Poesi för barn och unga: Poetry for Children and Youth

• Published in: Barnboken 2021, Vol.44
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: children's literature; children's poetry; General Literature Studies; Litteraturstudier; Litteraturvetenskap; poetry; Specific Literatures
• ISSN: 2000-4389; 0347-772X; 2000-4389

Language begins within the poetic, not only when it comes to our collective language evolution (“the infancy of language”), but also for the individual (“the language of infancy”), according to how Debbie Pullinger argues in her book From Tongue to Text: A New Reading of Children’s Poetry published in 2017 (45). If we accept such an argument, an affinity between poetic language and childhood comes with the package – in a metaphorical sense as well as in terms of developmental psychology. Literature, as we know it, springs from rites and ceremonies, and involves a rhythmically embodied orality (and is, in this sense, poetic), which conceptualises humankind’s most fundamental existential issues. The individual’s process of language acquisition begins, in turn, with a socially driven yearning for comfort and guidance in a world full of impressions and emotions but void of concepts. These affinities were a strong incentive for the decision to choose “Poetry for Children and Youth” as the 2020 theme for the annual conference arranged by the Network for Nordic Modernist Poetry (NORLYR). As it turned out, the pandemic year 2020 was a year like no other, and the conference could not take place. Instead, a collaboration between the NORLYR network and emerged. The result is a theme in which scholars of poetry and scholars of children’s literature share perspectives in order to find common ground, as well as break new one.