Under the Green Willow

THE 20th ANNIVERSARY OF SOMETHING BIG HAS BEEN HERE, BY JACK PRELUTSKY

It’s 2010, the thirty-fifth anniversary of Greenwillow Books, the wonderful children’s publisher started by Susan Hirschman. Happy anniversary! It’s also the twentieth anniversary of Something Big Has Been Here, my second “big” book of poems for Greenwillow. The first big book, The New Kid on the Block, was published six years earlier, and I hope to discuss it in a blog later this year. However, I’d like to say that The New Kid…weighed heavily on me as I worked on its successor. After all, many of the ideas that went into The New Kid on the Block were the result of over twenty years of almost compulsive observation, musings, and note-taking, and now I only had six years worth of material to work with. Nevertheless, I felt that I needed to make the second book at least as good as the first, lest I suffer reviews that said something like, “While not up to Mr. Prelutsky’s usual standard, this is still a serviceable volume of…”

It took me almost a year to write Something Big Has Been Here, whereas I’d raced through The New Kid on the Block in less than two months. I’m fairly certain that I could never do anything like that again, and in fact each successive “big” book has taken longer to write than the one that preceded it. As I worked on Something Big, one idea led to the next, and after a while my mind simply opened up and considered just about anything that crossed my path as fodder for a poem. This way of working has stayed with me and continues to be my modus operandi. Now I’d like to tell you about the origins of three of those ideas, and how I turned them into poems for Something Big Has Been Here.

My wife and I were at a large souvenir shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Outside the shop was a single boot, about six feet tall, cobbled of some unknown material. I immediately took out my notebook and went to work. I thought about what sort of being might wear a boot like that, and I wondered if there was such a person (or creature) roaming around, searching for its other boot. Then I thought about the footprint that such an individual would leave…that did it! Ten minutes later, I’d written my title poem.

Over the past forty years or so, I’ve visited several thousand schools and have often been invited to partake of the school lunch. Although these lunches have improved over the years, most of them were an ordeal for me…but I always smiled as I ate them. Anyhow, all those dreadful meals were the inspiration for “Grasshopper Gumbo,” which I’ve recited in hundreds of school cafeterias, often under the withering glare of a lunch lady. I hereby apologize to all the lunch ladies.


There’s something about me that mosquitoes love. If you’re on a picnic in mosquito country and want to ensure that you won’t be bitten, you don’t need any fancy potion. Just bring me along. I can practically guarantee that the critters will focus all their attentions on me and leave you unscathed. When, in the dim reaches of time, I was a little boy and went to summer camp, one of my nicknames was Kid Calamine. Every single morning, I’d have to go to the infirmary and be smeared head to toe with calamine lotion to help relieve the itching from hundreds of mosquito bites. Even when I had a tan I was mostly pink. The poem, “Mosquitoes, Mosquitoes!” is intensely personal and comes from the
heart.

That’s it for now. Perhaps I’ll tell you about other ideas and poems in a future blog.                    

Jack Prelutsky was the nation’s first Children’s Poet Laureate. He has filled more than fifty books of verse with his inventive wordplay, including Something Big Has Been Here, which was released in a new paperback edition last month! He lives in Washington State.