Non-Fiction Poetry and Music, too!

              Thanks to Alyson Beecher's Non-Fiction Picture Book Challenge at Kidlit Frenzy, those who link up share fabulous non-fiction picture books. I am grateful for all that I've learned through reading non-fiction picture books. 

I am reading a lot of other poetry for the Cybils awards, round one. I won't review them all, but want to tell you that there are so many wonderful poetry books that have come out since October of 2015. This task of choosing finalists is going to be tough! You can see ALL the nominated books here! Nominations are now closed, but each category is there. You may want especially to check the non-fiction category! This book I'm reviewing today is one of the poetry nominees.

        I'm saying that this book is a verse novel, at least it’s a verse short-story, filled with a marvelous jazzy set of poems that tell the story of one special day. On August 12^th, 1958, Art Kane had a big idea to gather all the jazz musicians possible to meet in front of a special brownstone in Harlem to take a special photograph. He pitched the idea to an editor at Esquire, who gave the go-ahead.

        The poems are mostly free-form except for one pantoum which has some specific rules, but Roxane Orgill has managed to capture a beat to music in all the poems, perhaps to the beat of her own jazz drum? They are easily read aloud, just as nice as listening to a jazz piece, telling this story of this famous photograph from beginning to end. The treat at the end is that the book has a pullout page that shows the photo. Dialogue sometimes moves the poems’ rhythm: “”Hi ya, Monk!”/”Fump, my man!”  



And the way the poems omit some words creates a smooth telling: “camera guy’s sweeping/jazzmen like bundles/toward number 17” Variations also set a tone like when a boy named Alfred tells his tale about a beautiful woman arriving in a beautiful car: “The pink of her blouse is like Easter/They like her better than her car/Ask me/Chick or V-8?/No contest:/Cadillac.” Details surrounding this gathering are not missed either. One poem, “At The Window”, shows the feelings of a girl leaning out the window, “Wishing/at the window/to be old enough/to be down there/with the big kids.” and “Waiting/for the camera guy/to go away/and give back/the street/free the concrete/for stickball/stoopball/anyball.” There are poems about the musicians and ones about those who sat on the curb and watched. Those “boys” sitting at the curb are left in the picture too, and only one name is really known, the son of one of the musicians. 

         The illustrations fill around the poems, sometimes adding background details, and most focus on the action described in the words. They are realistic and show the joy in this reunion, a serendipitous idea that today might be said to have “gone virile”.

             Roxanne Orgill did wide research and not only told this story beautifully in poems, but added an introduction, an author’s note, biographies of all the musicians in the picture, noted other books and articles about this picture, gave source notes and a bibliography. For those who want to know more, the sources are right in the book! I imagine that this book will be used widely when introducing studies of jazz, from younger to older students. You can see this photograph HERE!