Well it was certainly not an easy task, this is my very first anthology. I would not claim to be an anthologist by trade. And I knew I had to have 200 poems, and I knew National Geographic had the greatest collection of photographs of animals in the world. And so I just set out, first of all I made a long, long list of animals because I wanted to try to include 200 different animals, I didn’t succeed at that, I mean there are a couple of poems about elephants, and a couple of poems about spiders and so forth.
But that’s how I did it and I also made a list of potential poets. But the fact is that National Geographic wanted to use as many public domain poems, and anonymous poems as I could find.
And finding a children’s poem published before 1923 that resonated in the way that I suggested in the introduction is difficult indeed because those poems were written for a different audience, in a different time. I did use many of those public domain poems but I spend an awful lot of time trying to figure out which ones were the most kid friendly.
And then as far as the other ones go I used poems that were recently published or some, I commissioned some from my friends, I asked them to write about specific topics, and they did so, and in some cases it was a question of choosing between poet A, B, and C for this particular, for a particular elephant, it was a dicey proposition.
Well I think of it as both a coffee table art book but also one that you share with children and grandchildren sitting on your lap on the sofa. I hope this book sets a standard for books of this type for years to come.
I think it, I think in the sense of going from — Of filling out each section was really vital. And doing it as well as I could, and doing it with an admixture of poems that were wildly different from each other. I didn’t want page after another coming like tracer bullets, I wanted them to read, I wanted each one to be kind of a stunner, to make, to contain maybe an a-ha moment for the reader, I don’t know if I succeeded in that.
But I was — well you can tell I was very pleased with the outcome.
