Response to Joyful Noise

I thought this was a very interesting book. I didn’t think much of the picture of the butterfly on the cover, it seemed like a fairly normal type of drawing to put on a cover, but then I started reading and thought, “Oh, all these poems are about…bugs. Really?” I paged through the book and discovered that, yes, all of these poems were, in fact, about bugs. “Well,” I thought, “I suppose there are worse things to read poems about.” So I settled in and started reading about bugs. Fifteen minutes later, as I finished the book, I was surprisingly satisfied. And I think that has to do with my expectations as a reader. When I saw the whole book was just poems about bugs, my expectations fell off a cliff. I wasn’t expecting anything very intellectual or deep, and so I just enjoyed the poems for what they were, and I really did enjoy them. I think it’s interesting how our expectations as readers can shape our reactions to text, most of the time without realizing it. When I was younger my aunt sent me The Indian in the Cupboard. Based on the picture on the front, I thought it looked boring, so I didn’t read it until over a year later. I quite literally judged the book by its cover. When I did finally read it, I was so amazed that it wasn’t boring that I thought it was the greatest book ever written. After a few years, I realized it was very good but not quite as good as I had originally thought, but the fact that I was expecting nothing made it seem amazing. Okay, anyway, back to Joyful Noise.
Like The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, I really liked the visual aspect of the book. I thought the drawings added a lot, but only the realistic drawings. There were certain bugs being talked about that I didn’t know what they were, so the pictures helped me imagine the bugs and know what the poems were talking about. But I didn’t like the pictures that were cartoonish. I’m thinking specifically about “Book Lice” and “Honeybees.” That’s not how bugs look. They don’t have cute faces and they certainly don’t lounge on davenports. That just didn’t do it for me. And I think if every picture would have been in that cartoonish style, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it because it would become just another aspect of the book. But with so many poems having realistic drawings, the cartoony drawings seem awkward and out of place.
One of the reasons I really liked this book was because of the performance factor. The author states right up front that it is to be read aloud. Some people would say that all poetry should always be read aloud and nothing else is acceptable. I completely disagree with this, but with these poems it makes a lot of sense. I coach the speech team at Wayzata High School, and as I was reading these poems I could definitely see a duo speech going on. I was hearing the way the words worked together and picturing what it would like with people performing the poems. Not just reading, but performing. And I thought it was rather easy to pick out which poems would work the best for that type of speech. “Honeybees” would be really fun, and I thought “The Digger Wasp” was strangely touching. “House Crickets” could be interesting, and “Mayflies” would be too. I think anything that gets students out of their chairs and doing something is great, and this is definitely something I could use in a 9th grade class. To get the kids thinking about how poetry as performance is so fun and exciting is a great thing.