NEW YORK—Douglas Florian says he is not a morning person. (He merely catches a 7 AM bus every day to his art studio.)
Douglas Florian says he is not very disciplined. (He’s been known to work all night.)
Douglas Florian got a D in college poetry.
“We studied Paradise Lost. It was lost on me, I’ll tell ya,” Florian says with a grin.
Downplaying aside, Florian, a native New Yorker, is downright delightful. The award-winning poet/painter is as quick and clever as his poetry, and gracious to boot. Florian took a break from his work at his Midtown studio recently to talk about his career in children’s books.
A career that seemingly was destined from the start. Florian, whose latest book, Summersaults, is due out this month from Greenwillow, has been called “one of the most memorable contemporary versifiers for young readers,” by the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books.
In 2001, Florian was presented with the Claudia Lewis Award for poetry by the Bank Street College of Education for his book, mammalabilia. The book, published by Harcourt, includes “The Coyote,” which reads:
I prowl.
I growl.
My howl
Is throaty.
I love
A vowel
For I am coyoooote.
For Florian, a father of five, coming up with whimsical, witty lines—and equally wonderful art—seems to be what he was born to do. Florian’s father was a painter; his mother a literary woman with a penchant for The New York Times crossword puzzle. That, along with several inspiring teachers, set Florian on his path.
It started with painting. When Florian was nine or ten, he accompanied his father to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. At first, Florian had trouble grasping the most abstract works, but his father taught him how to look deeper.
“He taught me a lot about art values and about what makes a painting tick,” Florian says. “It was an advantage to be steered to a certain, honest, straightforward direction. Because in the art world, there’s so much nonsense that can go on.”
After writing and illustrating nonfiction picture books, Florian came across Oh, That’s Ridiculous! a compilation of nonsense poems edited by William Cole.
“I thought, ‘Wow, that looks more fun than nonfiction. I think I’ll try that,’” Florian says.
That summer, he churned out 300 poems. “Only about ten of them ever got published. I think that’s the thing about poetry—you have to really write a lot. Because your first ones, you might think they’re pretty good, but they’re pretty awful, probably. You have to learn your craft, learn different devices that poets use, [learn] about meter and rhyme and internal rhymes, and alliteration …”
Once those things are mastered, it’s time to break the rules. Something Florian does with gusto. Consider “The Boa,” a poem from Florian’s beast feast (Harcourt):
Just when you think you know the boa,
There’s moa and moa and moa and moa.
“I love to use poetic license to invent words,” Florian says. “And to print words upside down, to give a poem a shape, to use bad grammar and bad spelling … Anything that really makes the poem better.”
Where does he get his ideas—“From Sears,” is what he tells school kids. Sometimes, as he pointed out during his Banks Street award acceptance speech, “a poem just comes to you, like the measles.”
Don’t be fooled. Florian works very hard to make it look so easy. It’s just that the process can be difficult to pin down. Florian says, like most artists, his brain works in a backwards, upside-down, absent-minded fashion.
“My wife is always saying my head is in the clouds,” Florian says. “But I think you get a good view from up there.”
