Poetry is a special way of talking and writing. Poems are often musical, playing with the sounds of language while they tell stories, reveal feelings, make pictures and give us ideas.
We all find this pleasurable, but children especially so. I guess that's because for very young children, language often comes at them as something they hear without necessarily understanding it.
Poems are also places where you don't have to say it all, they don't have to tie it up in a neat knot in the way that stories usually do. And that's fine, because life doesn't usually finish with neat little endings. Life itself is full of questions and problems. Particularly for children.
It's as if poems like this point us at the very language we see and hear around us
Poems are great for exploring those fascinating questions: where do we come from? Where are we now? Where are we going? , I wonder what kind of person I am, I wonder what's going to happen, and so on. And aren't these questions that children ask over and over again?
Whether it's through nonsense (remember the dish who ran way with the spoon?) or through making one thing like another, (perhaps our plates aren't sitting on the table; but rather, the table is tired of carrying the plates) poetry can get us to see the world in strange, new ways and from strange points of view.
They gather up and change words. It's as if poems like this point us at the very language we see and hear around us and invite us to stop, think and wonder if the words we are used to are right, honest or worthwhile. For children, this is especially important.
If you think for a moment, very nearly all children enter school, using a language that is theirs, only to find that school is full of language that seems to belong to other people. If poetry plays with language and, through its music, invites children to remember and imitate it, this becomes a language that they can possess.
