UnBEElievables review from Kirkus

Kirkus has reviewed my new book, UnBEElievables due out in March from Beach Lane Books (a division of Simon & Schuster). YAY!

UNBEELIEVABLES Honeybee Poems and
PaintingsAuthor: Florian, DouglasIllustrator: Florian,
DouglasReview Issue Date: January 15, 2012Online
Publish Date: December 21, 2011Publisher:Beach Lane/Simon
& SchusterPages: 32Price ( Hardcover ):
$16.99Publication Date: March 6, 2012ISBN (
Hardcover ): 978-1-4424-2652-8Category: Picture Books

Florian (Poetrees, 2010, etc.) bestows yet another pleasing mix of punny poems and colorful collages that blend whimsy and fact. The 14 poems introduce the roles of the queen, drones and workers and touch on such matters as anatomy, development from egg to bee, and even Colony
Collapse Disorder. Spreads like “Swarm” epitomize Florian’s skill at combining pithy rhymes,well-chosen facts and playfully tongue-in-cheek pictures.
“When it’s too crowded, then we form
A cloud of bees that’s called a swarm.”
A three-sentence paragraph, offset in smaller type, explains why bees swarm, the role of scout bees and what happens after a new home site is found. The facing picture shows a veritable thunderhead of bees, dwarfing the sun and forest in its imperative to move house. Design is crisp: The text type, Neutra, sits in pleasing, contrasting colors against saturated pages of crimson, ochre-gold and grass green. Characteristically poking visual fun at facts, the mixed-media pictures present bees as cheeky girls and boys with red, kewpie-doll
smiles. The queen sports a crown, scepter and cell phone, illustrating the couplet
“My princely sons are known as drones—
Not one of those boys ever phones!”
Meanwhile, those Belushi-looking bad boys slouch and smirk in chunky medallions and sideways baseball caps. Florian shines again here. ("BEEbliography," websites for further inquiry)
(Picture book/poetry. 5-8)

Mark Podwal at Yeshiva University Museum

Photo of Podwal in Prague's Old Jewish Cemetary by Karel Kudlin.

Mark Podwal is an artist, author and physician. He's also my friend of many years. And he is the author and illustrator of many books for children, including the Jewish Book Award winner, The Angel's Mistake, stories and paintings about the endearing fools from the town of Chelm of Jewish folklore. In his A Passover Haggadah he joined the commentary of his friend Elie Wiesel with more than 50 exquisite drawings. Especially joyous is his A Sweet Year: A Taste of the Jewish holidays. His beautiful works of art, mostly on themes of Jewish history, legend, and legacy, are represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Fogg Art Museum, the Jewish Museum in Prague, and the Library of Congress. Now Podwal has moved from illustration to history, in designing textiles, including a Torah curtain, for Prague's Altneuschul (Old-New Synagogue), the world's oldest operating synagogue. He was commissioned to design new textiles for the sanctuary. Embroidered in shimmering gold thread on rich velvet, the textiles reflect the traditions and mythology of the Altneuschul and one of the world's most vibrant Jewish communities. Before they are shipped to Prague for installation they are on exhibition at Yeshiva University Museum's downtown branch at 15 West 16th street.

How fitting that the Altneuschul (Old New Shul) should have the creations of Mark Podwal, whose entire body of work represents the marriage of old and new. For the textiles he researched the historical precedents, but created something contemporary. The manufacture of the textiles by Penn and Fletcher was itself a synthesis of tradition and technology.

Stevenson Summer

As Summer draws to a close, and the days slowly sadly shorten, I thought of this Robert Louis Stevenson poem, "Bed in Summer."

Bed in Summer
By Robert Louis Stevenson 1850–1894

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.


I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.


And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
Source: A Child's Garden of Verses (1999)

Mean Irene

The Hurricane
by William Carlos Williams


The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You
have your heaven,
it said, go to it.

The keen Irene Latham is hosting poetry friday at Live, Love, Explore: http://irenelatham.blogspot.com/2011/08/welcome-to-poetry-friday-roundup.html

landscape with birds by paul klee

From Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein

Pigeons on the grass alas.
Pigeons on the grass alas.
Short longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow grass. Pigeons
large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the
grass.
If they were not pigeons what were they.
If they were not pigeons on the grass alas what were they. He had
heard of a third and he asked about it it was a magpie in the sky.
If a magpie in the sky on the sky can not cry if the pigeon on the
grass alas can alas and to pass the pigeon on the grass alas and the
magpie in the sky on the sky and to try and to try alas on the
grass alas the pigeon on the grass the pigeon on the grass and alas.
They might be very well they might be very well very well they might
be.
Let Lucy Lily Lily Lucy Lucy let Lucy Lucy Lily Lily Lily Lily
Lily let Lily Lucy Lucy let Lily. Let Lucy Lily.

Forgetfullness by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

"Forgetfulness" from Questions About Angels, by Billy Collins, © 1999.

Here's Donovan's poem/song from his double album, a gift from a flower to a garden, released in the U.S. in Dec. 1967. I love his stream -of -consciousness (or should I say ocean- of -consciousness) here. To hear him sing it, along with the ocean click:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mip8uVRt2II


Starfish-On-The-Toast
by Donovan Leitch

Fine rock a-pooling coast
this starfish on the toast
the men in the crabbing boats they cry

Far across the harbor
and 'round the sandy cove
the shepherd with his pipe and sheep he drove

big cloud tumbling high
the amazing flying sky
how the gulls are pillaging the town

fan faring daffodilly
trumpetingly small
all along the bathing hut wall

far across the empty beach
the tide has left this world
old men in tweed find study there

Holding whelks and periwinkles
tingling in his hand
little does he know they hold him too

Fine rock pooling coast
this starfish on the coast
the men in the crabbing boat they cry....

March: In like a lion. Out like a lamb.
The Fourth of July: Out with a BAM!!!

Paul Klee's drawing "Louse," created in 1940, near the end of his life.


One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop


The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.



From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

maggie and milly and molly and may

Cummings filled twenty pages of a notebook before this poem was finished.

maggie and milly and molly and may
by E. E. Cummings

10

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

Eletelephony
by Laura Elizabeth Richards


Once there was an elephant,
Who tried to use the telephant—
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone—
(Dear me! I am not certain quite
That even now I've got it right.)
Howe'er it was, he got his trunk
Entangled in the telephunk;
The more he tried to get it free,
The louder buzzed the telephee—
(I fear I'd better drop the song
Of elephop and telephong!)

Little Boxes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEvEEcc9iC8&feature=related

Another poem by Malvina Reynolds, copyright 1962 Shroeder Music Company, renewed 1990,inspired by what she saw on the hillside while driving to La Honda, California, from her home in Berkeley. It soon became a hit song for Pete Seeger. Many, many years later it was reborn as the theme song for the TV show "Weeds" and is sung in the link above by the marvelous Regina Spektor.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

God Bless the Grass

Written by Malvina Reynolds some years ago. Here's a video cover on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r85OxK58KnE

God bless the grass that grows thru the crack.
They roll the concrete over it to try and keep it back.
The concrete gets tired of what it has to do,
It breaks and it buckles and the grass grows thru,
And God bless the grass.

God bless the truth that fights toward the sun,
They roll the lies over it and think that it is done.
It moves through the ground and reaches for the air,
And after a while it is growing everywhere,
And God bless the grass.

God bless the grass that grows through cement.
It's green and it's tender and it's easily bent.
But after a while it lifts up its head,
For the grass is living and the stone is dead,
And God bless the grass.

God bless the grass that's gentle and low,
Its roots they are deep and its will is to grow.
And God bless the truth, the friend of the poor,
And the wild grass growing at the poor man's door,
And God bless the grass.

Schwitters Twitters

On the occasion of Kurt Schwitters' new show at

Princeton artmuseum.princeton.edu, his Dada poem, and Mama collage on Poetree Freeday

Kurt Schwitters

To Anna Blume

You, oh you, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I
love ya! - You thine thou yours, I you, you me.
- Us?
This (incidentally) does not belong here.
Who are you, countless woman? You are
- are you? - People say you are - let
them say it, they don't know where the steeple is.
You wear a hat on your feet and stand
on your hands, on your hands you walk.
Hello, your red clothes, sawed into white pleats.
Red I love, Anna Blume, red I love ya! - You
thine thou yours, I you, you me. - Us?
That (incidentally) belongs in the cold embers.
Red flower, red Anna Blume, what are people saying?
Prize question: 1. Anna Blume has a bird.
2. Anna Blume is red.
3. What color is the bird?
Blue is the color of your yellow hair.
Red is the cooing of your green bird.
You plain girl in an everyday dress, you dear
green animal, I love ya! - You thine thou yours, I
you, you me - us?
That (incidentally) belongs in the ember box.
Anna Blume! Anna, a-n-n-a, I am dripping your
name. Your name drips like soft suet.
Do you know, Anna, do you know yet?
You can also be read from back to front, and you, you
most marvelous creature of them all, you are from the back
as you are from the front: »a-n-n-a.«
Suet drips caress my back.
Anna Blume, you droppy animal, I love ya!

An Anna Blume

Poets House!

Poets House, in Lower Manhattan, will be showing my children's book art, thanks to Mike Romanos, the children's room director.

Located at 10 River Terrace in Battery Park City, NY, Poets House was founded by poet Stanley Kunitz in 1985, and moved from Soho to its present digs in September 2009.

Its collection contains more than 50,000 volumes of poetry including books, journals, and digital media. Each year Poets House presents more than 200 public programs, including panels, lectures, readings and workshops. The children's room is free and open to the public. Here's their website:

http://poetshouse.org/home.htm

Martian rocks may have names,thanks to the scientists of NASA's Pathfinder mission, which landed on the red planet and sent back 16,000 images. Other names include Yogi, Booboo, Poptart, and Jazzy. Mars gets as hot as 24 degrees Farenheit, but before you pack your bags, you should know that it's thin atmosphere is mostly Carbon Dioxide.
Full panorama below

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_yiiPzeRfNBQ/TI85RHzX3KI/AAAAAAAAAcU/hTEwuPEwwVo/s0/mars_rock_names_v2.jpg

SIMON EVANS Symptoms of Loneliness, 2009 Pen, paper, scotch tape, correction fluid 28 1/2 X 39 3/8 inches. Courtesy Moon River

"Letting In the Light"

I was surprised to get a nice review Friday in The New York Times of my show of abstract paintings (link below) There has been a dialogue (sometimes shouting match) between my illustration and abstract work for some time. This piece is titled "My Constellation" and is gouache on paper, 16 inches by 16 inches. Photo courtesy Bravin Lee Programs, 526 West 26th street, NY, NY

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/arts/design/04galleries-4.html?ref=design

The Truth About Hunting In Today's Africa

Children often ask me "What is your favorite book?"

Well, truth be told, for sheer fantasic imagery and originality you can't go wrong with George Leonard Herter's "The Truth About Hunting In Today's Africa, and How to Go on Safari for $690.00." In this 1963 travel guide we discover that "baboons are simply too small for leopard bait" but "leopard farming is far more profitable than mink farming," and "hunting with a phonograph of distressed goat calls is encouraged." Perhaps out of print, but never out of mind.

Einstein's Birthday

Today, March 14th, is Einstein's birthday.
Three quotes from the professor:

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
"I never think of the future. It gets here soon enough."
"The environment is everything that isn't me."


Happy birthday Uncle Albert.

Poetrees: First Review!

Poetrees has received its first review, an "exquisite" one from School Library Journal:

FLORIAN, Douglas. Poetrees. illus. by author. 48p. glossary. CIP. S & S/Beach Lane Bks. Mar. 2010. RTE $16.99. ISBN 978-1-4169-8672-0. LC 2009003025.
Gr 3-6–Florian focuses on trees (seeds, bark, leaves, roots, and tree rings) and introduces readers to 13 species from around the world. An oversize, double-page illustration accompanies each poem. Some are read lengthwise, which enables the artist to highlight the awesome height and size of trees. The selections are accessible and concise, with child-friendly wordplay and artful design: of the “spreading,” “treading,” “always-outward-heading” banyan tree, Florian concludes: “It’s not a tree–/It’s a forest!” The primitive illustrations–crafted on “primed paper bags” using mixed media including gouache watercolor paints, colored pencils, rubber stamps, oil pastels, and collage–range in nuance from whimsy to mystery and reverence. In “The Seed,” Florian highlights the symmetry of trees by laying out the short text in a figure eight, an eternity symbol; this dovetails neatly with the overall theme of recycling and renewal. He concludes with a “Glossatree,” a thumbnail sketch of each tree, and an author’s note and sources. This exquisite collection, with its thoughtful wordplay and timely subject, rewards careful reading and should resonate with a wide audience.–Marilyn Taniguchi, Beverly Hills Public Library, CA

And here is the poem on the paper birch tree, native to America and known by at least three names. It usually grows where it's c-c-cold.

Paper Birch

Paper birch.

White birch.

Canoe birch too.

Beautiful

Native

Tree to view.

Smooth white birch bark.

Grows where it's cold.

Paper birrrrrrrrrrrrrch:

A sight to behold.

poem Paper Birch and image copyright 2010 by Douglas Florian