Everyday is a party here at the Free For All, but today is one of those days where we pull out the extra-sparkly confetti and the really fancy party hats…because it’s the 100th birthday of beloved children’s author, librarian, and literacy advocate Beverly Cleary!

Beverly Cleary was born Beverly Atlee Bunn in McMinnville, Oregon on this day in 1916.  She wasn’t a natural born reader, and spent the first two years of school in a remedial reading group, until her school librarian helped her find books she enjoyed reading.  Their mutual love of reading fostered a life-long friendship, and by sixth grade, her teachers told her that she should become a children’s author, based on her essays and love of reading.

Instead, she became a children’s librarian herself, after eloping with her husband, Clarence in 1940, and delighted in helping children find books that would engage and challenge them.  In fact, it was precisely because there were so few of those books on the shelf that Cleary took to writing.  As she explained to The New York Times in a 2011 article, after encountering a book where a puppy said: “Bow-wow. I like the green grass.”

“No dog I had ever known could talk like that…What was the matter with authors?”

She realized she could do better…and she did.

More than 40 books and 90 million copies later, Beverly Cleary has become one of the most well-known and beloved children’s authors of the century.  From her outlandish and spunky Ramona Quimby to the intrepid Ralph S. Mouse, to the heartbreakingly honest letters found in Dear Mr. Henshaw, Cleary has spent a lifetime treating children like intelligent readers, and giving them characters to whom they can relate, and whose stories they could just plain enjoy.  As Cleary noted of her own childhood reading experiences, “If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book”.

Instead, she gave us characters who were–and remain–real, rambunctious, and beautifully empathetic, especially because of their mistakes, flaws, and boundless energy.  As Cleary noted to The Atlantic, “I have stayed true to my own memories of childhood, which are not different in many ways from those of children today. Although their circumstances have changed, I don’t think children’s inner feelings have changed.”

It turns out, she was 100% right.  In an online post from The Oregonian today, librarians, authors, and teachers from around the state have taken the opportunity today to thank Beverly Cleary for inspiring them, as well as their students, to keep reading, exploring, and adventuring.  As one librarian from Cleary’s former grade school (where the library has been rename in her honor) explains,

Students at Beverly Cleary School come to the library all smiles, and leave grinning as they clutch the books they can’t wait to read. Most all of them know that Beverly Cleary is a famous author who grew up in the same neighborhood they are growing up in. They also know that Henry, Ramona, Beezus and the other characters from Cleary’s books played in the park that they play in. In fact, many of them confuse Beverly Cleary with her fictional character, Ramona. When the younger students sit on the story steps in the library to listen to me read a story, some of them believe Ramona sat on those same steps to hear her librarian read to her.

But you don’t have to take my word for it.  If you would like to hear from the great Ms. Cleary herself, check out this interview below from the Today show that ran last month:

Then, come in and check out some of Cleary’s books for yourself.  For those who grew up reading her, it will be a perfect way to remember your childhood.  For those who haven’t had the pleasure–trust me, it’s never too late!

And, on a personal note, I would like to publicly thank Beverly Cleary, and Ramona Quimby, for teaching me how to tell time.

Despite T.S. Eliot’s immortal words, April is not always the cruelest month (though it can certainly be a meteorologically confusing one!), particularly when it is an entire month devoted to the celebration of poetry. April is National Poetry Month, and in the wake of our posts encouraging the overcoming of metrophobia, I feel it’s only appropriate to celebrate here on the blog. In fact, there is a confluence of events during the month of April that makes it a wonderful month to celebrate poetry. On April 29th, Mass Poetry will have their 8th annual Mass Poetry Festival, throughout that weekend in Salem. The quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death will happen during this month as well, and just in time, a first folio of his collected plays was discovered in Scotland on the Isle of Bute. Finally there is a call for readers will be happening right here at the Peabody Library on April 16th and 17th, to take part in Homer’s poetic tradition in a marathon tandem reading of the Iliad, which our regular blogger Arabella has already mentioned and about which I am ridiculously excited.

Amidst these very outward celebrations, I think it’s worth mentioning that what is most meaningful in poetry is often a much more quiet, inward journey that is sometimes celebratory and sometimes merely a subtle change that isn’t even noticed until the impact is felt much, much later. Other times, poetry can be a source of bibliotherapy. In a fascinating  and moving article, LitHub published the observations of a poet who prescribes poems to those in need. Yes, you read that right. She believes in poetry as a form of therapy that can be prescribed to those who need it. Ronna Bloom is the Poet in Residence at Mount Sinai Hospital and the Poet in Community at the University of Toronto. She has taken a very boots-on-the-ground approach to bringing poetry to those who may not have considered it otherwise. She realizes that those she encounters (often people who have had life-changing diagnosis) may not want a poem and that some might consider her efforts frivolous and doesn’t push the issue, acknowledging ” My motto: everyone who is alive could use a poem. Whether they want one is a different matter….There are things poetry can do and things is can’t.” However, there are amazing moments in which she truly connects with her “patients” realizing that “the point is less about liking and more about finding the poem that catches the spark of the experience, with empathy.” My humble opinion is that empathy is one of the greatest gifts poetry give and I give Bloom a great deal of credit for not shying away from what many choose to purposefully avoid (in relation to both tragedy and poetry), gently encouraging them to embrace the possibilities of language.

There are certainly other way in which poetry can reach people. LitHub has also published an article on poems that have made writers cry, indicating the transformative power of poetry. And for all of us wonderful bibliophiles, Flavorwire has a list of beautiful poems specifically for people who love books. Clearly, there is a type of poetry for everyone, whether or not we have chosen to find it yet. For my part, one of my transformative poetic experiences was when I was writing a paper in college and had to choose a Shakespeare sonnet for my topic. After paging through lines and lines of love poetry (my sarcastic, single self getting a little nauseous) I finally ended upon a sonnet about unconventional love, one that didn’t uphold the love-object as an idealized, stylized figure. Shakespeare’s dark lady is the polar opposite to pretty much any convention that poets before and after Shakespeare valued, but the Bard understood that love isn’t always dictated by the conventions of beauty and despite what many would have considered flaws that couldn’t be overlooked, he found much to love anyway. This was one of several poems that made me stop and truly appreciate some of what poetry could do and fortunately, because Shakespeare is in the Public Domain, instead of sharing book recommendations this week, I get to share this poem with you.

Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare

Till next week, dear readers, I encourage you to find a poem that you’re able to connect with in some meaningful way. Whatever that meaning, it is entirely personal and doesn’t need to be compared with anyone’s idea of poetry and meaning but your own. Mass Poetry’s website has a delightful section called “Poem of the Moment” that may help you with this. I also encourage any interested readers to join the Peabody Library in celebrating a centuries-old tradition of the oral recitation of poetry, whether by reading or joining us on June 19th in Veteran’s Memorial Park. Perhaps you might even find personal meaning in Homer’s epic.