Imagine That! Poems of Never-Was

Selected by: Jack Prelutsky

Illustrator: Kevin Hawkes

Published By: Alfred A. Knopf 1998

Genre: picture book, poetry

Age Range: grades 1-3

This book is a collection of poems by different authors all having to do with creatures and creations that are purely from the imagination.

I really enjoyed this poetry because they were about things that I might never have been able to dream of myself. They show how creative a person can be. I also like these compolations of different writers because it offers the reader a variety of writers that they can look up more about if they like a particular poem. They can look for more of what that poet had written.

One of my favorite poems from the collection:

The Flotz by Jack Prelutsky

I am the Flotz, I gobble dots,

indeed, I gobble lots and lots,

every dot I ever see

is bound to be a bite for me.

I often munch on myriads

of sweet, abundant periods,

I nibble hyphens, and with ease

chew succulent apostrophes.

From time to timeI turn my gaze

to little dotted "i's" and "j's"

and if I chance upon a dash,

I soon dispatch it with panache.

I chomp on commas half the day,

quotation marks are rarer prey,

a semicolon's quite a treat,

while polka dots are joys to eat.

When I confront a dotted line,

my tongue flicks out, those dots are mine,

Morse code becomes a feast, and yes,

I've snacked upon an S.O.S.

For I'm the Flotz, who gobbles dots,

I gobble them in pails and pots,

and you'll not like my brief embrace

if you have freckles on your face.

I really like this poem because it is funny and creative and names many of the punctuation marks that the readers may be learning about such as commas and periods. This poem is also fun because it rhymes. Students can learn about different rhyme schemes such as the aabbccdd scheme of each stanza of this poem. This poem also includes words that might be new to the reader such as "myriad" or "panache" this sets up a good opportunity for students to learn new vocabulary. All of the poems in this collection are so creative and have creative pictures to illustrate what they are describing. Creativity is something that is very important to art. If students are having a hard time trying to come up with an idea for a poem one approach could be to have them draw things from their imagination or their dreams and use this as a jumping off point to writing thier own poems "Never-was".