[Darren]

I just finished the two books in this series for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed them.

For those that haven't, they are books of poems broken up by interstices that are of a comedy of errors variety.

I appreciated both the variety of rhyming schemes (and sometimes none) and the created patterns that some of the poems employed. Some fantastic rhymes in there ("eats a/pizza", or "Nintendo/diminuendo") and some laugh out loud moments for me, like "how sweet to sneeze in mauve" (my wife thought that was very funny too). Some of the poems reminded me of other things and I should state that it in no way diminishes the art created, it's just connections my brain made. Whether it's a couple of the poems reminding me of the late, great Shel Silverstein or "Vocabulary" evoking the thought of "Jabberwocky". "I'm Feeling Very Ill Today" brought to mind the song "I'm A Wreck" by Mojo Nixon.

In the sports version, I appreciated that the hockey team was called the Jets. Had to laugh at "My Trademark Move", which, I don't know if everyone who's played hockey has accidentally butt-ended themselves in the stomach with their stick against the boards, but I did that once. Not fun. "21st Century Baseball" reminded me of a Carlin routine about sports where he was talking about making baseball more exciting with random land mines in the outfield. I had a lot of fun reading these. I have to assume that GK had a lot of fun and created some great memories working with his mom on these.

A few questions that came to mind for you, Gord.
1) Did you consider it a risk to do some books with poetry after doing only novels before?
2) How did you divvy up the work done between you and your mother?

Yelling "hike!", screaming "shoot!",
Or shouting "fore!" can
Remind me of the sports poems
Of the talented Gordon Korman.

[Gordon Korman]

Hi, Darren,

Thanks for posting about the 2 Jeremy Bloom poem books -- note that I hesitate to call it "poetry." 

Please note that the books were written in the early 1990's, when I was but a lad of 29 or 30, still single but sinking fast. My Mom and I chose the topics together. I wrote the story part and a lot of the poems, and she wrote poems like mad and we edited each other and published what we thought were the best ones.

Favorites of the authors: THE BEAUTIFUL DAY, when Marcy the beauty, the queen of the prom, slips on the ice and goes down like a bomb. And we're also very fond of the one about sumo wrestling, mostly because "It's a wonder that nobody giggles."

Funny you should mention Shel Silverstein. We wrote those books because we were (almost) sure we could do better than he did (we couldn't, but we did a pretty fair job, I think.) And if having fun counts for anything, we aced it!

                                                 Regards,                                                                                  ---Gordon Korman---