Sound & Sandbox: What Children Can Show Us About Poetry and Play
My son has one of these little players—a little blue box. You stick a card into it, and it plays a story or a song or a poem. These days, he pops in Runny Babbit by Shel Silverstein and, with elation, recites all the inverted nonsense words from “Runny and the skancin’ dunk —.” He doesn’t even need the player, of course. He is “tubbin’ in my scrub” when he bathes, and he tells stories before bed of “verewolves and wampires.” This is the way we fall in love with words—by realizing we can make them our own, play with them in our mouths and in the air, distort and connect and covet them like charms in our empty hands.