When I did the first large anthology, poets were charging a lot less, and I was able to put in over 600 poems. When I did the twentieth-century anthology, it’s about a third the size, and I think it cost more to do. I guess poets wised up.
But a lot of the poetry I read when I was a kid was didactic. It was preachy. It was moralistic. It was condescending. Some of it was syrupy. That’s not what kids want. I mean kids are flesh and blood. They want good stuff. So, I made it a point to avoid all of those things. I think that the best poets who’ve ever written for children are alive now and were alive in the last 20 or 30 years. It just changed. Poets realized that they could write about food fights and about aliens from outer space.
