152 Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. 152 Children’s Literature 32, Hollins University © 2004. Child Poets and the Poetry of the Playground Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. As many teachers know, Randall Jarrell’s The Bat-Poet is not only a touch- ing, sensitively rendered fairy tale. It is also a very effective—and com- monly employed—introduction to both the reading and writing of poetry. Besides suggesting Jarrell’s complex and dialectical theory of poetry, 1 The Bat-Poet also touches on the competing impulses that might drive one to versify, the satisfying and unsatisfying reactions one’s poetry might elicit, the social function of poetry, and even elements of craft. Though Jarrell’s bat-poet is of uncertain age, it seems reason- able to read him as a child, or perhaps an adolescent. The bat-poet is a precocious student of poetry, and, though he once enrages his men- tor, the mockingbird, by writing a somewhat ambivalent piece about him, the bat nonetheless composes the “right” kind of poetry, the poetry of the schoolhouse, or what I call official school poetry. He is one of the rare students Kenneth Koch remembers initially desiring for his first Teachers and Writers workshop, that is, a child “who al- ready like[s] poetry” (274). The bat writes poems of which Myra Cohn Livingston would probably approve, “fine poetry” that exhibits pho- nological cohesion, that displays “the judicious use of rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and other tools of the craft” (22, 256). In short, the bat represents the good student, one who accepts and works within the traditions of adult poetry. Certainly there are human children who, like the bat, strive to emulate the adult poets they encounter, but more common are those raconteurs, to borrow Iona Opie’s term, who specialize in the sometimes bawdy playground poetry. These child poets serve to remind us of what children often do with language while outside grown-up supervision. As we will see, they reveal that children have a poetic tradition of their own, a carnivalesque tradi- tion that signifies on adult culture, even while producing poetry that rewards repeat listenings. I argue that any comprehensive study of American children’s poetry—and, more broadly, children’s poetry in general—is ultimately insufficient insofar as it fails to acknowledge and consider playground poetry as poetry, as belonging to a rich po- etic tradition.