What are your thoughts about participating in the POW! Festival as a Poet In The School?

As an author and illustrator, I do three things: write, draw, and go around to yak to kids. So, like, YES, I'd like to visit a school, and especially as a poet! My favourite role!

Please tell us about your most recently published book and also a little about any other books you've had that "saw print." As a Poet In The School, do you plan to solely read pieces from your book? Do you plan to read other work as well?

My first book of poems was Dirty Dog Boogie, which has been the favourite with little kids and grownups, students and teachers. It was followed by Nothing Beats a Pizza, Cabbagehead, and then Zigzag: Zoems for Zindergarten. Shoe Shakes was full of poems for 3-4-year-olds, although all ages seem to use it.

The most astonishing thing teachers did with the last two books, meant for little kids, was have their 7th and 8th graders use them for writing their own poems for little kids. More interesting an assignment than writing a sonnet, wouldn't you say? Rhythm, humour, word play, repetition, sound effects -- all possible.

In a 64-page book called I Did It Because...How a Poem Happens, the poems of mine kids liked most are collected together along with about 20 pages of suggestions and prompts for kids for writing, ideas I think I would have responded to myself at 10 or 12.

How would you describe your poetry?

My poems are all about (1) the beat and (2) the kids. Almost everything I ever mention in any poem is something that happened to me or popped into my own head -- I never think, "Oh, what would children like?" I would read only my own pieces, most of them done in participatory Echo Reading, for which the kids get to recite and ham it up without being looked at. This was rhythm demonstrated, not explained. I want them to leave a reading of mine in love with the cadence of language and eager to explore more of it, perhaps write poems, songs and stories of their own.

When did you start writing poetry and what prompted it?

I started writing rhyming verse when I was very little, it always appealed to me and I seemed to have an intuitive feel for word usage. Songs are just poems put to music.

What inspires you to put pen to paper / fingers to keyboard?

What inspires me is anything. Lines of poems jump into my head. It might turn out to be a line in the middle of a poem. It might get seventeen more lines added over the next day or year, half of them might get scrapped.

Can you describe (a little) your writing process in creating a new poem?

When I seriously sit down to complete a new poem, I scribble all over the page: images, rhymes, ideas, and then connect them afterwards.

The POW! Festival is built on the notion that poetry should not be relegated to an existence as "a niche art form" that the average person doesn't care about.
How do you respond to that?

Poems are snapshots of thoughts and pictures, experience and emotions. Of course they fit into everyday life. I personally think every family should have its own terrific memorable family poem... I may change my career and simply go door to door writing them.