve probably read this play on words way too many times…) in my ears. I found myself wanting a reading partner while I was reading, and I actually tried to include another voice in my head to create the effect by myself. It didn’t work very well, but I tried. I could see how the act of reading the poems with someone else would not only create a common bond among the readers but also invigorate the words with a shared aural context. I feel I may have missed out on some of the good stuff in the text.

            I found Mayflies to be particularly good. The imagery was solid, and I enjoyed the complexity inherent in the text. The concept of death is intimately linked to the life cycle of the mayfly, and I thought the poem did a nice job of illuminating this fact. It was tragic, sad, and almost tactile for me. The sense of time, or perhaps the lack of time, was pervasive in the piece. It reminded me of a rock ballad. I kept thinking of Jack and Diane…except they were bugs.

            I was also quite taken with the liberal use of alliteration and onomatopoeia in all of the poems present in Joyful Noise. The liberal use of simple and straightforward rhyme schemes and the special attention given to how the words sound made reading this brief book a joy. Once again, I wanted to “play” with the book with a friend.

            The love story entombed in Book Lice was cute, while the plight of the poor Moth just made me feel a keen sense of melodrama. I felt this same sense of over-the-top melodrama with The Digger Wasp. I’m not saying that I thought these particular poems were weak, but they didn’t speak to me like others did. I enjoyed the humor in Honeybees. It was an interesting contrast between the queen and the workers. I’ve often pondered what it would be like to be a worker bee, and whether or not I would resent the queen. This poem did a nice job of exploring that particular question for me.

            Whirligig Beetles just wrapped me up. I really wanted a reading partner for this poem. It would have been fun to practice this poem with a partner until you could rattle it off really fast and then wait behind something to jump out and unleash this poem on some unsuspecting bystander. It felt like bug-rap.

            Requiem just depressed me. I felt bad for all of the bugs that die in the first frost of the season. The ‘rest eternal’ part made me groan a bit. I felt like I should hold hands with someone and sing Kum-ba-ya. I wanted to reach for the dust to dust and ashes to ashes bit. It was a bit over the top for me, but I don’t tend to get sappy about bugs too often.

            I really enjoyed Chrysalis Diary. It stands out as one of the better poems in the book for me. I think it incorporates everything that I enjoyed from before: alliteration, onomatopoeia, solid imagery, and images of snow—I’m a sucker for poems that refer to snow. I have written many poems about snow in my day, and there is just something about a poem that incorporates the changing seasons, the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly—it’s rich with inherent symbolism and depth of meaning. Know what I mean, Vern?

            Overall, Joyful Noise was thoroughly enjoyable for me. I liked it immensely. I must reiterate: I wanted to find a playmate to play with me in the text. Fleischman did a great job of creating a work that not only invites, but requires, readers to work together to extrapolate the full benefit, meaning, and experience of the text. It rocked the bug-house.