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.
Transcript:
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Sometimes an author and an illustrator get set up together, like on a blind date. That’s how it happened for Matthew Burgess and Doug Salati.
MATTHEW BURGESS: We share the same agent.
DOUG SALATI: Yep.
BURGESS: And she said, you need to meet this client of mine, Doug, and you guys should work together. And we met for coffee in Brooklyn. I remember asking him, I said, Doug, what is it that you want to work on? Like, what are you interested in making? And his reply was, I want to illustrate poems.
SALATI: I love poetry. I loved it when I was a kid. I think that was a way into writing for me. It was also, as an illustrator, a completely different form to experiment with and to play with. Separate, short, tight little moments.
BURGESS: And immediately, I was, like, I’ve got poems.
RASCOE: Poems about a dragon pinata, a hungry yeti, primordial slime, a terrible, horrible idea, serious questions, dancing and magic tricks, all in their book of illustrated poems, “Words With Wings And Magic Things.” For our series Picture This, Matthew Burgess and Doug Salati talk about how it all came together.
BURGESS: I’ll read this poem called Feeling The Colors.
(Reading) If you’re feeling Day-Glo green and the glare gets in your eyes, have a glass of chocolate milk and a slice of pumpkin pie. If you’re feeling purple and you wish to feel it more, consider running naked on the midnight moonlit shore. If you’re feeling lemon yellow while basking on the beach, make sure you have a wide-brimmed hat just within your reach. And if you’re feeling lavender in your fingertips and toes, it might mean someone misses you in a realm that no one knows.
SALATI: For me, with this book, the frequency of getting to have Matthew volley over a poem, and then for me to generate some sketches for it and then move on to the next one and the next and the next and the next, and it became this great little dance from one to the other.
BURGESS: One of the ways I describe this book is Shel Silverstein meets Rumi for kids. Basically, when I was a kid – I was the youngest of five kids and my siblings had Shel Silverstein’s books on the shelf, and I remember discovering “Where The Sidewalk Ends” and “The Light In The Attic” and staring at those illustrations and reading those poems, and 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. For me, watching Doug create all the different animals and children and figures that appear in the book was a total joy.
SALATI: Oh, it’s such a huge, huge, huge cast of characters. It goes from kids to fantastic type of beasts – you know, your dragons, your yetis – to owls and every other animal. The biggest challenge, I think, of the book was, OK, we have so many worlds. We have so many characters, different tones of the poem, different songs being sung here. You know, how do we bring it all together?
BURGESS: So the book is divided into seven sections, which we call portals – Welcome, Wonders, Wild, Weee! (ph), Whoops & Wallops, Windows and Whispers & Well Wishes.
SALATI: At some point in the process, Matthew came in with these beautiful couplets as a way to whisk you into this next grouping. And that let me play with different types of imagery in terms of how I was using the page. So a lot of the images in the book are kind of smaller, spot images, you would call them, to allow for a lot of space for the poems. But these couplets let me kind of go for more of a traditional picture-book image where you’re using the whole spread.
BURGESS: I wanted to rave quickly about Doug’s seven magic tricks in the book. Doug created these seven die-cut illustrations, and for people who don’t know what that means, basically, there’s an image that has a hole in the page. And those are the pages that have the couplets. And when you look and you just turn the page, you kind of discover that there is a gap or a window.
And something from the original drawing is carried over that is visible through the window as you turn the page, if you can visualize that.
SALATI: Like, with Wild, Matthew’s text says, (Reading) the animal inside of us who longs to wander free, the sparkling specks of stardust that make up you and me.
Then it’s the scene that I remember from my backyard of that kind of metal slide that you would stick to in the summer, a swing set with two swings with the chain link and the rubber seats. And then there’s a girl at the top who’s peering over a fence and looking up at the moon and then an owl kind of floating by.
And when you turn the page, the moon is the die cut. You know, so the moon is cut out, and through that moon, when you turn the page, the owl then becomes a part of the next spread, and that next spread reveals an entire kind of whirling, rushing scene, stampede of all of these animals from all over the world, and behind them is a speckling of stardust and, you know, galaxies beyond. And it’s a very dramatic scene.
BURGESS: You know, I teach at Brooklyn College, and I also have taught in New York City public schools for almost 20 years, turning up in early elementary classrooms as Mr. Matthew, the poetry man. And college students often arrive with these ideas about poetry. These ideas include 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.
And I realize that that’s not really how we start out. Poetry can be fun. And when you write poems with kids, you see how immediately they get this, and they understand this. Like, if you read a poem aloud to kids, they start to dance in their seats. Like, they start to move. It’s just so immediate.
SALATI: So this is Dancer.
(Reading) I’m a really good dancer when no one’s around. I get high with my hands and low to the ground. I’m an excellent dancer, if I say so myself. I dance until the knickknacks shake on the shelf. I let my legs get loose just below my caboose, bounce my bum to the beat, keep the rhythm with my feet.
The drawings for this poem start with this kid reaching up and then a few jaunty movements to the left, to the right, and then this complete, you know, unrealistic reverberating of his whole body.
BURGESS: Yeah. It reminds me that at some point when Doug was working on the drawings, I said, we’re going for – what did I say?
SALATI: Oh, maximum fun?
BURGESS: Maximum fun.
SALATI: A tall order, you know?
BURGESS: Right.
SALATI: It really reminded me of that time – that time when you’re a kid, where you are not – you’re not worried so much about the product or the outcome or the finished thing. It’s the making.
BURGESS: I think, in a way, the process of making the book allowed both Doug and I to enter into that childhood space of making, before self consciousness sets in, before you start, as Doug said, worrying about the product – where you make for the fun of it. That’s the best kind of making.
RASCOE: That was award-winning author Matthew Burgess and Caldecott medalist Doug Salati, talking about their children’s book of poetry, “Words With Wings And Magic Things.” For more conversations like this one, visit npr.org/picturethis. Our series is produced by Samantha Balaban and edited by Melissa Gray.