What Makes a Children's Poem? (cont.)

So there no definite rules about poetry and its audience. With the children’s poetry market tighter than a ice skater’s bootlace, trying to sell poems with an adult feel to them will be a long, arduous process. If you’re looking at your poems and trying to figure out if they’re more appropriate for kids or for adults, check out these guidelines (and they’re full of generalizations that you can probably find exceptions to) and compare them to your own work.

Keep it short. Poems for kids do not generally go on for pages. They are not usually prose poems. Poems for young kids are often 20 lines or less (sometimes lots less!), and poems for pre-teens and teens are still most often less than 40 lines. One of the things that kids love about poetry is its brevity. It is not intimidating on the page.

Write about things kids are interested in, in a way that will hold kids’ interest. Poems that ponder one tiny thing at length tend to appeal more to adults. Of course, you can write about things that don’t seem like high-interest topics, if you’re writing them in a way and voice that speaks to kids (see “The Aardvarks?).

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